The Death of Indie Distro?
IPA now concedes it should have admitted BigTop’s troubles last spring, but it naively hoped to fix them over the summer. According to Schroeder, mere days before she got Landry’s October 19 e-mail someone finally leveled with her: BigTop didn’t know when she’d be paid.
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“I have to play hardball now, but what can I do?” she told me. Her idea of hardball was getting in IPA’s face and making it feel guilty. “I typed up a three-page letter basically explaining why we need this payment so badly,” she said. “We’re basically on deadline now. We have to ship the next issue to the printer next week. Without the payment, we may not be able to. So I wrote the letter to 15 people or so, including employees of IPA, the board of directors at IPA, and also employees at BigTop.” (BigTop was recently renamed Indy Press, but no one calls it that yet.)
She says IPA got serious about raising the money a year ago, which was a year after it recognized the problem. “The board thought that by early summer we’d have at least some of that money in hand. And actually we do have some in hand, but not all of it. The misery that publishers are feeling is real and it’s justified. If you’re the one that’s going under, there’s nothing I can say that will change that for you.”
When Sinker pulled himself together, he and associate publisher Anne Elizabeth Moore wrote an e-mail asking for help: “An immediate influx of cash will allow us to pay off back debts–to contributors, printers, web hosts, etc–and better enable us to weather any coming storm caused by nonpayment from our distributor.” Moore says, “We pretty much sent copies to anyone we had ever heard of or met in our entire lives and asked them to send it to everyone they had ever heard of or met.”
Plenty of people preach that words are cheap and the act is all, but it’s an odd message from a writer. Yet here’s syndicated columnist Victor Davis Hanson in the October 28 Tribune: “To paraphrase the ancient Greeks, it is easy to be moral in your sleep. Abstract ethics or soapbox lectures demanding superhuman perfection mean little without deeds.”
The idea that the only way to speak truth to power is with a gun–Hanson’s phrase for the alternative is “abstract moralizing”–has a long history. If he wants to give Amnesty no points for trying it’s his right. But there he is, someone full of contempt for mere lecturers, lecturing.
