HISTORY OF IPG

INDEPENDENT PUBLISHERS GROUP was founded in 1971, the first organization specifically created for the purpose of marketing titles from independent presses to the book trade.

Then as now, small and mid-size publishers had great difficulties selling their books effectively because they could not attract the services of good sales reps and because booksellers were reluctant to absorb the cost of opening new vendor accounts and the high transaction costs and shipping charges that result from small orders.

The obvious solution to these problems was to group a number of independent publishers together for selling and order fulfillment, thereby creating a list that could compete on equal terms with those of the large houses. IPG was successful from the start and has maintained an unbroken record of growth and financial stability.

In 1987, IPG was acquired by Chicago Review Press (CRP), an independent publisher founded, with the publication of one title, at about the same time as IPG. CRP, like IPG, had experienced a strong record of growth; at the time of the acquisition, CRP had almost 200 titles in print.

But rapid changes in the book trade were beginning to threaten the viability of even well-established independent presses. The larger publishers had begun to buy up the middle-sized ones, the chain retailers had become a very large part of the retail market, and the advent of desktop publishing led to a torrent of new publishers and new titles that overwhelmed booksellers.

The solution to these problems for Chicago Review Press was to market its titles through IPG, an organization large enough and strong enough to be successful in this new and much more competitive marketplace.

In the 1990s, it began to make sense for a number of large independent presses to make use of IPG's services.

In some cases the principals of larger U.S. publishing companies (30 or more new titles a year) concluded that they were tying up too much of their time and resources dealing with the distribution side of the book trade-warehousing, bill collecting, customer service, and trade sales management-and not enough on the acquisition, editorial, design, and promotion side of publishing, which was where their real interests and abilities lay.