Bosacks Speaks Out: Goldmine Reaches Indie Record Stores in New Distribution Deal

The Goldmine distribution story is a great lesson for every publisher and gives me some fond memories of publishing times past. My first two publications, one in New York called "The Express" and one in Arizona, called "The Mountain NewsReal" were from a media species then called the underground press. I was in my early twenties and we had no rule books or mentors, so my partners and I just made up "procedures" as we went along. One of the things we explored was not only publishing an alternative newspaper but also alternative distribution. Our papers were distributed not on newsstands, but in retail outlets, hair cutters, bars, clubs, college dormitories, rock concerts, head shops, and a dozen other non-traditional publication outlets. 

The same theories held true later for us at "High Times" magazine. In the beginning no wholesaler would distribute the controversial title, so we needed to create alternative distribution outlets other than  traditional newsstand.  We did so to great effect and extremely high sell through numbers.  

It is the non-traditional aspect of this story that modern publishers should consider. The old newsstand outlets are diminishing, with rare exception. Each sales report is down by double digits from the year before. It seems to me that creative new distribution outlets like the ones that Goldmine found are the way to offset some of the lost circulation. I know that many niche titles today do this very thing; they distribute their publications where their readers are rather then where their readers aren't.