McBooks Press, a small Ithaca, N.Y., publisher, has pried itself loose from the bankrupt LPC Group and signed a new distribution agreement with National Book Network. Alexander Skutt, president of McBooks, explained that McBooks was free to seek another distributor after LPC failed to assume the publisher's contract by mid-May as stipulated by a court ruling.
Skutt said that while the change in distributors will delay some publication dates, all titles that had been set for release this fall will be published this fall or winter. The company does about 28 new titles per year in the areas of nautical fiction, regional photography and vegetarianism. It has an 82-title backlist.
The company was owed $318,000 at the time of LPC's Chapter 11 filing and another $150,000 from April—"the best month in our history," Skutt said. "We've been cursed by our recent success," Skutt told PW, noting that since the company began publishing in the nautical fiction category, sales have increased by more than 50% in each of the last two years. The cornerstones of its nautical program have been the Richard Bolitho series by Alexander Kent and the Lord Ramage series by Dudley Pope. The majority of McBooks' titles are published in trade paperback, but it released the newest Kent title, Relentless Pursuit, in hardcover.
While most of McBooks' titles are reprints (rights for Kent have been acquired from Random House U.K.), it is doing some original fiction. A first novel by Irv Rogers, Motoo Eetee: Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World, was published in May, but because of the problems with LPC, NBN will resolicit orders. Another important publication for McBooks, The Boxing Register, will ship on schedule in June to coincide with the International Boxing Hall of Fame 2002 induction ceremony. A first printing of 6,000 has been set.
Skutt said that McBooks had enough stock in its own warehouse that it uses to fill special orders and sales to nontraditional outlets to ship to NBN to allow the company to fill orders to the trade. But Skutt has another court date set for this week at which he hopes the judge will approve his request for LPC to ship his books to NBN. "I also hope to get a little money," he said.
