Help Diverse, Independent Literature in America

Small Press Distribution, better known as SPD, has for five decades connected readers with writers by providing dynamic access to independently published literature. Now, with SPD Next, we aim to build on this important work, raising $100,000 to expand our services and make an even larger impact in the years to come.

As a nonprofit, Small Press Distribution exists to get small press books out into the world so that essential but underrepresented literary communities can fully participate in the marketplace. For numerous small presses, SPD has long provided the only reliable and available access to the U.S. book market, but as the industry has evolved SPD has failed to keep pace.

With SPD Next, we are raising $100,000 to greatly enhance our services for publishers and vastly expand the availability of our titles, making SPD a truly global operation. With your help, SPD will be able to offer print-on-demand, eBooks, audiobooks, worldwide distribution, and a wider availability in independent bookstores, Bookshop.org, and libraries in the U.S. and beyond. Most importantly, the addition of these services will ensure that SPD publishers have much lower overhead, allowing them to publish more authors, get more books in readers’ hands, and have more maneuverability within the tight margins of the publishing industry.

Your contribution will help us modernize SPD’s operation, moving from our fixed-cost Berkeley warehouse to variable-cost storage with our two warehousing partners: Publishers Storage & Shipping and Ingram Content Group. Once these changes are made, all SPD books will be available to a much wider market, with faster shipping at a lower cost for all of our publishers. This will not only allow us to improve services for our current publishers, but also to take on publishers we couldn’t before, as the costs of starting and maintaining a press will be greatly reduced under our new model.

For a more detailed breakdown of these changes, make sure to view our FAQ document. We hope to have your support as we move SPD into a brighter future. Thank you everyone for your contributions. We’re incredibly excited for what lies ahead.