Consignment or Wholesale
The two deals every maker meets at a distro table — and who carries the risk
What the words actually mean
When a distro wants to stock your zine, there are exactly two financial arrangements on offer: consignment or wholesale. Almost everything else — the email templates, the payout schedules, the spreadsheets — is administrative scaffolding built on top of one of those two structures. Understanding which one you are in tells you immediately who is carrying the risk, and that is the question that matters.
Under consignment, the distro takes copies of your zine but does not pay for them upfront. They hold the stock, sell it, and pay you your share only after a copy has actually left with a customer. If no copies sell, you are owed nothing — but the distro also loses nothing. The maker has, in effect, made a loan of goods to the distro, and the distro converts that loan to cash on the maker's behalf. The split is typically around sixty percent to the maker and forty to the distro, though this varies and some worker-run or co-operative distros operate on a more generous model. How a distro works in practice — the float, the spreadsheet, the payout cycle — is worth understanding before you send a box.
Wholesale is simpler and starker: the distro buys your copies outright, at a discount from the cover price. They own the stock the moment it changes hands. Whether those copies sell in a week or sit in a box for two years is no longer your concern, because you have already been paid. The discount is usually around fifty percent of the cover price, sometimes more. The distro carries the full risk of unsold inventory; in exchange, you give up a larger share of the margin and all ongoing control over those particular copies.
Who carries the risk, and why it matters
The only two deals, and who carries the risk in each.
Distros & Fairs
The risk question is not abstract. Zines are often made in runs of fifty, a hundred, two hundred copies. Losing a dozen to a distro that folds, moves on, or simply forgets to pay is a real and common grief for makers. Consignment protects the distro from that scenario — they have no money at stake — but it exposes the maker to the uncertainty of whether payment will ever arrive, and when.
The colophon of a professionally handled zine often records the run number, and that run number is small. If a distro takes twenty copies on consignment and sells five in a year, the maker has fifteen copies locked in limbo. Getting them back requires following up, potentially paying return postage, and absorbing the time spent on correspondence. None of that effort appears in the original deal.
Wholesale removes the limbo. Once the invoice is paid, the transaction is finished. For a maker who finds the admin of tracking consignment payouts across multiple distros tedious — and it is tedious — wholesale is a cleaner model. The trade-off is that you will earn less per copy sold, because the distro needs room in the margin to absorb the risk they have now taken on.
In practice, most small distros default to consignment because they are operating on thin margins and cannot afford to buy inventory outright. Wholesale tends to appear when a distro has grown to a scale where it moves significant volume — enough that offering wholesale terms to reliable makers is commercially viable — or when a maker has the leverage and the confidence to ask for it.
Negotiating the deal, and what to watch for
Neither arrangement is inherently fairer than the other; they are just different distributions of risk and reward. What makes one better than the other depends on your run size, your patience for admin, your relationship with the specific distro, and how urgently you need the cash.
A few things worth pinning down before you send stock, whichever model you use. First, the payout schedule: consignment distros should specify how often they pay out — quarterly, biannually, or on request above a threshold. If this is not stated, ask. Second, what happens to unsold stock: who pays return postage, and after how long will the distro flag copies as slow-moving? Third, whether the distro places a cap on how many copies they will take. A distro that takes ten copies on consignment is doing you a modest favour; one that takes fifty and pays quarterly on sales of two or three copies at a time is tying up your print run for a long time.
For wholesale deals, the key figure to know before you agree is your cost per copy — the actual money you spent printing each one. If your cost per copy is close to fifty percent of your cover price, a standard wholesale discount leaves you at break-even or worse. That may be acceptable if the distro offers reach you cannot get otherwise, but it is worth calculating clearly.
Both deals work. Plenty of makers run consignment agreements with several distros simultaneously and find the payout cycle manageable with a simple spreadsheet. Others prefer the clean close of a wholesale invoice and price their zines accordingly. The question is which uncertainty you would rather live with: the open ledger of consignment, or the reduced margin of wholesale.