10-15-2007, 01:02 AM
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So Fucking Banned
Join Date: Oct 2004
Location: Midwest, US
Posts: 1,566
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Quote:
DDA has several contracts with the publishers as does PDC. Both of them do about the same thing. Secondary distribution is almost always done by USPS using PVDSs at DDU rates anymore. A significant portion of the initial distribution in some markets is accomplished that way as well and towards the end that is all I would do is mailings. If the book is very small, it goes DSCF and I never got to touch those cause they went from the plant directly to the delivery unit.
The intial distribution is usually outsourced to places like DDA/PDC who hire people off the street to work as independent contractors. YB still does most of theirs directly, except in a few states, they have vendored that out now, the vast majority of my work was done with them. PDC is a bunch of assholes, I did not extend my arrangement with them beyond the initial project.
They contracted to my company as a large crew. At the height of it, I had four rental vans running crews of two each plus my van and my assistant. Ten people, 10K books a day at about $0.40 per book. Thats $4,000 a day. I got my drivers from a staffing agency, the assistants from the local homeless shelters for $50 a day and away it went. Then if I had managed to snag the mailing project, which sometimes paid several thousand dollars itself, I'd go do that while everyone else was out running routes.
Make friends with the distribution people, make yourself useful a couple of times, put a couple of people under you in rental vans and pretty soon you can start negotiating your rate higher than what they publish or offer to anyone else. I have gotten as high as $0.80 a book, the vast majority being about half that, and I can throw 2,000 books in a day easy single handed.
I have not fucked with books for a couple of years now, aside from the occasional mailing project here and there. Sometimes I do recycle runs for YB and warehouse cleanouts of back stock, only because I can double dip. Getting paid to clean out the warehouse, then I turn around and broker the scrap paper to the mills by the truck load. Anymore, I make more money running my other ventures - not worth the hassles of dealing with the YB empire which has gotten hard to deal with these last few years.
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I remember being at a YP convention some time ago and the chairman of PDC got up and started going off on all the big bells for some stupid shit... and the recycle runs are a hoot too. We used to piggy-back on Verizon's 18 wheelers packed to the brim with overprints. What a joke.. everyone thinks they are "Recycling" when in fact they are just dumping them in the landfill.. the glue in the bindings render the books unrecyclable.and fuck DDA.. fuckers stole my job as Frontier outsourced all secondary to those idiots. Interesting... well that was off topic for thread. Lmao. .. and I was on that list... If someone wants to use my exbankrupt, ex-felon/prisoner ass ID for something.. good luck on getting any approvals anywhere. |
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