Publishers hit by 'disastrous' Orca warehouse problems as stock gets stuck for months

Publishers say they have faced “disastrous” problems at Orca Book Services with months' worth of stock left undistributed at warehouses, at least one client losing "tens of thousands" in revenue and another left unable to trade for nearly three months.

Book distribution business Orca provides services to UK and overseas general, academic and specialist publishers. Acquired by Marston Book Services from Continuum in October 2008, Marston went on to be bought by US-based United Independent Distributors (UID) in 2019.

In July, The Bookseller learned Orca's 66,000 sq ft distribution centre in Poole, Dorset, was to close towards the end of 2021 with the service moving to Biggleswade in Bedfordshire. Although publishers were assured there would be “little impact” on services, clients say major distribution issues have arisen since then. UID was bought by the US-based Independent Publishers Group (IPG) in October and the new owner is now attempting to address the problems.

Publishers say a huge amount of stock became trapped in the Poole warehouse from the summer, with firms unable to fulfil orders for several months. The situation is still to be fully rectified, despite the efforts IPG says it has made.

A publisher, who wishes to remain anonymous, told The Bookseller of initial problems with the Poole warehouse: “It emerged they hadn’t distributed any of our books from August. Customers have had their invoices but not the orders. I’d scaled back in lockdown but it would have been disastrous otherwise, it’s still pretty awful though.

“We’ve lost tens of thousands of pounds of sales. We had a serialisation in a broadsheet newspaper and an interview with the author, books to sell, but Amazon removed the sales button from our titles because we don’t have stock. It’s been a nightmare for us and there are so many other publishers affected.”

They added: “How will they move everything in the new warehouse and deal with the backlog, how will they compensate us? I don’t know if we’ll see this out. It's a reputational thing more than anything else.”

James Corbett, founder of deCoubertin Books in Liverpool, told The Bookseller: “Through no fault of our own, we were effectively unable to trade at all for 11 weeks until mid November, and then only on very limited terms. We have lost all of our new Amazon sales since August, had thousands of lost orders to bricks and mortar retailers cancelled and remain unsighted as to where our backlog of orders are.

“The situation has been utterly demoralising: we felt like a corner was about to be turned after Covid and the collapse of Bertrams – we have a couple of great books out, with strong publicity and really strong orders for our front and backlists. But this lockdown – and its timing – poses a bigger threat to our company’s future than either of those crises.” 

Geoff Cowan, m.d. of Meyer & Meyer Sport, echoed this frustration. “The problems at Orca have absolutely crippled us, and something positive must happen very quickly,” he said. “I understand that the causes lie with the previous owners and that everyone now working under the new IPG management is trying to do their best to rectify the situation, but I am concerned that the matter is likely to worsen.”

He is worried about what will happen to his stock which is currently in the Poole warehouse while the stock of six new titles, which had all been due for publication in November and December, “simply languishes somewhere in the enormous new UID building” in Biggleswade.

Cowan revealed that online retailers such as the Book Depository have now removed his titles from sale and “are fully justified in doing so, as we are unable to guarantee to supply them in a reasonable time – or possibly at all, for that matter”.

He believes it “can only be classified as a catastrophe for all concerned”, adding: “I have worked in publishing for nearly 60 years, in that time I have experienced four previous warehouse moves, all have had their problems, but this has undoubtedly been the worst.”

A spokesperson for Veloce Publishing Limited said: “At what should be our peak sales period, our new titles for Christmas — along with most of our stock generally — are sitting in boxes in a warehouse, and the worst of it is we don't know whether that warehouse is in the old Orca site at Poole, or in Biggleswade, where the operation has moved to.

“Sporadic email ‘updates' really tell us nothing useful at all, and the clock is ticking with regard to getting all stock out of the Poole warehouse before the landlord locks up shop and refuses entry.

“Amazon and Gardners have cancelled all orders for the past few months, and who knows whether we shall ever recover those sales or if they are lost forever? Books intended for the US market have not been sent to the shipper, so there’s a double whammy of lost sales.”

The spokesperson urged a “a final reckoning once all stock has been relocated” and called for IPG to reimburse publishers who “through no fault of their own, have suffered undoubtedly large losses because of this complete and utter shambles”.

John Beaufoy, m.d. John Beaufoy Publishing, said: “It's been a very difficult year for all of Orca's client publishers. Service levels started to decline in the spring, and gradually worsened over the summer.” He conceded that IPG is now “doing their best to put things right, but they have inherited a lot of problems, which are far from being resolved”.

It is unclear how many publishers have been affected: more than 100 are listed as clients on Orca’s website but some of those have switched distributors, The Bookseller learned on contacting them. One publisher, who preferred to remain anonymous, said: “I wouldn’t be surprised if Orca still had me on their list of clients. I left Orca over a year ago and you can draw your own conclusions as to why.”

However, one book distribution service representative singled out Orca for praise, though they have recently transferred to Central Books. “We really appreciated working with Orca over more than 22 years because they were everything we wanted them to be. They were always reliable and above all professional.

"As with other publishers, we experienced a time of being in limbo in terms of where our books were but this was actually of a short duration and then all our publications went to Central Books. The dust is now settling.”

The Bookseller has seen a letter from Gardners to clients saying it has become “increasingly concerned at the lack of progress” with Orca. It states: “We have tried everything possible to help ease the burden and simplify the flow, such as cancelling old orders and starting afresh when we experienced very poor supply issues nearly two months ago.”

It added Gardners was having to de-register published titles from its database as well as those not yet published “as there is no confidence that many of these will be supplied in time for publication”.

A spokesperson for Gardners told The Bookseller: “We are in discussions with Orca and directly with publishers and we have sent out a commercial letter to some of our suppliers. We respectfully state that we do not deem it appropriate to make open comments about our trading relationships, communications, and the challenges we are trying to swiftly resolve between us.”

Joe Matthews, c.e.o. at the Independent Publishers Group, declined to comment directly for this article but instead shared a message he had recently sent to all Orca and Marston publishers. He wrote: “IPG acquired the UID group of companies on October 18th, and in the 40 days since then we have financially secured the companies, aggressively invested in additional labour, and accelerated the move out of the old Orca warehouse in Poole.

“We have now added an additional temporary warehouse in Newbury so that we can meet the very difficult timeline of fully exiting Orca by 14th January. We are working closely with Gardners and other resellers to expedite Orca publishers’ orders from the new warehouse in Biggleswade. All of this is made more difficult against the backdrop of global supply chain problems, labour shortages, and other impacts of the pandemic and Brexit.

“IPG inherited an unstable lease situation at Orca. In order to comply with the landlord’s stipulations we have had to embark upon an immediate relocation to our new facility in Biggleswade, on a timeline we had not planned for. The logistics of which are simply impossible to resolve without impacts to the business.”