Going the route of self distribution in the video business is tough. You not only have to be salesman, but also producer, and collector, and deal with scamming stores that will take your product on net terms, rent it out for the length of the net terms, then return it as defective. You will have to take it back if you want to ever have them sell any of your videos. To get stores to pay in front of your delivery or at delivery is tough as most stores operate on loaned cash through net terms given by distributors and studios. This is especially true for small upstart video lines. When we started promoting our video line we were told by a number of stores and distributors not to contact them until we had 5 videos or more in distribution. This did not make sense to me until i understood that any distributor is not going to want to rep your product line if it is not going to be around for a while... and they also want to see a little name demand build up on a video line before they start making calls to promote it.

Many distributors you will find are just order takers. they will rep your line, but they won't do much more than wait for the phone to ring. Find a distributor that has a good commission based sales force and you will find a company motivated to sell a hot product.

if you deal with SF stores, you will likely find that many Castro stores, Folsom stores, wont' buy from you because they have exclusive buy arrangements with GVA. You could give them the video and they still would not take it....it's part of their agreement with GVA. And GVA owns many of the adult stores in the SF area and has a broad reach into those they don't.

You will find some stores that will carry your product, but they will want very attractive terms, or very cheap prices and getting them to prepay is not easy. Not impossible, just not easy.

We do a lot of nationwide store mailings with 1 sheets, or DVD slicks on our line to keep the name recognition up and to contribute to the demand for the line.

The AVN show in January is a good outlet to sell directly, both to domestic and international stores and distributors.

Just some quick notes from our experiences