What’s a stockholder to do when he’s lost a boatload of money, tried to turn a company around from the inside and received little support? Robert Robotti‘s answer, announced this morning, was to resign from Advanced Marketing Services’ board of directors. Robotti, appointed a director last November, stated that he disagreed with the Board’s decision to proceed with the annual meeting of stockholders on January 24, 2007, as previously scheduled, even though AMS is facing more court battles in the wake of its Chapter 11 filing and its litany of problems going back several years.
Meanwhile, PW has more on Avalon‘s sale to Perseus, confirming that the deal was a long time in coming. “Moving distributors is at least a three-year commitment and I’m not sure I wanted to stay through 2010,” said Avalon president Charlie Winton. As discussions with Perseus progressed, Winton became convinced that the company, with its decentralized structure and satellite offices, would be a good fit for Avalon. Radio Free PGW’s perspective is that the selloff won’t make that much of a financial difference to the fortunes of Publishers Group West, but “the death knell for PGW would be if Grove/Atlantic, Berrett-Koehler and perhaps New World cut and run.”
And what of those other PGW clients whose distribution fate hasn’t been decided? PW Daily reports that PMA, the Independent Book Publishers Association, has put together a plan it hopes will help out with some of the “extremely challenging issues” for PGW clients. According to PMA director Terry Nathan, the association plans to act in three areas: establish a network of printers that will do short runs of books, to get inventory back in the control of the affected publishers; contact financial institutions to provide short-term business interruption loans; and look for other distributors to step in and help with interim distribution and/or cash flow.