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Amazon.com's CreateSpace service offers a turn-key sales and distribution model with no up-front fees - at a price.
Getting your movie out to the home-video market is never easy, especially with little startup capital. Historically, the small-scale independent filmmaker working outside the studio system has been stuck between a rock and a hard place when it comes to the home video market. On one hand is the traditional distribution method, where you try to get a big-name distributor or wholesaler interested in buying your movie and acting as a middleman between you and the Blockbusters and Wal-Marts of the world. With traditional distribution, your profit margins are thin after the distributor and the retailer take their cut, but hopefully you sell enough units to make it worth your while. Getting the attention of a major distributor is very hard, and even if you manage to do that, you're locked into what is essentially a consignment-based business model designed for the distributors and retailers to make money with little risk. Content creators don't make very much, and they take the fall if things go sour. It's a system that sticks the guy at the start of the supply chain (you) with the short end of the stick if the movie doesn't sell.
On the other hand, you have the direct sales method, where you do all marketing and fulfillment yourself. Chances are the big retailers won't touch you, but at least this way you have total control. You're doing most of your selling to specialty outlets and directly to consumers, which means that you get to keep a larger portion of the proceeds from each sale. However, you have to handle payment processing, shipping, customer service and so on by yourself, and on average you're not going to move nearly as much product as you would if you went with a major distributor.
Both models require an initial outlay of funds over and above what it cost you to actually make the movie. DVD duplication isn't free, after all. While a really small-scale DIY operation might be able to get away with duplicating-to-order, that approach puts a hard upper limit on growth, and losing out on economies of scale really eats into the bottom line.
eCommerce Levels the Field
The rise of the Internet as a sales channel has done a lot to level the playing field for the individual filmmaker. It's still nigh-impossible to crack a major distributor, but, like mushrooms, many small companies have sprung up seemingly overnight, willing to take on some or all of the burden of the direct sales distribution model. For example, trendy indie darlings Filmbaby (www.filmbaby.com) are happy to handle ordering, fulfillment, customer service and all of that other annoying stuff, plus a web storefront, in exchange for a $39.99 setup fee (per title) and a subsequent $4 from each DVD sale. Many duplicators will provide warehouse space and shipping functions. If you combine that with a Filmbaby-style fulfillment provider, you never even have to lay hands on your own outgoing product.
Of course, this all assumes that you have the startup capital necessary to dupe a few hundred DVDs, fit them with covers and cases and rent a warehouse space to put them in. What if you don't? Making a movie is costly enough - is there any way to sell it to your target audience without bleeding your bank account even whiter? Yes, there is. Amazon.com, the 900-pound gorilla of the Long Tail business model (see sidebar, below) has a solution for you.
CreateSpace: Copy on Demand
Amazon.com'sCreateSpace service (www.createspace.com - recently renamed from CustomFlix to better reflect its product selection) is an excellent distribution solution for the small-scale professional or advanced hobbyist filmmakers who want to make their movies available to the internet at large. CreateSpace's self-stated purpose is "to profitably connect content owners with a worldwide audience of millions."
Here's how it works: you sign up with CreateSpace and send them a copy of your film in one of a variety of pre-approved formats. If you already have a DVD master, you can use that; otherwise, CreateSpace offers digitization and DVD mastering services. You also send them your cover and disc face artwork. They send you back a proof, you approve it, set a sale price and... that's it! Your film is available for sale online, and you have the option to list it on Amazon.com, the internet's largest film retailer. Anytime a customer buys your movie online, CreateSpace burns a copy, prints the packaging and ships the DVD (or HD DVD, with Blu-ray Disc coming soon) to its destination. Or, if you prefer, you can make the film available as a download - no physical product required.
