For now: Most first-time authors
that I meet have a misconception about how books are sold. They think books are
sold mainly through bookstores.
They can be forgiven for believing this. After all,
bookstores are the place where it is easiest to see a book being sold. And
seeing is believing.
The other piece of this belief is that you want to believe
your book will be sold in stores. If you’re an author, nothing feels more like
success than walking into a big chain store and seeing your book on the
best-seller table.
Obviously, some books are
sold in bookstores, but I am not enthusiastic about any but large and
knowledgeable publishers following a sales strategy that relies principally on
bookstores. Here’s why:
First, selling to bookstores is unlikely to be profitable.
In order to get your books into bookstores, you must sell them at a substantial
discount. If you sell to them directly, you will probably sell them for 40% off
of your list price. And then you will need to set up an account for them,
invoice them, collect payment, and deal with returns. If you sell to bookstores
indirectly through a distributor or wholesaler, you will do so at 50% or more
likely at 55% (or even more) off of your list price. If you are a self-publisher,
starting out with a small press run, you will find it almost impossible to make
money at these discounts. Even if you are an independent publisher of several
books, able to do standard runs of 2000-5000, you will find the economics of
bookstore selling difficult at best and a strategy engaged in as a secondary
rather than a primary revenue stream.
Second, selling to bookstores is risky. If you sell to
bookstores directly and set up accounts with them, they will expect to return
unsold books. This is something you may be able to live with, at least over
time as you build up your business and your account base. However, if you sell
to bookstores indirectly through distributors, returns are a killer. Here’s
what happens. When your book comes out, your distributor asks you to send them
a quantity of copies, let’s say, 1,000. Now you think you’ve sold 1,000 copies.
You haven’t—whether your distributor buys the copies up front or on
consignment—because your distributor retains the right to return unsold books
to you. You ship 1,000 books to your distributor, who ships them to one or more
warehouses. The warehouses then distribute your books to stores. However, the
stores usually will not put your books on the shelves unless one of two things
happen: 1) you give them a monetary incentive to display the books (this is
called a “retail display allowance”) or 2) many people come into the stores
asking for your book. The latter only happens if you’ve done some publicity or
taken other marketing steps that drive people into the stores. Assuming you
haven’t been able to afford to pay stores extra money or to spend thousands of
dollars on a national publicity program, the bookstores now send your unsold
books back to the warehouse, which sends your unsold books back to you. What’s
more, thanks to all the handling, a large percentage of the books may be
damaged and not saleable, at least at the list price. Worse, they may tear the
covers off and send you only the covers (to save shipping costs) so that you
can’t even sell the damaged books at a discount. Now you’ve spent extra money
on books you can’t sell and on shipping that did you no good.
Third, bookstores (especially general-interest stores like
Barnes and Noble) are not an effective way to market your book. Bookstores are
infrastructure, a place where customers can find books. Of course, bookstores
provide some marketing, especially in the way they display books. That’s one
reason why it’s important to pay attention to your cover design. They problem
is that bookstores, especially the general ones, do not do an effective job of
reaching your particular customers.
They attract all kinds of customers, few of whom are going to have the remotest
interest in your book. They are highly inefficient that way. (On the other
hand, if a bookstore has a focus—travel, for example—and you have published a
travel book, the match is better. More about this when we return to the subject
in the final chapter.) Moreover, if when they do attract the right customers,
and even when the right customer buys your book, you don’t have this customer’s
name. And you can’t sell them something else or talk to them about your
work—unless this customer contacts you.
Fourth, books increasingly are being sold online and in
digital formats (Kindle, etc.) that bypass brick-and-mortar stores altogether, Amazon
being the mother of online sales.
This is not say that it is impossible for a small
publisher to succeed with a strategy of selling to bookstores. Below are two of my favorite stories about two
authors who “succeeded.” (Their names
are fictional.)
Joe Miller printed five thousand copies of his first book,
a hard copy compendium of inspiring stories. This was a rather large run for a
first-time author, but Joe was energetic and smart. He learned how the
bookstore business worked. He hired a distributor, put together a publicity
plan, and managed to sell most of his press run through bookstores. I thought
he was rather successful. However, when I talked to him a couple of years
later, he had a new strategy—enlisting the aid of corporations to buy editions
of his book to be given away for publicity purposes. Not a bad strategy,
actually. I asked him what happened to his bookstore efforts. “Oh, I gave up on
that,” he said. “With tons of hard work, I managed to get rid of my books. But
the discounts to distributors and bookstores were so high, I didn’t make
anything.”
Bill Scarpelli created a small publishing house with a list
composed entirely of his own photo books, which he sold mainly through
bookstores. He was planning more books in the same vein. I was impressed.
“Well, it’s taken a tremendous amount of work,” he said. “And capital. The
worst problem is that it’s so uneven. Sometimes the money pours in. Sometimes
there is nothing. I’ve had to declare bankruptcy twice.”
And those were successes.—The Publishing Pro
