Getting Your Book in Bookstores - 3 Things to Do

Are you publishing a book? Do you want bookstores to carry that book? Stick around. I've got three things you're going to have to do to make sure that your book can be carried by bookstores. Hey there, I'm Julie Broad with havemoreinfluence.com if you're writing and publishing a book, you might be thinking about distribution. How are you gonna get that book baby into the hands of your ideal readers? Well, of course one of the way is through bookstores. And I gotta tell you, there is nothing better than the feeling of walking into a bookstore and seeing your book on the shelf. It's pretty darn cool. But truth be told, you really don't have to have your book on the shelves of a bookstore in order to have great sales results. A chunk, a massive chunk of book sales are happening online and largely through Amazon. But that said, bookstores are an important part of distribution. And if you want your self published book to have a shot at getting on the bookshelves of your local bookstore or bookstores across the country, then you must do these three things. Where you've chosen to upload and offer your book as your print on demand solution is going to play a massive role. In the first place, as to whether your book will get on bookstores when you upload it through CreateSpace, which is Amazon's company, you might think bookstores will carry it because it says something like that on there, that this is the wider distribution channel. But the reality is very few books will ever be sold to bookstores through Amazon. There's a lot of reasons why this is the case. If bookstore distribution is important to you, your best solution probably is to go Through Lightning Sources IngramSpark Division. Books published through that are available through the Ingram catalog, which is where bookstores will look for and buy your book. But here's three things you need to do if you want those bookstores to buy your book. Number one, get an ISBN number. Some self published authors skimp on this. Now in Canada, if you are a Canadian author, you can get this number for free. And I have produced a video showing you exactly how to do it. It's super simple and we're lucky in Canada to have this free. Number two, when you are setting up your discounts, there's options. But the reality is if you don't make your book discounted by 55%, which is what bookstores expect it to be discounted by, they're not going to order that book. And number three, something I talked about extensively in a past video because this one burned me is to make your books returnable. If your books are not returnable, bookstores will not order from you. And I encountered this issue even though I thought my books were returnable. There was some country based issues as I was getting my books listed in provinces across Canada. And long story short, check out this video. Make your books returnable and expert tip have them destroyed. Don't opt to send them back to you. So those are three things that you absolutely must do in order to increase the likelihood that you can get that book on the bookstore's shelves. There's a whole bunch of other things you're gonna have to do to get bookstore distribution as a self published author, but these three things lay the strong foundation for it to at least be possible. Got a question? Go ahead, post it right here in YouTube and I just might shoot a video to help you out. All right, thanks for stopping by. See you next time. Bye. You also may want to go by book launchers.com if you're looking to self publish your book in the next couple years. That's going to be a fantastic resource to help you out. Book launchers.com so excited to launch it into the world in 2017.