Self Promote and Succeed Chapter 15: Banging on the Bookstore Door

Chapter 15 banging on the Bookstore Door can you direct me to the cookbooks? Do you work here? Can you help me find where are the bathrooms? These are some of the questions I get asked at every single bookstore event I do. Bookstore signings weren't all I dreamed they would be, but it is a bit surreal to see your book on the shelf. There's just something so cool and validating about finally seeing your book for sale. Widespread bookstore distribution may not be what you really need to achieve your goals. For most authors, it's going to be more of a personal goal than an achievement that really moves you toward the impact and income you desire. Plus, the math is kind of scary. We'll get to that later. Local bookstores, however, can help you and your book gain exposure and sell more copies. To get a bookstore to carry your book, here's what you do. First, plan your sales approach. Large traditional publishers have sales teams who pitch the books they want to promote to bookstores. If you self publish or have a small publisher, you typically have to be your own team and head into the store with a sales sheet on your book. A sales sheet is similar to a media kit in that it's meant to give retailers quick and easy info about you and your book. But unlike a media kit, a sales sheet's goal is to get the retailer to order the book for their store. It can be a PDF or printed. If you're approaching a retailer in person and should be only one page on your sales sheet, you need to include several cover image and, if possible, your author image, details of your promotional plans for the book, including local media or events Metadata on the book noteworthy editorial reviews or blurbs, prior media exposure and awards or recognition. Short Book description where the book can be ordered wholesale, for example IngramSpark if you've already prepared an author media kit, you're way ahead of the game. Remember, stores want books that sell. They have limited shelf space and small margins. This means your job isn't to convince the bookstore manager that you tell an incredible story that will mesmerize readers. Your job is to show them that you're going to send eager buyers to their store to spend money on your book, and hopefully other books too. Another thing you can do is pitch an event at the store. Ask if they're hosting authors for book readings or Q and A sessions. If so, you can offer your contacts, clients, emails, and social media accounts to help them promote an event you host. Tying into an awareness month, if applicable to you or your book topic can work wonders too, especially if it's one the bookstore already wants to promote. Most bookstores stock books for upcoming events and have you sign copies that they sell later. This is the strategy I used to get widespread bookstore listings for more than cash flow. I had about 10 different bookstore events across Canada and I pushed sales hard. It worked and other stores saw the sales numbers and ordered books. A decade later, some bookstores still carry my book. The second step is to discuss listing and wholesale discounts with the store. Once they're interested, now they've got to buy copies. If you're set up through Ingram, then your bookstore can order from them. Most bookstores require a 40% discount, which means setting your Ingram wholesale discount at 55%. That said, you may be able to strike a deal somewhere in between since you're going to do a lot of the work to drive traffic to the store. Alternatively, many bookstores may offer to do a consignment deal where you get paid after your book sells. Finally, fulfill your promise once your book is listed. Just holding a book signing isn't enough. You have to have a marketing plan to sell books during the event, and even after. My bookstore appearances did much better with a radio interview the day of the signing or the day before. I also emailed people in the local market and suggested they come by and say hello. Posters around the area can help, but remember, if you're not famous, you you have to sell the hook of the book and the benefit you offer. It's not about the reader getting to meet you because they don't know or care yet who you are. Keep that in mind because the number of people who are going to come out and see you is far fewer than the number who are coming for the expertise you offer or the tips you can share. Following through after the event to help sell books can help, especially if you're working with an indie store, one store in Ottawa in 26 books for an event. But a snowstorm swept in and we didn't have a good Turnout. They had 10 books left after my event. This was a big deal. I could have bought them from the store, but I decided to send an email to my list and promised a free one hour consultation for anyone who went in and bought all 10 books. Within days the books were gone and the store loved me and kept a copy in stock on an ongoing basis for many years. If your local sales do well, you may find yourself faced with the opportunity to sell books with a retail bookstore chain. That raises a lot of factors to consider, so we'll get into that in A bit. Case Study Airport Bookstores do you dream of seeing your book for sale in the airport? We've had several clients at Book Launchers make that dream a reality. But none did it quite as well as Robert Workman, the Author of Hired Gun 2. Walking Through Airports on sales trips, he'd pop in and get the manager's name and phone number. He'd call them and find out where they bought books and what made them carry a book. He was determined and would follow up conversations with a box of cookies and a thank you. When he got a listing, he would tell all his traveling colleagues and friends to buy the book at that store. Sales at one store make it easier to get a listing at another. Bit by bit, he unlocked the keys to 15 different airport bookstores. You can find book selling opportunities everywhere. The trick is to be patient and persistent. Have fun with it and uncover the opportunities as Robert did. He did it for fun, not necessarily because airports were going to make him rich. Now, if your book is targeted at people like you, think about where you go on a regular basis. Walking around with your eyes open, as Robert did, is a simple yet brilliant exercise in creative marketing. But reaching out and following up also requires preparation. When Robert called airport bookstore managers, he had the tools he needed to convince them that his book would sell. These included a professional book cover design and a well designed author media kit, including endorsements. Sometimes it took Robert a week of phone calls to get the person actually buying the books on the phone. Not surprisingly, given his background in sales, his process boiled down to prospecting, calling and sending the information by email with a media kit attached and then following up. If the bookstore is part of a big chain, the only way that any individual manager can buy a book is if the big chain headquarters ships it to them. They cannot always make independent buying decisions. What did Robert do? He'd head over to Federal Express, wrap his book in really nice tissue paper and put it in a box with a half a dozen cookies in a Mrs. Fields tin. He attached his business card and included a cover letter with the media kit printed on really high gloss heavy stock. Then he would call a week later. His strategy resulted in book orders from airports in Anchorage, Dallas, Los Angeles, Miami, Omaha and San Francisco. Now that you know how to sell your book to a store, you have to be ready for them to buy the book. For that to happen, we need to talk about IngramSpark, the bookstore catalog of Ingram. KDP has a global distribution option, but bookstores won't buy from Amazon. The money doesn't make sense for them. And many don't like Amazon, so they just plain won't buy from them. If you want wider distribution, you need IngramSpark to gain access to the Ingram catalog. When you upload your book to ingramspark, they ask for your wholesale discount. A wholesale discount is how much a wholesaler actually pays for your book. Wholesalers include online retailers like Amazon, as well as brick and mortar retailers like Barnes and Noble and Costco. These retailers sell your book at its list price, and if they can't make a profit from selling your book, they won't buy it. Plain and simple. In other words, the retailers are doing a Jerry Maguire show me the money. If you pursue bookstore distribution, you don't just compete with self published books. In fact, your biggest competitors are books published by traditional publishers. They already have a little spot carved out on the shelf. The major publishers literally pay for display space. Haven't you ever found the top 10 best seller stands suspicious? I mean, how can there be three John Grisham books in the top 10 all at once? They paid for that spot. That's how to interest retailers. You need to offer a 53% to 55% discount. You also must make sure you've checked the return and destroy box when you upload your book and choose your settings. Bookstores won't buy books if they can't return them. Which leads into why bookstore listings can be riskier than what they're worth. And if you're cringing at the thought of your books being destroyed, read on. Bookstores might not be worth it. When I self published my first book, More Than Cash Flow, I wanted everything traditional published authors get and more. I busted my butt to get my book into bookstores all across Canada. And it worked. I got widespread distribution. But I also got an unexpected and unwelcome surprise. Many of my books were returned six months later. And guess who had to foot the bill for all of those returned books? It's not the store and it's not Ingram. It's the publisher. And when you self publish, that means you. Six months after a huge book tour across Canada, I got hit with a $1,200 bill for returned books. Thankfully, by then I'd already pocketed more than 30 times that amount and in book royalties. But it still really stung. Bookstores haven't pre sold your book. When they buy it, they buy it and hope it sells. Unlike print on demand, when your book gets printed only when someone buys it. A lack of sales is what leads to returns. If your book sits on the store's valuable shelf space for too long collecting dust. They need to get rid of it. And it's not their loss to absorb, it's yours. In other words, as I mentioned earlier, you have to reimburse them for the returned copies that didn't sell. After wholesale discounts, depending on the book size, type and price, you probably made about $5 per copy. The bookstore probably paid about 9 or $10 for your book. You're not paying the bookstore back for what you made for the book. You're paying them back for what they paid. In other words, you made $5 and you're paying them 10. Yep. You lost $5 per returned copy on a book that didn't sell. Here's what that looks like in a formula. What the bookstore paid minus what you got paid equals the extra charge you have to pay for a return. $10 minus $5 equals $5. The situation got even worse for me because I didn't check the Return and destroy box. Instead, I checked return to Author. And that meant I paid for delivery for every individual copy sent back to me. Instead of it costing me two times what I made, it cost me two and a half times because I then had to pay $3 per book for the return. So here's that what the bookstore paid plus the delivery charge for each book minus what you got paid equals the extra charge you have to pay for each return. $10 plus $3 minus $5 does not equal what the number is there. I don't know who fact checked this, but their math was terrible. $10 plus $3 minus $5 equals $8. At the time I thought I could resell the books. I also cringed at the thought of my book babies being destroyed. Big mistake if a bill for $1,200 shocks you. Imagine if you had an entire chain of bookstores purchase your books but then go out of business or have to close their locations for three months for a pandemic, all your books could be returned. That's really ugly. Here's some more disturbing math. I probably sold a maximum of 600 books total to the stores that first year. Unfortunately, through Ingram, you don't get to see who's buying books, so you don't get to know what percent of those are bookstores. But I was in the trenches, so I think my estimates are solid. Here's the math I warned you about. Brace yourself, because this gets a little ugly. Let's say I sold 500 books in stores and netted $5.80 per book for a total payday of $2900. Then I had to pay $1200 for returns from book sales. I netted $1700 before tax. Then I had to pay my book tour expenses, hotels, marketing, airfares and the PR person I hired. Thankfully, my speaking engagements and other business initiatives in each city were profitable or that would have not been a good financial move. When you think of that, I mean, whoa. I can tell you I won't be doing a bookstore push for any other books I self publish. If you don't want to give up on bookstores completely, keep these things in mind. Online is still good. The 55% wholesale discount and issues with taking big risks with returns are not the same with digital sales through Barnes and Noble, Chapters, Indigo or other chains like Walmart. Those chains sell your book online and you can still set your wholesale discount to 40%. You make money even if there is a return. I must say it feels incredibly validating to see your book on the shelves of a bookstore, but just being on the shelf does not mean it will sell. This is true especially since your title will likely be spine out, not cover out on a shelf where someone really has to search for it. The only way to sell books is for you to generate that demand. If you do decide to sell online only you you can market the book, keep more dollars sold per book and not worry about the bookstores returning your books and costing you more money. If you still want a few select bookstores to carry your book, become a great bookstore partner because selling local can be really smart and worthwhile, especially if you want to contribute to your community's economy. If a bookseller knows you and likes your book, they'll talk you up and sell it to walk in customers or include you in their newsletter. It's worth being in a few bookstores. A bookstore is excited about your book. You can sell your book on consignment or your book is ordered at a discounted rate that's compatible with your overall strategy. In the next chapter, we'll turn our focus to one of the most powerful content marketing strategies for anyone looking to be known as an expert in their industry. Build a platform or have an impact video marketing featuring YouTube Chapter Summary 1. Bookstores won't buy from Amazon, so you need to be listed in the ingram catalog via IngramSpark to sell your book to a local bookstore or others outside your community. 2. Bookstores need to make money, so you have to set your wholesale discount at 55% on Ingram so that the store gets 40% and Ingram gets 15. If a bookstore returns your book, you pay them what they paid for your book. This means every book returned is a net loss to you as an author. 3. Author Book signing events can be a great tool to get more bookstore listings, but take the time to understand your goal and purpose in doing them. Also, make sure you've marketed the event well, because getting people to attend bookstore signings isn't as easy as you might think. 4. Wide Bookstore Distribution might not be a good fit for your overall goals. Given the risks, be sure to understand your reasons for pursuing it and whether it's worth the work and potential lost revenue. 5. Last but not least, when you show up at your bookstore event, check for the location of the cookbooks and the bathrooms, because you'll be asked.