Everyone who’s written a book has a dream. Some dreams are so elaborate they include the front window fantasy. The author’s book is at the center of the display in this view, surrounded by other copies or maybe other books.
Few of the dreams show the moment when a customer is lined up at a bookstore, ready to purchase — and then the customer in front of them has a complex transaction. This gift card, plus that discount code, breaking up their buy across credit cards. A friend told me about this at his Barnes & Noble. He’s written four novels, but this holdup turned him away from buying one.
That’s a delay you won’t encounter online. So much of what we’ve learned to do in purchases has left the retail store. Go ahead, blame it on Covid.
It’s likely that the standard stores don’t stock many titles outside the Big 5 universe. An article from the Independent Book Publishers Association pegged the Big 5’s share at 85 percent of all titles in one indie bookstore.
Making your place beside mainstream
Mrs. Dalloway’s in Berkeley is a “standard store” according to its owners. Lots of mainstream titles are on sale there. They can take an order for your book, or any author who’s in Ingram’s wholesale catalog. “Sometimes we try to do endcaps with independent publishers,” said the owner. “But casual browsers are not looking for books in that mode. If we had time and space to feature independent publishers, we would. But features like that do not sell as many books.”
When you build your book dream around a store moment, you’ll want to have an agent, or at least a strong genre backlist of books. Agents are the way into the Big 5. When more than four of every five books arrive through distribution sales that the Big 5 uses, your indie book is hunting for a spot on a crowded bus.
Stores can help sell your book, but ensuring that they want it is your job more than anyone’s. Those Berkeley store owners say that big independent stores, with a team of buyers and display spaces, “might be able to support independent publishers — but for our size, we just don’t have time and space.”
The owners go on to say that “An independent bookstore would need to have showcasing independent publishers be part of their mission, if they want to include such presses.” The local community of booksellers should be the first target that any author explores. You take your book to the store’s seller, along with reviews, then ask if it’s something they’d sell from a table. A book face-up on a table takes up three to six times as much space as books sold from the shelves.
Table display is discovery selling, versus delivering books that are already in the reader’s mind. “Wow, what a cover,” might be followed by “I heard about that book.” Without that, the store is just doing what Amazon, Apple, or Kobo do from your phone. They take orders and never make you wait behind a complicated purchase.
