Distributor Or Wholesaler? Writer Beware Explains!

If you're considering submitting to a smaller publisher, one of the things you should investigate before you send your work out is what sort of distribution deal that publisher has. Because if it doesn't have a proper distribution deal in place, its books (for which you can read your books) just aren't going to sell.

But what does that mean? How does distribution work, how does a distributor differ from a wholesaler, and what implications does all of this have for your work? Over at Writer Beware, bestselling author Cathy Clamp explains. Read it now, bookmark the article, and next time you're considering submitting your work to anyone other than a major publisher you'll know what questions to ask, and how the answers might affect you.

Self-Publishing Sales Statistics Clarified

When I appeared on The Write Lines last week I mentioned that the average self-published book sells between forty and two hundred copies, depending on which set of figures you consult. Compared to mainstream publishing, where sales of three thousand copies for commercial fiction are considered by some to be disappointing, these figures are terribly low and the reaction from the other studio guests (a literary agent and three successful mainstream-published writers) was obvious: if you listen to the recording you can clearly hear them gasp.

After the broadcast I caught up with the reaction on Twitter, and found that a few writers were discussing the figures I quoted and reaching some rather unsound conclusions. While I'm not going to quote anyone here (it’s just not appropriate to single anyone out), I do think it’s important that I respond to their points. But first, a very quick primer on how sales figures are usually gathered in the book trade.

Nielsen Bookscan collects the sales figures of various online and physical retailers, then collates those figures and reports them to the book trade (it’s Nielsen which produces the best-seller charts we're all so envious of). However, as relatively few copies of self-published books are sold through bookshops, and quite a few self-published titles don’t even have the ISBNs which are essential for books to be tracked by Nielsen, the majority of self-published sales aren't included in Nielsen’s sales reports: therefore, if you rely on Nielsen to provide sales information about self-published books, you’re likely to be way out of whack with the real picture.

The Tweeters seemed to assume that I was relying on Nielsen, and that therefore my figures had to be way off.

They would have had a very valid point if I had relied on Nielsen’s reports for my statistics, but I used a far more generous source for the figures I quoted on air: the publishers themselves (there’s an obvious difficulty here: my figures came from companies which style themselves as self-publishing service providers, which many consider to be vanity presses: but for the purposes of this discussion I’ll ignore that issue, which is a little off-topic here. I shall return to it at another time, have no fear).

As most publishing service providers of this type offer only print-on-demand services, copies of the books that they publish are only ever printed in direct response to an order; a copy printed is a copy sold, no matter who buys it. So long as a book is printed and sent out from their premises they consider it a sale—when these companies report sales what they’re really reporting is the number of copies printed. You can see that there is not going to be a hidden stash of sales which fail to get included in the sales statistics: if anything, these companies are likely to over-report, rather than under-report, their sales.

As the sales figures I quoted came directly from POD-based self-publishing service providers, not only do those figures include all copies sold in bookshops or by Amazon, etc.; they also include all copies subsequently returned by bookshops to their authors (because with self-publishing the author is the publisher, and so they have to credit the bookseller’s account for those returned books even if they’re no longer in a sellable condition); they also include as sales every single copy that the authors bought and then sent out, for free, to reviewers, or gave away to family and friends; and every single copy which all those hopeful authors ordered, only to have them left mouldering away in their garages when they found they couldn't sell them—of which there are far too many.

Which means that it’s impossible for the sales figures I mentioned to be under-reported: unlike Nielsen's figures, they are going to be higher than the sales which really count in an author's career: the sales made to interested readers who considered the books potentially good enough to pay their hard-earned money for.

Trios: The Einstein Girl, by Philip Sington: Selling Literary Fiction

Samantha Fanaken works as part of Random House's sales team as a Senior Key Account Manager, and here she discusses selling literary fiction into bookshops.

One of the most enjoyable parts of working for a literary publisher like CCV is reading large piles of paper that will one day turn into books. Reading a book long before it has a cover means you come to it with no assumptions, only the enthusiastic description from the editor when they asked you to read it.

It’s hugely useful to have read as much of our fiction list as possible before presenting them to retailers. Non-fiction is easier to categorise, it’s usually simpler to assess whether a book will appeal to classic military history buffs or foodies etc, whereas fiction is much more subjective.

So, it’s helpful to know a book before trying to recommend it – so you can do the quick reductive ‘it’s a bit blah meets blah’ or ‘if you liked that, you’ll love this’ but then go on to talk about a book in more detail – the characters you can’t stop thinking about, the scenes that stay with you, the plot twists.

The Einstein Girl has much to offer. It has a rich seam of history, set in Berlin just before Hitler comes to power, and uses a little-known fact from Albert Einstein’s life as its core. There’s a mystery to be solved - a young woman is found naked in the woods outside the city with a leaflet to a lecture by Albert Einstein in her hand as the only clue to her identity. There’s a sweet sad love story between her and her psychiatrist, a man battling with his own scars left by the Great War. Slowly between their conversations and the psychiatrist’s own research, the greater story of Einstein’s family and its secrets unravel.

Enough sly pitching of the book at you. Read it, it’s great.

So, reading the book helps give me a steer on the potential readers and how we might best reach them through our retailers. When talking to a retailer like Waterstone’s, who are very supportive of new and developing writers, we have a good discussion around who might buy the book and whether that makes it a candidate for promotion front of store in its first outing in hardback or trade paperback, or whether it’s best to push the paperback a year later. In this instance, I’m pleased to report Waterstone’s are as keen as I am on The Einstein Girl and it is available in all stores in their 3 for 2 throughout August.


Philip's editor at Harvill Secker has kindly squirrelled away five copies of The Einstein Girl for us. If you'd like to be in the running for one of them, all you have to do is answer the following question: where did the designers find the photograph which appears on the cover of The Einstein Girl? Send your answers to "competition at philipsington dot com": next week, Philip will select the five winners at random and I'll announce them here.

Trios: The Einstein Girl, by Philip Sington: Waterstone’s Perspective

Last time The Einstein Girl appeared here, we learned how its cover was created; today, Rodney Troubridge (the Fiction Marketing Planner at Waterstone’s) reveals how he makes his decisions; and next time, a key account manager at Random House will discuss selling this sort of literary fiction to booksellers.


As a lucky retailer who gets sent a lot of proofs to read it is always enjoyable to think, 'what shall I read next?'

Looking back I think what interested me about The Einstein Girl was that it had been recommended by the publisher at a highlights presentation of their titles a few months before. I didn't know any thing about the author other than vaguely remembering his previous novel but I liked the plot line and so I gave it a go.

I have always liked reading books set in the interwar period in Germany and/or Central Europe and admired the way the doomed Weimar Republic is portrayed and the frightening spectre of the Nazi takeover beginning its terrible influence. I was also intrigued to see how the author would handle the giant figure of Einstein and how he would fit into the overall story.

Luckily my colleagues on the buying team felt equally enthusiastic and we will be promoting the title in branches of Waterstone's from publication.


Philip's editor at Harvill Secker has kindly squirrelled away five copies of The Einstein Girl for us. If you'd like to be in the running for one of them, all you have to do is answer the following question: where did the designers find the photograph which appears on the cover of The Einstein Girl? Send your answers to "competition at philipsington dot com": a week after the third article in this series appears, Philip will select the five winners at random and I'll announce them here.

How Writers Can Save Publishing, One Book At A Time

When I visited Aberystwyth a couple of weeks ago, I did my usual thing: I left my husband on the beach to supervise our children, and I went for a walk around the town.

I've known Aberystwyth all my life: I have a lot of family there, and it's familiar to me in an infrequent, surreal way. I know the layout of its streets, but not the names of them; I know the history of the town as it appears in my family's folklore, which often juxtaposes oddly with the more widely-accepted versions; and I know a series of landmarks through the town which help me to knit together my own mental street-map, and which provide a framework for all those inherited memories I have of the place.

This time, though, one of those landmarks had gone. Galloway's, the independent bookshop on Pier Street, has closed. The space it left behind is now filled with racks of tracksuits and boxes of cheap trainers. There are other bookshops, of course (and the list you'll find in this link still includes Galloway's even though it's gone, which pleases me): there is a branch of Waterstone's on the main shopping street and a couple of hundred yards down from it the small but brilliantly-stocked Siop-y-Pethe, both of which are wonderful in their own ways, and there are a few others too: but Galloway's, with its top floor full of fiction, its racks of small-press books, its spooky, echoing basement full of textbooks and odd non-fiction: Galloway's, which I've never once left without a satisfyingly fat bundle of books—Galloway's is gone. Because, as several people told me sadly, it just wasn't making enough money to remain in business.

I stood outside the space-which-once-was-Galloway's and stared in at the bright white trainers and the young men fighting to get themselves the right sizes, the best designers. It was never so busy when it was full of books. I found myself thinking of the wonderful literary magazine Cadenza, which came to an end this year not because of a lack of quality or reputation, but because it didn't sell enough copies to pay for its own printing bill; and of Salt Publishing, which earlier this year asked us to buy just one book in order to keep it in business (which appears to have worked, I'm pleased to say).

So here is my point. It is difficult to get published: this we know. But imagine how much more difficult it would be if the market were halved. Fewer publishers in business translates directly into fewer publishing slots; and as bookshops close, books and literary magazines have fewer opportunities to get into readers hands, which reduces book sales even further.

Over the last year I've read a lot of blog posts which have bemoaned the perilous state of publishing today: the suggested solutions to publishing’s financial crisis have ranged from sacking all editors (and in so doing prevent them rejecting the Brave New Literary Voice Which Could Alone Save Publishing (which is usually, coincidentally, the voice of the person writing the blog post in question) to cutting literary agents out of publishing's food-chain (because in their role of literary gatekeeper—how I hate that phrase—they’ve rejected the Brave New Literary Voice Which Could Alone Save Publishing, and we know who that is, don’t we?). But very few of them have pointed out that writers could do a lot to help keep all these publishers and booksellers in business until business picks up.

Every time you submit your work anywhere, support your submission by buying a copy of the magazine that you’re submitting to, or a book from the publisher you’d like to publish you. If you’re writing a novel and are nowhere near ready to submit then think about who you would like to publish you once you’re ready to go and buy something from them.

Buy just one more book; subscribe to just one literary magazine; use your local bookshop if you can; and then keep going. Every single copy helps: and there’s no need to stop at just one. If you can afford to, buy an extra book or literary magazine every month or every week; if you can’t afford to then order books at your local library and read them all for free—the library pays for the books it lends out, and every little helps. Because every time a publisher ceases trading or a bookshop closes its doors, it becomes just a little bit harder for us to get published. And if we writers haven’t supported the independent publishers, the small imprints, the many tiny but wonderful literary and genre magazines which put out fabulous work, then we can’t complain when they close, and another opportunity is lost to us forever.



(The two stunning covers I've used to illustrate this piece belong to books translated by John K Bollard with photographs by Anthony Griffiths: The Mabinogi, and Companion Tales to the Mabinogi. They're both published by Gomer, and I bought them from Siop-y-Pethe. If you're interested in the Mabinogion, or in Welsh/Celtic literature, culture or countryside, buy them both: they are the most beautiful books I've seen in a good long while.)

Selling Books To Book Shops (Part I)

The following article first appeared on my blog in October 2008, but thanks to my technical ineptitude it disappeared from view a couple of months ago. Here it is again. I hope it stays here this time!


Mainstream publishing houses employ sales representatives who work all over the country, visiting all the book shops they can find. Their publishers provide them with gorgeous colour catalogues to work from, which show all the books on their publisher’s lists; they use streamlined ordering systems which deliver books swiftly and efficiently, and usually the next day; and the book shops have accounts at their wholesalers or distributors, and so don’t have to pay for the books that they buy straight away, which gives them a chance to sell the books before they have to pay for them, and so gain a nice bit of positive cash-flow.

Independent presses often don’t have access to such sales teams. They might employ a sales agency to sell their books for them, and so increase their turnover that way—but there’s a fair amount of cost involved in this, and it’s not an option that the smallest independents can take. Once they’ve developed a good-enough reputation they are sometimes allowed to sneak in under a bigger publisher’s wing, which allows them to remain independent but still gives them access to the bigger publishers’ sales teams; this gives them that all-important nationwide representation, which invariably leads to a swift improvement in sales figures and, therefore, turnover (which is not the same as profit).

Self-publishers don’t have the option of employing a sales agency, or of persuading a big publisher to help them out with their sales (after all, if they could do that then they probably wouldn’t have self-published in the first place). The only way that they can realistically hope to get their books into bookshops is to sell them in there themselves, which means visiting each and every bookshop they can find. And even in a country as small as ours, that’s an awful lot of bookshops for one writer to visit, and a very unprofitable way to sell just one title.

Trios: The White Road and Other Stories, by Tania Hershman: The Bookseller’s View

Sara Crowley has had fiction published by Pulp.Net, 3:AM, elimae, flashquake, Litro, Cella's Round Trip, Dogmatika, Red Peter, Better Non Sequitur, and a variety of other lovely places. “Salted”, her novel in progress, was shortlisted for the 2007 Faber/Book Tokens Not Yet Published Award. She is, among many other things, a bookseller at Waterstones and if you visit her blog you’ll be able to see photographs of some of her displays of the short story collections she so enthusiastically promotes—including one with Tania’s book in centre-stage. I wish that every bookshop had its own Sara Crowley, and offer her my warmest thanks for this piece.


I am a writer, mother, and part time bookseller in the fiction section of a large branch of Waterstones. I like to read and write short and long fiction; each has its own craft, skill, and reward. Novels outsell short story collections though, and there are a number of customers who are resistant to them. I understand how satisfying it is to immerse oneself in a lengthy story, but just as we are capable of listening to, and appreciating, both singles and albums, I don’t see the need to pick one form of writing and reject the other.

I maintain a short story collection display case and have no difficulty in filling the nineteen available spaces. I like to mix classic must-reads (Sylvia Plath's Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams, Raymond Carver's Where I'm Calling from) with new voices (Lee Rourke's Everyday, Neil Smith's Bang Crunch) and contemporary greats (Lorrie Moore's The Collected Stories of Lorrie Moore, Ali Smith's The First Person and Other Stories). I hope there’s something for everyone, and regularly change things to keep the display fresh. My colleague (who runs the fiction section) has a vast knowledge of fiction past and present; between us I think we offer wonderful range.

Customers often bring in reviews they have cut from the paper, or ask for a book they heard about on the radio. I’m not sure that short story collections get the necessary publicity in the press to generate buzz about them so one way of attracting potential buyers is to write a bookseller’s review. One of my favourite authors is Janice Galloway, so I ordered in copies of her superb collection Where You Find it, wrote a glowing review, and have sold 55 copies so far. It really pleases me to think that I have helped people to discover such a talented writer, and it proves that if good quality work is visible then people will buy it. Tania Hershman’s name may not be familiar to people yet, but if they read my recommendation and pick up The White Road and Other Stories they will see that it is beautifully produced and it offers something a little different, as Tania prefaces the stories with snippets of scientific articles that have inspired her. She is a very skilled writer, so reading a passage or two is likely to make the customer buy the book.

It’s sad to think that without publicity some wonderful books can remain undiscovered.


Two weeks ago we heard how Tania Hershman promoted her book, The White Road and Other Stories; and last week Jen Hamilton-Emery of Salt Publishing discussed some of the difficulties involved in running an independent press.

If you'd like to be in with a chance to win a copy of The White Road and Other Stories, then answer this question: which magazine's articles inspired many of the stories in Tania's collection? Answers to tania@thewhiteroadandotherstories.com. You have until May 27 to get your emails to her, after which time she will select one winner at random from all of the entries she receives.

Guest Post: The Implications Of Second-Hand Book Sales

My thanks to Nicola Morgan for this post.


Second-hand books—what’s not to like? The ultimate in recycling, they raise money for charities and independent second-hand bookshops, and offer cheap reading material for those who can’t afford the full price.

At which point, allow me to draw some deep breaths, because I’m trying to be moderate and not mount my hobby-horse for a full-scale rant. Nor would I like you to think that I would steal the food from the mouths of starving babies who are helped by Oxfam and the like. Thing is, I know that at some point I am going to mention Amazon Marketplace....

Let me start by being incontrovertibly reasonable and stating What I Have No Problem With:

• The genuinely second-hand trade in out-of-print books (even though you’ll often have difficulty in determining whether they are, so let’s rephrase that to “books which you can’t buy or order new”).
  
  
• Ditto out-of-copyright books (because the author has been dead a long time—seventy years in UK law—and they can’t use the money).
  
  
• The argument that one’s book being sold in a second-hand shop may create new readers, who may buy or recommend your other books.
  
  
• The giving of used books to schools, libraries (if only they would accept them, but thereby hangs another gripe), hospitals, prisons or any other such organisation where the books will be read on-site.
  
  
• Any scheme which offers good reading material for people on low incomes or reluctant readers.

Thing is, the second-hand book trade poses a specific problem for authors because of how we earn from our work. The advance + royalty system means that we earn when a new copy of our book is sold, but not if it’s sold second-hand (you may know that in the UK now, visual artists DO earn a second royalty when their work is re-sold in a gallery or at auction).

So, any second-hand purchase which replaces a full-price purchase is lost income. This wasn’t a big deal when second-hand book-selling was small business. But now, it’s HUGE.

Take Oxfam. From figures I could quickly find, each Oxfam bookshop would expect to make around £175,000 per year; and bearing in mind they don’t pay most staff and don’t pay business rates, they have an advantage over “ordinary” second-hand bookshops, many of which are complaining about unfair competition. In 2002, Oxfam sold 12 million books in the UK, and with many new shops opening every year that figure must have grown. Forgive me if I don’t search for that info for you—I’m trying to write a book and earn a living at the moment....

Now, I’d hate to knock Oxfam. But I do argue for an informed choice. And my choice is to give money to my favoured charities (which may include Oxfam), but to buy books from a proper shop and support authors and literature.

But what about people who can’t afford full-price books?

• It’s not only just the economically deprived who use charity shops. People on all incomes use charity shops, for many good reasons.


• But, if you want to save money, use public libraries, where books are free AND the author earns money each time. So, don’t throw the poverty line at me—libraries are the best levellers of all.

And, er... Amazon Marketplace?

Thing about Amazon Marketplace is that the word “second-hand” takes on a blurry hue. Every author I know has found their books listed, sometimes for absurd prices (one of mine is currently available for 1p—apart from the HUGE postage charge) as being second-hand before publication day. Where do these books come from? Back of a lorry? Returns to publishers (which means they’ve already had the royalty payment DEDUCTED from the author, sometimes at a higher rate than the royalty paid to the author in the first place—oh, don’t get me started on that)? I once had a consignment of books go completely missing between warehouse and a school where I was doing a talk. I’d love to know precisely who ended up making money on them—it sure as hell wasn’t me.

Amazon Marketplace is a stunning business model: three parties make a profit—Amazon, the seller, and the postal service. Never mind the author, eh?

Look, don’t get me wrong: I’m all for free trade; I’m all for people getting a bargain; I’m all for charities making money; I’m even all for businesses making a profit. But what I’m most for is every customer making an informed choice. And if you don’t care about the author, fine: that’s your choice.

I call the concept Fair Reading. It’s explained in detail on this Facebook group. I am not telling people not to buy second-hand, or to feel guilty if they do—I want everyone to be aware:

• that most authors earn very little—according to recent Society of Authors figures (for the UK) two thirds of professional authors earn less than half the average wage;
  
  
• that author income is based on a few pence earned on each new book sold;
  
  
• that if authors can’t earn from writing, they won’t be able to write, and then we’ll all be the poorer.

I have been remarkably moderate today, for me. Another day, remind me to tell you what happened when I spoke to people (yes, really, people) at Amazon about it. And I also tried to work out how we could do for authors what was done for artists in the EU—the Authors Licensing and Collecting Authority could manage the collection of second-hand royalties—but we reckoned that it would be too punitive to the charities and we don’t want to knock charities. So, all I’m left with is the power of education and the generosity of people’s natures and sense of fairness: do join me in spreading the word about informed choice and Fair Reading.

The message is simple: Buy your books at the best price you can for the author, or borrow from a public library. If we love books, we need authors.

©2009 Nicola Morgan

Bookshops And Booksellers

I've written a few posts about bookselling which you can find here. I buy books from the big chains, the independents, online and from real, physical shops. There are all sorts of booksellers out there and most of them do a wonderful job. Support writers and spend lots of money in bookshops. It's the only way.

If you have a favourite bookshop or bookseller, whether independent or part of a chain, then post a link to its website here and I'll add it to my list. I could especially do with some bookshops which aren't based in the UK.


UK Bookshops And Booksellers

The Big Green Bookshop in Wood Green, North London, has a great blog called Open A Bookshop, What Could Possibly Go Wrong? A real delight.

Bookseller Crow is in Crystal Palace, South London, and has a blog (you might have to scroll down a bit to find the latest update) and an online shop.

The Children's Bookshop in Edinburgh is run by publisher Fidra Books, and has a very informative blog.

Joseph's Bookstore. Finchley, North London. It comes highly recommended.

Mostly Books, Abingdon, has a lovely blog.

Wenlock Books in Much Wenlock has a very quiet blog which is rarely updated but the shop is a real treat: it sells new and second-hand books, and dispenses cake on Saturday mornings. It's one of my favourites.


Online Booksellers

Most of the big chains have online bookshops: I'll leave it up to you to find those for yourself!

Here's Amazon in the UK.

This is Abe Books, which lists the stock of second-hand booksellers worldwide alongside a good search facility. It's particularly useful for finding obscure and out-of-print titles at good prices.

Bookselling: Chains vs Independents

As so many of our bookshops are now part of large chains, and the bulk of book buying for those chains is carried out by a central buying office, the stock you see on the shelves has become homogenous and neutral. Stock in an Edinburgh branch of Waterstones is almost identical to stock in the Exeter branch.

Most branches will have a small section for local interest books (by local authors, perhaps, or about local history) but the majority of the titles that they carry will be found in all of their branches.

While I don’t hold any grudges against Waterstones or any other chain (I’ll cheerfully admit that I’ve spent weeks of my life lurking in their stacks), I do worry about the impact that they’ve had on bookselling’s independent sector. While relatively few independent bookstores now remain, thirty years ago they were a feature of almost every high street: each one had its own personality, which was reflected in its stock, and the people who shopped in them. I fondly remember a bookshop in Ealing Broadway (opposite the train station: can anyone else remember it?) where I used to buy short story anthologies, poetry, and experimental fiction, much of which I still own; and another bookshop on Kentish Town high road where twenty years ago I bought all sorts of books from new writers, published by emerging presses. I doubt that any branch of Waterstones would even consider stocking half of those the titles: and yet they’re (almost!) all brilliantly written, and many contain work from newcomers who are now household names.

So now, when ever I go anywhere, I make an effort to find any independent bookshops that I can. Some are a little less organised than Waterstones or Borders; and they don’t usually have much in the way of three-for-twos; but they more than make up for those failings by having staff who can find you the perfect title out of their brilliant range of fascinating books.

Why Do Vanity Publishers Sell To Writers, Not Readers?

It’s widely accepted in the publishing industry that the difference between a vanity publisher and a mainstream, commercial publisher is that the former makes most of its money selling books back to its writers, while the latter makes its money selling books on to new readers: but why is this the case and why is that distinction so important?

Mainstream publishers focus on selling their books to readers. This is done through the efforts of salespeople, distributors, wholesalers and booksellers, with the assistance of publicity teams which manipulate a vast network of media contacts in order to bring books to their readers’ attention. It’s a two-pronged attack which simultaneously makes the book widely available and makes potential readers aware of the book, and publishers which only focus on one side of this equation rarely succeed.

Vanity publishers focus on selling to their own authors because they know that those writers are keen to see their books sell well, and they provide a guaranteed market for their own books. Vanities don’t attempt to sell to bookshops or to promote to new readers because that’s a complex system which can be very expensive; and because they know that bookshops aren’t likely to buy their books and reviewers aren’t likely to review them.

Where Books Are Sold

Most books are still sold in real, physical bookshops and not online, despite claims to the contrary by many of the vanity presses and self-publishing services.

There are exceptions: few textbooks ever make it into bookshops and are instead sold direct from the publisher to the end-user, sometimes through the university or school. Few self-published titles or vanity-published titles make it into many shops either: most of these books are sold via the internet, or as a result of the authors’ efforts to sell into individual bookshops. But their overall sales are notoriously low, which has a lot to do with the fact that they just don’t get the exposure to their potential readers which comes with bookshop placement.

Snowbooks On Marketing

Snowbooks is one of the UK’s publishing’s success stories. It’s a thriving independent publisher with a solid reputation for publishing strong titles and selling them in high numbers (the covers are beautiful, too). It's got a great blog, too. Here Emma Barnes, Snowbooks’ co-founder, discusses her very effective approach to marketing and promotion.


One of the interesting things about being a small publisher is that we can see the direct effect of every piece of marketing activity that we do. In larger companies, where there’s a medium-sized budget for a title, there might be a series of interviews and signing sessions, an online ad campaign, an SMS campaign, a series of ads in women’s magazines, a print run of in-store posters, a fund for co-op promotional spend, and a run of pre-publication proofs for endorsers, reviewers, reading groups and prize-winners to enjoy. If the book does well, who’s to say which bit of marketing worked? For our titles, most pieces of marketing activity are usually standalone. If something works, we can usually tell so easily, without the noise of other activities to confuse matters.

So, for instance, when we took out a £600 ad in a popular publication for The London Scene, a collection of Virginia Woolf essays featuring a never-before-seen sketch, it was easy to see that it had had no effect whatsoever when sales remained at a steady rate. When an extract from that self-same book scored a double-page spread in the Guardian’s G2 section, and sales remained static, we could divine the value of that, too. However, when the book subsequently featured in a high street retailer’s promotion, and shifted 4000 copies in a six month period, we knew that we were on to something.

Since then we’ve often experimented with ads and review coverage, because the received wisdom is that PR, reviews and coverage sell books. Maybe it’s just us, but we have yet to find much empirical evidence to support that proposition. Last summer, for instance, we were lucky enough to receive, as part of a deal we’d done, a free full page of ad space in a leading men’s magazine, worth £50,000 if you look at the rate card. I designed a perfectly lovely advert for a book perfectly tailored to that market. Sales didn’t budge at all. When that book got a core stock rating in a leading high street retailer, however, we sold 150 copies in one week.

My point? Retailers sell books, not marketing. Am I right? I’m right as far as Snowbooks is concerned – I have the data to prove it. There is, however, something in the idea that spending a sufficient amount of money will certainly get people’s attention. A Tube ad campaign, for instance, would have to be very poor if it didn’t sell some books. My question would be whether enough books are sold as a result of the marketing activity to pay for the activity in question. There’s also a strange phenomenon about having to spend money on consumer marketing in order to persuade retailers that you are serious so that they promote your title, although I’ve never come across the need for such complicated manoeuvrings myself. And even when PR does sell some books, the costs and time of hiring the PR agency or lunching contacts on a regular basis are often much greater than the promotional charges levied by retailers to achieve the same result.

By the way, when I make comments like these, the first response is always ‘but I buy books based on reviews and so on’. Yes, but look what you’re doing. You’re reading a blog about how publishing works. You are an interested party; someone with an above-average interest in books and the business of selling them. Your behaviour is not representative of the book-buying public as a whole.

If the findings for Snowbooks held true for the whole industry, what would that mean? It would mean budgets should be realigned away from ads and towards retailer activity. It means relationships with retailers should be seen as the most important part of the publishing process. It means the acknowledgement by agents, authors and publishers of the role of the retailer as gatekeeper to the reader. Who knows how differently we’d all behave if we took a fresh look at what retailers achieve.

Special Orders: Why You Have To Pay In Advance

Suppose that a customer walks into a bookshop and asks the bookseller to order her a copy of a book that the bookseller has never heard of: and that when the bookseller looks the book up, he finds that it was published by a vanity publisher which is notorious for publishing terrible books at horrible prices. What do you think he's going to do?

The well-informed bookseller is going to demand that payment is made for the book before he actually orders it—otherwise the book is likely to never be collected and could end up sitting on the shelves for years, at the bookseller's expense.

You can read about just such a case here.

Snowsales

The rather lovely independent publisher Snowbooks is now publishing details of sales and returns on its new(ish) Snowsales blog.

Do you want to know how many copies of each title Snowbooks sold in December? How many returns bookshops made the following month? Or which bookshops return copies of a book one day, only to reorder them again a few days later (and what the environmental and business implications of this silly shilly-shallying really are)? It's all there. Each blog post takes the form of an overview with a spreadsheet attached, which you can download and examine at your leisure

All you have to do to read all this fascinating stuff is email Emma Barnes and ask for a password, so she knows who has access to her sales information. You can find out everything you need to know here.

Droplifting

I've seen several people suggest that droplifting is a good way for writers to promote their self-published books: but I think it's a terrible idea.

Droplifting is shoplifting in reverse and involves surreptitiously leaving copies of books on bookshop shelves in the hope that someone will buy them. The obvious problem is that while the books will physically be in the bookshop, they won't have a virtual presence in the bookshop's computer system and so if they ever do reach the checkout, the cashier will be unable to sell them. If there's a manager on hand to authorise the deal the shop will probably just give the books away: if there's no manager available the books will be put to one side and will probably end up in the recycling bin or dumped with the sale items. But as booksellers tend to be aware of their own stock, chances are that one of the shop workers will spot the droplifted books on the shelves, recognise that they shouldn't be there, and dispose of them within hours of their deposit.

How ever this is worked, the writer loses money. How does the writer benefit? And what on earth do they think they will achieve by doing this?



ETA: Marian Perera, over at Flights of Fantasy, has written a much better piece than mine about droplifting, which you can read here. Thank you for the link, Marian!

How Not To Sell To Book Shops

Any self-published authors who intend to sell their books direct into bookshops would do well to read this post from the Fidra blog, which tells everything you need to know about how NOT to do it.

There's also a sequel to it, in which a better strategy is revealed, which will be useful to all writers, whether they're self-published or with a mainstream, commercial house. Go and read these two pieces now. You will be glad you did. Honest.

Bookselling: Chains And Independents

Bookselling is dominated by the big chains. On the UK high street, Waterstones dominates; online, Amazon is king in sales of both new and second-hand books following its 2008 acquisition of Abe Books, the brilliant second-hand bookselling website which lists sellers from all over the world.

Because of their huge buying power, not only do the big chains command higher discounts from publishers than are available to the smaller, independent booksellsers: they also directly influence publishers’ decisions. If buyers for the chains don’t like book covers, the covers will be redesigned; if they don’t like blurbs, they’ll be rewritten; and if, ultimately, they don’t like certain writers, then those writers are unlikely to be commissioned again.

Bookselling chains don’t make their income purely from book sales: they also get paid to run promotions. Consider all those books on the three-for-two tables: each one is there because their publishers have paid for their inclusion. And this subsidiary source of income doesn’t stop there: a few years ago there was an outcry when the public discovered that positions on Waterstones’ “bestsellers” chart were all bought and paid for by the publishers concerned. Since then, little has changed: the chart is still money-driven but at least the fuss has died down now. I’d love to know what sort of proportion of the chains’ income is provided directly from bookselling, and indirectly from paid-for promotions, but I don’t suppose they’ll volunteer the information.

There’s a cost for all this, of course: chain bookstores all seem to offer the same chart-led stock, and don’t often carry the quirkier, more risky books: the self-published titles with the limited markets; the poetry, small-press titles or anthologies. Which is, for me, where the real gold lies. So next time you visit an independent bookseller and wonder why it doesn’t offer cut-price books, or run many promotions, don’t think harshly of it. Have a good poke around and discover those odd little books that you won’t find anywhere else. Buy a big bag full of them, and be grateful the shop is still open. Because the independent bookshop is at risk, and needs our full support.

Selling Books To Book Shops (Part II)

I’ve made no secret of my opinion of the YouWriteOn publishing scheme: but now that some writers have signed up to it, how can they persuade bookshops to carry their titles?

Before they even consider phoning their local store, it is absolutely essential that the writers concerned find out two things: which wholesaler or distributor the YouWriteOn books are going to be listed with, if any; and what the sales terms are. This isn’t something that the writers can arrange for themselves: it’s a publisher’s job to find a wholesaler willing to take a list on; to ensure that all titles are listed correctly; and to set the sales terms (I’ve already blogged about how self-publishers can get their books into Waterstones but in this case, YouWriteOn is the publisher and so is responsible for getting this done).

These wholesalers are essential because booksellers have accounts with them, and prefer to buy their stock from them. They are unlikely to be willing or able to buy books direct from YouWriteOn’s website. And booksellers will ask what the sales terms are: they need to know what they’re going to have to pay for a book before they buy it, so that they can be sure of covering their costs and making some profit on each sale; and they need to know if they can return the copies which don’t sell, because that will directly affect the number of copies they’re prepared to buy, and how forgiving they’ll be if the discounts are low.

Sales terms can be a bit tricky: I’ve heard of a few instances where bookshops have taken self-published titles at discounts as low as 35% off the retail price, but that’s rare in my experience (although I’ll admit here that I have little direct experience of self-publishing, so if anyone wants to add their comments I’d be grateful). Discounts of 45-60% are more common (Waterstones is unlikely to consider a book with less than 50% discount). And most bookshops will expect the books to be supplied on a sale-or-return basis, so that if after a couple of months the book has not sold, or is getting a little shelfworn, the retailer can return them at no cost.

Now, if YouWriteOn isn’t planning on paying a wholesaler to handle their supply-chain, then the bookshops will have to either order direct from the YouWriteOn website, or the writers will have to supply them. I’ll be interested to know how YouWriteOn intends to handle bookshop discounts in this case, as the contract makes no provision for author discounts, which is going to make it economically impossible for the authors to supply bookshops direct at the discounts they need.

Once writers know where bookshops can get hold of the books, and what the sales terms are, they can start selling: and that’s where the real work starts. A post or seven about that will soon follow.

(You can find Part I of Selling Books To Bookshops here.)

The Problem Of Returns

Bookshops are reluctant to buy books they aren't sure of: the worry is that they'll get stuck with stock they cannot sell, and so lose profit in an already tight market. Consequently, booksellers try to avoid buying any stock on a firm sale basis, and usually do all they can to buy books on sale or return only.

Despite the valuable breathing room that returns provide to booksellers (particularly to the independent booksellers), returns cause all sorts of problems. Sales reps are reluctant to authorise them, because doing so takes up valuable selling time; publishers don't like them because returned books are shelfworn, cost them money, and yet can't be resold; and writers don't like them because they lead to nasty "reserve against returns" clauses in their contracts which allow their publishers to hold back a percentage of their royalties in order to allow for any returns.

Emma, over at the rather wonderful Snowbooks, wrote a couple of excellent blog posts earlier on this year in which she discussed the many problems that returns create. I can't better them: you'll find them here and here.