Should You Focus On Selling Your Books in “Real” Bookstores?

We get asked a lot if books published by us will appear in the bookshops. And it’s a complicated answer, so we thought we’d respond here.

All our books are distributed by all the wholesalers and distributors that bricks and mortar bookshops use, as well as being published in the main catalog where bookstores choose new releases for stock. So yes, our books are available in all the major and most minor bookstores. If you go into your local Borders you probably won’t see our books on the shelves but they will be able to order them for you.

However, we focus our selling on Amazon (by far the best source of sales) and online versions of the major retailers.

Here are some of the reasons why we don’t focus on bricks and mortar:

1. Traditional bookstores expect a minimum of 55% discount on a sale or return/destroy basis, with 90+ day payment terms – just to put a book on their shelves. This figure and terms are even worse for supermarkets and WHSmiths. If we focused on these stores, in order to be profitable, we’d have to pay our authors 1-3% royalties like other publishers instead of our generous 20-40%.

2. Many bookshops have no centralised ordering process – Borders, when we pushed hard with them for a couple of our author’s books for example, said they make decisions on everything that they consider “long tail” – ie everything except for the next John Grisham, JK Rowling etc. – at local branch level so we’d have to “sell” to each store individually. Well we’d prefer to use our effort to create demand with target readers instead. This focus on the marketing effort that gets the best result stems from our Lean Marketing approach – see www.leanmarketing.co.uk

3. When you do agree to bricks and mortar store’s terms you will have to pay (a lot) to get any decent in-store positioning to make sales worthwhile – see this article in the Times – http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article669160.ece

So, for us, using our publishing/royalties model, we think old-style bookstores are a risky, and unprofitable, business.

Now, here is why we prefer online bookstores:

1. Most online shops will accept 35% (25% is possible but you end up having availability issues) on a firm sale basis. Basically, once they order stock in, we get paid and it’s up to them to sell the stock. This massively reduces our exposure to risk. We don’t have thousands of books out in bookstores speculating that the shops will sell them (paper profit), that could be returned at any moment, in usually poor, unsellable, condition.

2. Neither us, nor the author ever have to handle the books (which will involve extra cost to post and pack) as it all gets done via the distributor/wholesalers – which typically increases profit by about £1.50-£2.00 per book on top and means no need to store/insure stock. We did it this way for our first book and I can tell you 5,000 books takes up some space until it’s all sold!

3. Most importantly, as pro-active marketers, Amazon allows us to ethically “hack” the system to increase the numbers of people buying the book, reach the top of bestseller lists, improve visibility, make the book more desirable and to steal traffic (we share how to do all this with our authors) from bestselling books by celebs and massive budget publishers.

4. Online also has a search engine that means you’ll come up for people specifically looking for “YOUR KEYWORDS” as opposed to hoping they’ll see the spine of your book on a shelf shared with anything to do with “YOUR CATEGORY”.

5. Also, as I already said, to raise your book’s visibility in offline stores you need to bribe them… http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article669160.ece

6. Finally, Amazon is the “killer app” for book buyers and they’re only likely to get better – stats are hard to find but try these…

North American Sales 2007 (Books, DVD, Music, coffee)
$4.68 billion Barnes&Noble
$4.63 billion Amazon (first outsold Borders in 2006)
$3.41 billion Borders/Waldenbooks
$477 million BN.com

My maths isn’t great but that gives Amazon sales of well over a third of the $13.2 billion market – and they don’t sell coffee! I also think Amazon will be top of this list by end of 2008 (April 09 will be when these figures come out) based on the following…

North America Growth Figures – 2005-2006 and 2006-2007
+23%(06-07) +15%(05-06) Amazon
+9%(06-07) -1%(05-06) BN.com
+4%(06-07) +2%(05-06) Barnes&Noble
-0%(06-07) -1%(05-06) Borders/Waldenbooks

Notice also that BN.com is growing faster than the traditional stores too.

So in summary, we focus sales where the customer is easy to find, where they’re looking for your book, where you don’t have to pay to be seen and where the author makes the most profit.

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