According to Brooke Warner, a contributor for the Huffington Post, one of the most thrilling experiences an author can have is when he or she walks into a bookstore and find their book on the shelves. In which is an experience that can be described as an “exception” and “not the norm.” Small book stores don’t have the space to accommodate as many books as seen inside bigger chains, like Borders or Barnes & Noble.
For self-published authors, getting into bookstores is a chore. And it’s not a given for traditionally published (and many hybrid-published) authors who have traditional distribution. Authors tend to get limited information from their publishers, often because their publishers have access to limited information from their distributors. For instance, authors I work with often ask me, “Which bookstores are carrying my book?” As a publisher, I can see which stores have ordered directly from our distributor, but I can’t tell which stores might have ordered from third-party wholesalers, like Baker & Taylor and Ingram Wholesale. The reason authors pose this question is because they want to do follow-up with those bookstores, but I posit that the better approach is proactive, and rather than send buyers to bookstores you know are carrying your book, you want to send them to the bookstore that’s most convenient to them.
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