Selling Books, Part 1

Over the years I’ve been asked a lot of questions by reporters covering book fairs or heritage events, but yesterday a reporter from the St. Catharines Standard came up with a really good one.

She asked about the importance of selling books at events like book fairs, rather than through large chain stores. Yes, it was important, I told her, and explained why.

One of the reasons the question impressed me was that I’d recently gone through an attempt to get the books Bob and I self-publish into a large chain. The chain already carries several of my books from trade publishers, including the Hamilton Book of Everything, which I co-authored with Kim Arnott and Marvin Ross. It was selling quite briskly before Christmas and was known to my contact at the chain.

Well, I sent off a package of books with high hopes, but it turns out they’re not going to be carrying them. In some cases it’s because the books don’t meet industry standards, as they lack scannable barcodes, These are older books – I do put barcodes on everything now.

Other criticisms were that some of the newer books weren’t big enough, more like booklets. They’re all about 6 x 9 inches and a minimum of 100 pages. (Those 100 pages was more than adequate to cover the subject matter, and, having written for newspapers and magazines for years, I’m really reluctant to pad a manuscript just to meet some particular word length or page count.)

There were also issues about some of the fonts used in the text, the selection of photographs, the cover art and the price.

You’ll note that there was no discussion about the content, and if that shocks you, welcome to the wonderful world of book publishing.

I’ve thought about the comments and don’t have a problem with some of them. The font issue is a matter of personal preference, and in this case it was somewhat large and unconventional – Bookman TC, 12 point with 16 point leading. But I’ve learned from experience as a writer of historical non-fiction that many of my readers are “of a certain age” and often appreciate somewhat larger font.

The cover issue was very specific – my contact thought the cover art on ONE book looked a little pixellated. And yes, on very close examination it does. But customer reaction to the cover (and I’m talking about independent book store owners, as well as buyers) has been excellent.

Then there was the price point. My contact felt the books were too expensive. Keep in mind that the chains ask for 45% commission, and if you get a distributor as well, you’re paying out 60%. On a $15 book, this means the chain and the distributor get $9, leaving just $6 to cover design, printing and marketing expenses.

Now, a book like this (about 100 pages) can be printed for as little as $2 or so, if you’re willing to print a couple of thousand, have the money to pay for them and some place to store them. Go the print-on-demand (POD) route and you pay closer to $5, especially if you’re only ordering smaller quantities.

In this case, the author makes a whopping profit of $1 per book!

What this means is that, while POD is a great option for self-publishing, it has its drawbacks. Especially since it appears the chains are set up to handle books that can be published by traditional publishers, who can take advantage of economies of scale and print several thousand copies at a time. And they are apparently not willing to carry “product” that veers too far away from the industry standard

So, for the foreseeable future, getting our self-published books into chains does not seem to be an option. But there are plenty of others, and I’ll talk about them next time.