In exchange, the vendor will keep part of the profits from any sales. Basically, if a person has a product to sell but lacks the platform to sell it, they can make arrangements with a third-party vendor to sell the product for them. If you aren’t familiar with selling on consignment, it’s pretty straightforward. That’s where selling on consignment comes in. There are still other factors to consider-specifically the practical ones about wholesale pricing and a book’s returnability. Unfortunately, even if your book is available from a distributor, your bookstore still might not be willing to order it. On the occasion that a bookstore wants to place an order-a small number of copies, special requests from a customer, or books that a store can’t get directly from the publisher-they have the option to instead order from a book distributor. In some cases, you may get lucky enough to have a local bookstore that is open to ordering copies of your book. Instead, it’s up to you, the author, to let bookstores know that your book is available, and to convince them that it’s worth their valuable time, money, and shelf space to add it to their inventory. Or a built-in, long-established relationship with buyers at bookstores around the country. Of course, self-published authors don’t have a sales team to advocate for their books. The sales reps will handle most-if not all-of the aforementioned factors with the bookstore buyers, working hard to maximize both the publisher’s and the bookstore’s sales by putting the correct stock of books in the correct stores. They are responsible for convincing bookstores to invest in quantities of the publisher’s upcoming books. One of the primary responsibilities for the reps on those sales teams is to…well, sell their books. If you’re familiar with some of the major differences between traditional publishing and self-publishing, you might recall that traditional publishing companies have sales teams. The bookstore needs to know that they won’t be responsible for eating the cost of those unsold books and that the publisher will accept the books as a return and refund or credit them for the cost. Let’s say a bookstore orders ten copies of an upcoming release, but they only sell four in the year before the paperback edition comes out. They’ll also consider what the return value of a book is. Wholesale pricing is how bookstores make a profit on the books they sell, and why you rarely see a discount higher than 30% on a book. What kind of discount is the publisher offering? The wholesale price of a book is usually 40 to 50% off the list price of a book. There are practical factors to consider, too. Factors like what kind of marketing strategy the publishing company has in place to support the promotion of the book-will they be doing a lot of advertising for it, what are the chances it becomes popular or hits the bestseller list? Will the author be doing any major media promotion, is Netflix optioning the rights for a series, or has Book Twitter started hyping it up? But some factors have little to do with the content of the books. They’ll likely take in mind what genres their customers buy most frequently if the author is an established critical or commercial success or a debut author, and if the book’s topic is timely or trending. There are a lot of factors that go into what books a store will choose to carry. How Do Bookstores Decide What Books To Stock? The store, in turn, will handle the actual sale of the books.īefore you submit your book for an author consignment program, there are a few things you should know and a few questions you should answer to ensure you’re making the right choice for your brand. In this particular case, the author would be responsible for providing copies of their book to the store and doing the bulk of the marketing and promotional work to get readers to visit that store to buy the book. For self-published authors, selling on consignment can be the best (and sometimes only) way to get physical copies of your book on a shelf in a bookstore.
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