1) Scandals is available from Ingram and B&T. No need to deal directly with my legit publisher, Twilight Times Books.

2) I’m a writer with a blog to attend to, and I’d rather not worry about the biz details of buying my own book for resale. Not to mention the disruption to my cash flow.

3) I’d be happy with the store starting out with just a copy or two. We’re not talking about a huge investment. Besides, Scandals got recced by the Washington City Paper, the same one the store carries. Had some copies been on hand at the time of the rec, the store could have moved ‘em.

4) Great point about paid placement. But if people don’t buy Glenn Beck, what’s the point? Oh, how I hate PP! It’s no small reason why the chains are in such trouble.

Thanks,
David

Is your book available from Ingram or Baker & Taylor? If not, that could be a huge part of the problem. Stores like to deal with as few invoices and vendors as possible.

Is your book available through Ingram or Baker & Taylor? If not, that could be a huge part of the problem. If a store orders from them, they have one invoice and one vendor to deal with. If they start ordering from this one, that one, and the other one, their costs go way up. Sad but true.

I think it goes to companies unwilling to stock and sell what their customers want. Add in companies playing dominance games with publishers and writers. Chains run out of head office are unable to know customers wants/needs in all geographical areas.

Being unable to sell through bookshops was one of the things that you took into account when you decided to sign up with this publisher, but if things have changed and it has now become a problem for you then you can plug the gap yourself.

Buy 50 books from your publisher at a good discount, and sell them to the bookshops at a slightly less good discount on a sale-or-return basis. (Your contract probably won’t provide for much in the way of author discounts, but no publisher will refuse a reasonable deal if you wave money in their face).

Everyone benefits: the bookshop and the publisher, through increased turnover; and you, both from increased royalties and from the extra money you make by selling at a lower discount than the one you buy at.

What you are making money from is your superior knowledge of risk: the bookshop doesn’t know your book, the publisher doesn’t know your bookshop’s clientèle, but you know both.

About 40 percent of the displays in any Barnes & Noble store are dictated by the home office, with 60 percent reflecting the insights and imagination of the store manager, said Stephen Riggio, chief executive officer of the company. …

Judy Smith (former worker said) “That’s bunk.” Instead, she said, “Every table, every end cap, every window, every stepladder is planned” …

The modern co-op system includes product-placement fees paid by publishers for prominent displays of books.

David Rothman did not mention Barnes & Noble specifically. The system of paid product placement is used at many stores.

Regarding why your great novel has a hard time hitting bookstores – I’d guess the POD issue. At my local bookstore (part of a very large chain) is always hesitant to order books that POD, even when customers request them. Why?

As you said, a lot of issues with the stores being able to return books. A very large part of what bookstores order is based on the ability to return the book if it doesn’t sell.

But another reason is because this bookstore has had a horrible time just trying to get the books shipped from the POD company! Often, it will take weeks for a POD book to arrive at the store, if the order is even filled at all. That’s right, a large percentage of POD books ordered by the bookstore appear to be ignored by the printer!

All this leads bookstore employees to discourage customers from ordering POD books. They always point them to the POD website to order directly through the POD company.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big advocate for POD books because it eliminates the waste of a large print run where a lot of the books might not sell. Unfortunately, large chain bookstores are very biased against anything that doesn’t come from one of the large publishing houses. Sad but true.

On a side note, my local store is in a fairly conservative area but they still stock a good mix of books on both sides of the political spectrum. However, they still have problems with customers turning all the books favorable to President Obama around so the back of the book is facing out. Petty and childish? Yes, very much so.

Unfortunately even savvy English majors are unlikely to have a book-reading horizon that extends back more than three or four years. Thanks to the Internet those of us who love older books no longer have to put up with the retailers’ attempts to push profitable new books at the expense of interesting old ones. The result is the same as what’s currently happening on broadcast television: an increasingly hysterical focus on mass-market sales to milk the increasingly smaller numbers of less-discriminating (i.e. Internet-illiterate) customers. Soon the average local bookstore will contain nothing but celebrity biographies and the latest blockbuster novels.