From the Nieman Lab comes a story of a bookstore in Boulder, Colorado that is trying a new distribution model for local authors. In addition to the usual selection of titles from big publishers, the Boulder Book Store offers a series of distribution packages for local authors selling print-on-demand titles on consignment.
Fees range from $25 to stock up to 5 copies of a book at a time through $255 to arrange an in-store reading and signing, as well as mentions in the store’s website and newsletter and other benefits.
And the books are selling. Not flying off the shelves…but sauntering off, steadily. In the first week in March, [store head buyer Arsen Kashkashian] told me, the store sold 75 consignment books — which, given the store’s 40-percent cut of those sales, and the authors’ fees, accounted for 3 percent of the store’s total revenues for the week. Part of that number, Kashkashian believes, is attributable to the authors’ efforts at self-promotion, which amplify the store’s own marketing strategy. “Some are blogging, some are on Twitter, some just trying to get out there by word of mouth,” he notes. “They’re working their networks, whether it’s online or offline. They’re kind of learning how to do it.”
This is exactly the sort of thing that bookstores are going to need to do in order to survive as they face pressure both from online booksellers and from the march of books toward electronic format. Not only is it finding new models of revenue but it is also taking an active role in the community, putting a local face on the book industry and connecting local authors to readers and vice versa.
And it is also giving those self-published authors a better shot at getting more widely known—perhaps helping to counteract that self-publishing stigma Paul mentioned a little while ago.
Will this model proliferate to other local and regional bookstores? It might be worth looking into.
Photo of Boulder Book Store by Jesse Varner used under a Creative Commons license.
When I was overseas, I saw stores do a great job promoting local authors. New Zealand when I was there had some sort of ‘Top 100 New Zealand Books’ promotion where every store had a wall of labelled slots from 1-100 with only those books, and you could get a pamphlet listing them all too. They also had a whole section for NZ authors, and given how tiny most of the bookstores I saw were, that gave local authors a sizeable chunk of the store.
The best promotion I have seen here is the ‘Canada Reads; promotion where the state-funded radio station has several prominent people choose a book and ‘defend’ it, then there is some kind of vote for the winner. I just got a promo code from e-tailer Kobo Books for the ebook version of the winning book. My one annoyance with it is that the winning book was originally a French book and they only seem to be offering the English translation…
I think it’s great that bookstores are opening their doors to small publishers. Not so great is a model where bookstores make money by charging authors rather than through selling books to readers. I’d like to know how much of that 3% is sales and how much is author fees.
Rob Preece
Publisher, http://www.BooksForABuck.com
I’m with Rob. Charging authors to do in-store events? Boo.