Terry Persun, author of numerous technical articles, poetry books and novels, has published a guidebook that will help any of us who are working with small presses, self-publishing or working to support our book even though it is with a big publisher. Here is an excerpt from Guidebook for Working with Small Independent Publishers. For information about Terry Persun, and to read his informative blog visit his website. There is always room for improvement in getting word out about a book. Knowledge of how publishers work, or could work, with distributors and bookstores, online as well as brick and mortar, certainly takes the mystery away and helps me get down to work developing and maintaining these kinds of channels. –Ed.

Excerpt from Guidebook for Working With Small Independent Publishers

Small, independent publishers distribute their books in a variety of ways. Narrow niche publishers have often collected a direct mail list over the years for almost everyone interested in their subject. They may not need to go through bookstores, grocery stores, or museum shops. In fact, such places wouldn’t sell their books very well anyway. This is especially true for publishers of books that cover the hard sciences and technical information. There’re a limited number of sales a publisher can expect when publishing books that explain the formulas for plastic materials, for instance. Or, if you’re looking for a specific engineering title on how to apply a certain type of motor to an application, your locally owned and operated bookstore won’t have it on the shelf. But the publisher of that book may have sold a thousand copies to engineers on his or her list, or through magazines that cater to those readers. 

Poetry magazine publishers who branch into publishing chapbooks or books often sell to their own lists. Their sales may be only a few hundred copies, but it’s a steady sell and enough for them to print the next book and the next one. Similarly, the publisher of a line of books on a particular Indian tribe will most likely know its audience. The publisher will be able to reach that audience directly, as well as through a limited number of specialty stores, whether those dealing with Native American books or those associated with museums that highlight items from the particular tribe.

Before I go on, let’s quickly discuss online bookstores as a distribution method. There is no doubt that almost every publisher in the business today, including the ones I mention, are listing their books online so that they might get just one more sale from the book they’re selling. The best use of an online bookstore is when the reader knows what they’re looking for. Many users go to online bookstores as a “destination”. They do very little browsing. Online bookstores are most often used by people who know the title or author of the book they want to read. The point, really, is that you can’t consider an online bookstore as a reliable distribution network. They are, in fact, a bookstore, and even though they warehouse some books, most are acquired through a wholesaler (which I’ll explain in a moment).

How do small presses reach bookstores in order to sell their titles? Many of them don’t, and that’s an issue you need to take up with your publisher. If you believe that distribution through bricks-and-mortar bookstores is important, there are several ways a small press can do that.

Many small publishers produce their own catalog and mail it to bookstores. This is a method that may get your books into some independent bookstores, but seldom works to get books into the chain bookstores. Even the independents must go through extra paperwork every time they work with a small press catalog. And extra paperwork means extra hours at work. The books the small press sells have to fit the independent’s theme – if they have one – in order for them to go through the trouble. For example, an independent bookstore located in a small coastal town may purchase a series of nautical titles from several different small presses. If the books are a popular item, they’ll be glad to do the paperwork. This works particularly well for niche publishers. Another example might be an independent that sells a large number of sports books. They’ll be willing to put in the extra work necessary to acquire a line of, let’s say, baseball books, from a small press.

A lot of independent bookstores, particularly, will purchase from small publishers who are owned and operated locally. These stores are community stores. They know the people in the area and they will work together to help those local publishers and authors. I’ve seen a local author section in many small town stores in particular. Even self-published titles can find their way into these stores.

Even the chain bookstores often provide a way to incorporate books produced by local authors and presses. The managers of chains have a small portion of their budget that allows them to participate in the community by supporting the local businesses and authors. Some are more difficult to get into than others, but it’s always worth trying.

In general, there are two primary methods, though, to sell into bookstores: through the use of either wholesalers or distributors. Wholesalers can be viewed as service providers to bookstores. What they do is get the books from a warehouse to the bookstore for the lowest cost. All the bookstore has to do is order them. So, a small press has to create the demand for the book, then a bookstore will order it through the wholesaler. The wholesaler does not have sales people who create demand for the books in the first place. They are, basically, a warehousing, shipping, and handling outfit.

Small publishers who use wholesalers will produce a catalog, but instead of forcing the bookstore to order directly from them, they’ll list prominently the names of the wholesalers who carry their titles. This makes it easy for the bookstore. They can order through one source. The paperwork is simpler, which means that they’re more likely to order your titles if they see a demand from their audience. The small press still has to create the demand.

Distributors represent the interests of book publishers. Instead of a small press hiring a sales team and marketing staff, and operating its own storage, shipping, and returns warehouse, it can outsource these activities to a book distributor. This doesn’t mean that a small press can sit back and let the distributor do all the work. Let’s face it, a distributor will have thousands of books it’s trying to get off its shelves. The small press you’re publishing with may have only ten books among those thousands.

Once again, the press does have to create demand. What’s good about a distributor is that once demand is created, and books from the small press begin to sell, the distributor will help those books along by talking about them to bookstores. So if you and your small press partner can create enough sales, the distributor becomes more and more interested in helping get those books into more and more stores. Generally speaking, a small, independent press can use all the help they can get, and using a distributor is typically the best method to use at first.