bookstores

Quick Link: Book Marketing: How to Get Your Self-published Books into Bookstores

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Quick links, bringing you great articles on writing from all over the web.

Indie publishers in brick and mortar stores? Yep, the post from the Self-Publishing Advice Center is more a cautionary tale of what not to do BUT if you join the Alliance of Independent Authors you also get a free (!) download of their book on how to get your title into stores!

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Book Marketing: How to Get Your Self-published Books into Bookstores

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The latest guidebook for indie authors in ALLi’s Successful Self-publishing Series has been written to answer one of the most frequent questions posed by self-published writers: “How do I get my book stocked in a bookstore?” – and the frequent supplementary query: “Is it even worth trying?”

Although most indie authors make most of their sales online, many writers would love to see their books stocked in bricks-and-mortar stores – the kind where we bought books when we were kids, before Amazon was even a glint in Jeff Bezos’s eye. But many of them fear it can’t be done.

At ALLi, we believe it is possible for indies to work effectively with bookstores, and many of our author members are doing so. We also believe it is the indie’s prerogative to choose whether or not to take that route, and no author should feel a failure if they don’t.

But to make the decision that’s right for you, you owe it to yourself to acquaint yourself with the facts, rather than be deterred by rumours or misinformation.

Read the full post on Self-Publishing Advice Center

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If you liked this article, please share. If you have suggestions for further articles, articles you would like to submit, or just general comments, please contact me at paula@publetariat.com or leave a message below.

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In The News – ‘People are hungry for real bookstores’: Judy Blume on why US indie booksellers are thriving

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In The News – Articles Of Interest For Authors

I am not allowed in a book store by myself. It is a deal I made with my husband, because I can’t be trusted. The problem is that once you get into a book store, it is a very enticing place. So no matter who I take with me, we end up with too many books for my budget’s happiness. Even with my husband! interviews the Judy Blume,  in this Guardian article that also explains part of reasons behind my addiction.

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‘People are hungry for real bookstores’: Judy Blume on why US indie booksellers are thriving

At 78, the multimillion-selling author has begun a new career, opening her own bookshop – and joining a business sector that’s flourishing again in the US

May 20 2016

This is the face I make when I am told the bookstore is closing and I have to go home...
This is the face I make when I am told the bookstore is closing and I have to go home…

She might be a beloved and bestselling author of classic children’s books from Forever to Blubber, but Judy Blume says she wakes up every day “and I look to the sky, and I say, ‘whoever’s up there, I thank you for not having to write today’.”

Blume doesn’t have to write because, at 78, she has embarked on a new career: she’s an independent bookseller. Together with her husband, George Cooper, she has opened a small, nonprofit bookshop in Key West, Florida, where she’s working almost every day. And she’s loving it. She had planned “to take a gap year” after she finished writing and promoting her last novel, In the Unlikely Event. “I was going to relax and read and have this whole time with no pressure. And then bingo – the chance comes along to open a bookshop, and there you go. I guess I like that in my life … To learn something new like this, at 78, makes it all the more exciting.”

Read the full post on The Guardian

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If you liked this article, please share. If you have suggestions for further articles, articles you would like to submit, or just general comments, please contact me at paula@publetariat.com or leave a message below.

Readers to Books/Books to Readers––Part One: How to find Books in the Kindle Store

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This post, by M. Louisa Locke, originally appeared on her site on 11/5/13.

I have spent an enormous amount of time on this blog giving advice to authors on how they can get their books discovered by readers. But the other day, as I read a post by Mike Shatzkin entitled Finding your next book, or the discovery problem and fumed over his statement that looking for books online is more difficult than it is in a bookstore, I had an epiphany. If this man, who spends his life giving publishers advice on how to sell their books, doesn’t know some of the fundamentals of how readers can find books in an online bookstore, why am I assuming that the average reader has any better understanding of how to discover books in the Amazon Kindle Store? Maybe I have been preaching to the wrong group. Maybe, I should be directing my advice to readers, not just writers.

Even though research suggests that nearly half of all books (print, ebook, audiobooks) are bought online, the process of browsing in an online store is still new for most of us and it can be confusing. Except for the very young, most people who buy books are familiar with how to find them in physical bookstores. So I will begin by describing the experience of browsing in a brick and mortar bookstore—say my local Barnes and Noble––and then I will compare that to the experience of shopping online in the Kindle store.

In the process I will demonstrate that all the methods of finding books to read in a physical bookstore (staff recommendations, display tables, and shelves of books organized by broad categories) exist in the online Kindle store. However, in the Kindle store there are a variety of additional methods of finding a new book to read that don’t exist in physical stores, providing the potential for a shopping experience that can be much faster and more productive.

Not surprisingly, for the authors of books, understanding the different methods of discovering books in the Kindle store is the first step to figuring out how best to make sure their books will be discovered by these methods––which is what I will address in Readers to Books/Books to Readers––Part Two.

I will be focusing on browsing (rather than on looking for a specific title or author in either kind of store since this is an entirely different matter and much easier to do.)

 

Finding books in a physical bookstore:

 

Click here to read the rest of the post on M. Louisa Locke’s site, and also see the second installment: Readers to Books/Books to Reader–Part Two: How to Sell Books in the Kindle Store with the Search Bar.