“I want my book in retail outlets, but I’m not willing to take a chance on returns,” says an author to me at a book fair a few weekends ago.
Insert the crickets chirping here.
Now, insert my jaw dropping.
The statement from the author was said to be after I explained a new program, Coffee&Books, which works with regional coffee chains and places eight titles for sale in these chains for 60 day periods. Books that get into the stores (currently we have one partner with 60+ stores participating), need to supply 300 books (about 5 per store). These 60 stores collectively get about 66,000 visitors a day. That’s 66,000 people (a DAY!) , who have eight books to look at while they wait to buy their coffee. There are only 40 spots collectively for an entire year, 20 of which go to traditional publishers and 20 to self-published titles.
If you want to be in the game, you need to play by same rules that the big boys do. Yeah, it sucks to have to print up 300 books and not know whether they will sell. But, if you want a shot at retail, you’re going to have to roll the dice and accept returns as part of life being a big-boy or big-girl author. Until the rules change (which doesn’t seem to be happening anytime soon), authors need to either step it up or lose their opportunities to other authors who are hungrier and want it more.
Whether it’s Coffee&Books or some other opportunity for real, bricks-and-mortar exposure, it’s one of those moments in your book’s marketing life, where you have to decide whether you want to make your own luck or just rely on a wing and a prayer. If you want to be discovered, but don’t want to spend any money to print some copies of your book, so that it might have a chance at being noticed, what’s the point?
