Following on from my last post, here are my thoughts on how to go about persuading me to stock your self-published book.  All the opinions expressed are mine – apart from the things that other booksellers, publishers and authors have told me in confidence and names have been changed to protect the guilty.   You know who you are.

Anyhoodle, here we go.  What you, the self-published author, needs to realise is that booksellers like to sell books.  It pays the bills, buys us pizza and wine on a Saturday evening and for our Caribbean holidays.  By and large, if something is hugely popular we have it on the shelf unless we loathe it so much that its mere existence offends us.  Regular readers know who I include in that category.  However, although there are books that we have to stock - if you’re a children’s bookshop you have to have titles such as The Very Hungry Caterpillar and Harry Potter and a smattering of Enid Blyton whether you like them or not – generally speaking at least one of us has to love a book for it to make it to the shelves, or at least see the merit in it even if it doesn’t lift our hearts.  It’s especially important with Young Adult fiction because it’s a harder market for us than say, picture flats. 

And as an independent bookseller we love having books on the shelves that aren’t on special offer in Waterstone’s and which our customers may not have seen before.  When a customer leaves with their purchases telling us that she loves the shop and that we have so many great books you don’t see in other places we get a warm happy glow. 

We get sent lots of proof copies and although sometimes we groan as we see another formulaic offering about teenage vampire romance or trainee wizards or apocalyptic eco-disasters set a couple of decades into the future (you wouldn’t believe how many of those are around at  the moment), we try to read at least some of each of them or we pass them on to a kid of the right age who we know will have an intelligent response to it.

And we’re optimists – you wouldn’t be a bookseller if you weren’t.  You’d be in a profession where you don’t work long hours for lousy pay and your only perks are free books and decidedly average wine at launches.  So we do always approach prospective stock with a open mind, ready and willing to be impressed.  And self-published books aren’t refused on principle; what if your book is fabulous and a buzz builds around it?  Obviously we want to be part of that.

Here therefore are my top tips for self-published authors who would like us to sell their books.

1.  Don’t come into the shop to tell me about your book on a Saturday.  Or two days before Christmas.  Or anytime when you can see that I am up to my eyes in it.  I will be polite but brisk and I’m not going to listen to your pitch.  But do have a pitch; don’t ramble endlessly.  Two sentences should do it.

2.  Don’t tell me that you’re a local author and therefore I should stock your book.  Geography is not a reason for me to love your work.  There are a lot of authors roundabout here and none of the good ones have ever told me that I should stock their work simply because they’re local.  Some of them, even the really famous ones, have been disproportionately excited when they’ve noticed their books on the shelf though, which is kind of endearing.

3.  Do send me a copy of the book with a brief note about yourself.  You don’t need to pitch the book; that’s the job of the back cover blurb.  If your blurb isn’t convincing people that they want to take a look inside then it’s going to be hard work to sell to me let alone customers.  If there are grammatical or punctuation errors on the cover I probably won’t even look inside.

4.  Know the business.  I know it’s a huge learning curve for you but you need to know about discounts and trade terms and wholesalers and distributors and stuff.  We order 99% of our stock either via wholesalers (in our case the lovely people at Gardner’s) or distributors such as Littlehampton, Macmillan or TBS.  A distributor won’t take your book but Gardner’s might and it’s worth asking them to consider taking it on consignment.  Note ‘ask’ not ‘tell’.  That means that I can order it easily without having to call you and wait for you to drop them off.  And don’t whine about the whopping discount they will demand from you.  And don’t tell me that I have to take five or ten copies and that you’re only going to give me a discount of 20% and that they’re on firm sale.  You will need to let me order as many or as few as you like, I will require a discount of at least 40% and the books will be on sale or return.  You might not think that’s fair but that’s how it is. 

5.  Pick up on clues.  I’m actually quite a nice person and I know how much you love your book and how proud of it you are and I don’t want to be rude about your dream.  However, when you ask me what I thought (see the point below for more on that one) and I say something vague about not really being right for our market or whatever, please understand that I am trying to let you down gently.  It’s not my job to tell you that you can’t write for toffee but if you get stroppy with me (and people do) I will be blunt.   

6.  Don’t hassle me.  I have a company to run, I am busy and I have a to be read pile by my bed that rivals one of Waterstone’s 3 for 2 tables.  There’s some fantastic stuff in there that I’m looking forward to reading and some stuff that I think might actually be dross.  Chances are that your self-published book has been put in the ‘probably rubbish’ pile rather than the ‘brilliant – can’t wait’ pile.  I am always going to want to settle down with a proof of one of say Canongate or Bloomsbury’s forthcoming titles than start ploughing through the ‘probably rubbish ‘ pile.  But I will read it and if I like it I’ll be in touch.  If it was grim then I might just chuck it in the recycling.  Either way, if you don’t hear from me, take that as a hint.  Emailing to ask what I thought is also hugely preferable to ringing me or rocking up at the shop.  If I didn’t like the book then the latter two put me on the spot a bit and I would rather tell you the bad news by email rather than face to face.  You’ll look downcast and I’ll feel as though I’ve kicked a puppy and that’s not nice for either of us.

7.  Once your book is on our shelves, don’t keep coming in to see how it’s getting on.  If it hasn’t sold you’ll be depressed and I’ll feel guilty that you’re depressed about it.  But do send people in to buy it from us because the more we sell the more likely we are to want to stock your next book.  And don’t even think about sneaking in and turning it face out on the shelf.  We notice these things and it makes us cross.

8.  Love your local bookshop.  Don’t do all your shopping on Amazon or wherever and then try to play up the fact that you love our shop so much and you’ve published a book that you think I should stock.  If you use us now and again and are friendly and chatty then when you tell me about your book I’m already predisposed to give it a go and I’m also likely to take the time to give you constructive feedback rather than a blunt ‘no thanks’.

9.  Be nice to all of us who work here.  Don’t just ask to see Gill or Malcolm or I and be dismissive of other members of staff.  Everyone here knows about books, everyone here will be selling your book and I don’t like people being rude or off-hand to my staff.  If you want to be really nice bring cake.  Or wine.  Or chocolate.  It won’t make us more likely to stock your book but it will cheer us up while we read it.

10.  And when you make it big, remember the people at the independent bookshops who championed your work.  They are the people who made sure that the big old world out there actually read your book by actually putting it into people’s hands and telling them how good it was.

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