Book Thread: (03/29/2026) [Sabrina Chase]

The Secrets of Publishing, part 2 : Bookstores and Libraries and Distributors, oh my!

Greetings, O Book Thread! They let me come back. (Actually, the lock on the door of the server room is a little flimsy...)

So how are bookstores picking their books anyways?

Back in the good old days, a bookstore owner or minions would have some vague idea, from recommendations or personal experience, what books were good and could sell. Then the big publishers consolidated, were run by accountants and NOT book lovers, and books became items in a catalog to be ordered like produce by people who voluntarily eat brussel sprouts. And the bookstores were the same. Books were treated as widgets and rather than personal knowledge bookstore owners went with the recommendations from the publishing houses and ordered only from the big distributors. Maybe some smaller publishing houses that are trendy and/or had kompromat on their purchasing department manager.

But what about small, innocent publishers and indie writers? Can they get their books in bookstores?

Yes, but it is non-trivial. First, you have to get your books in the distributor catalogs and it must have a print version, not just ebook. There are two main ones, Ingrams and Baker&Taylor. They charge a fee per book. Also, your book has to have an ISBN (International Standard Book Number) and it can NOT be the one Amazon gave it. [Sidebar: Publishers hate Amazon and so do bookstores. They firmly believe Amazon is stealing all their business. Well, that part is true ... .

Anyway, they refused to let Amazon books sully their premises. So, you have to have your own ISBN. And they cost money.] All of this is annoying but doable, except ... bookstores demand the right of RETURNS.

Bookstores hate risk. And for various stupid historical reasons, they want to return books that don’t sell, but sending books back is expensive, so they would cut off the cover and send THAT back, and “pulp” the rest of the book. Which is why you sometimes see “if you bought this book without a cover it has been stolen”. Now they don’t even want to do the cover. They just want to either dump the book entirely to get their refund. Oh, and they want a huge chunk of the cover price too. You can actually have a negative invoice if there are too many returns. I have books in the catalogs but not a lot of sales to bookstores. A book with no push from publishers (yes they can provide monetary incentives to bookstores to pick their books) means bookstores overlook it. They will of course have Oprah’s picks and a few other celebrity things but the rest is just based on pub listings and push.

Why bother with bookstores then?

Because a big vector for reader discovery is libraries and they also use the distributors. Even librarians with an interest in new books (and indie) don’t have the time or the resources to hunt them down individually. Their purchasing systems, and I actually worked at a company that made that software so I know a good bit about it, require the ISBN at a minimum and often also the distributor catalog or they can’t make a purchase. This is print and ebook, by the way.

And THEN you get the stupid library purchase rules for ebooks. An ebook is just a computer file, so why can’t they just have infinite copies? They don’t want to pay for infinite copies. Some publishing houses had insane rules like making libraires purchase a new license after 6 borrows (as if the file expired). Things have calmed down a bit and you can now allow “library licensing” where they pay a higher per-book price, once, and only allow one borrower at a time. It’s an “evolving situation” as they say at the War Department …. BUT! I am happy to say that without any effort on my part beyond getting in the catalog, my books are showing up in libraries! Including in Dubai. I have no idea who in Dubai asked for my book. I want to know.

Anyway, people who want more than the sample chapter on Amazon will go to the library to see if an author is worth the money, so I want my free ice cream samples out there. But it is annoying.

How can we get good books in bookstores again?

Good question! Going to bookstores and having them order books (in the catalog) that you know or suspect are good. They then know there is customer demand. Also know the tradpub industry is dying but like any ginourmous dinosaur, they die slowly. You won’t get an accurate feel for the book industry from a bookstore. Really and truly, indie by sales (units and dollars) is already doing better than tradpub. Even I, with my very first indie ebook, sold MORE units and got MORE money than the contract I was offered by tradpub. And all the intellectual property rights remain mine. (Bwahahah!)

Publicity remains the real problem. Tradpub doesn’t understand what the market wants either. You may have heard of Brandon Sanderson breaking Kickstarter with his secret book project in 2022. These are books his tradpublisher didn’t want at first, so he published them himself. That Kickstarter raised 41.7 million dollars in DAYS. The most funded project in Kickstarter’s history.

People really do want to read good books. They will pay good money for those books. Tradpub has proven they don’t know what people really want. The tricky thing is, still, connecting the writers to the readers … and nobody has figured that out yet. But we are working on it!

posted by Open Blogger at 09:00 AM

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