“How do I get my book in your store?”
by Chris Steib, Owner of Transom Bookshop
Every few days, an author will inquire (in person, online, over the phone, via social media) about Transom Bookshop stocking their book. Admittedly, it would be much easier for me to just ignore these requests, but I have a lot of empathy for writers and immense gratitude for their work. And it’s my job to consider the possibility that an unknown book could be brilliant and/or best-selling, and it would be foolish to outright turn down every request.
But I do have to turn down some, if not most. Hence this article, which is my attempt at a candid but compassionate answer to The Question: how do I get my book in your store?
Contents
Prologue, in which I butter you up before slowly turning your hopes over a spit
The Gist, in which I provide a summary, lest you’re a lazy reader, and a grim lesson in bookstore finances, lest you’re not
No Thank You, in which I keep it real with a few deal-breakers
What Kind of Books I Buy, in which I talk about the kinds of books I buy
Conclusion, in which I say all those things again, but a little differently
A handy, screenshottable, social-sharable punchlist
Prologue
First off, congrats. I mean that. As a three-time failed novelist, I know it’s not easy, and getting published is like: camel, meet eye of needle. Even self-publishing requires editing, typesetting, cover design, yadda yadda yadda.
Secondly, thank you. A bookstore simply can’t exist without all the talented people tirelessly laboring upstream. From the last-mile delivery of my inventory all the way up to the author who put pen to page, and the person in the dedication who inspired them to do so—I’m forever in debt to all of you.
And so here you are, having worked tirelessly for n months or years to produce a book, and now you’re ready for the world to throw open its arms (and eyes) to you.
Unfortunately, the hard part wasn’t over when you wrote “The End.”
So here’s my advice. I’m just one bookshop owner, and I’ve only been around a couple years, but I have road-tested this with writers’ groups and validated it with a few other bookstore owners. I hope you, dear writer, find this advice useful in your journey to bestsellerdom, and I hope we can be on that journey together.
The Gist
No matter what else you take away from this article, remember the cardinal rule of this query:
make it easy for me to sell your book, and it will be easy for me to buy your book.
I know you poured your heart into your book, as I poured mine into this bookshop, but this is not a favor or a community service or an act of love; it’s a financial transaction. I research, pay for, manually receive, and merchandise every book in my shop. And then I cross my fingers that customers will buy it so that I can pay rent and staff (and maybe someday, myself).
I make hundreds of buying decisions each day. Some are easy and high-confidence, like restocking a bestseller. Some are laborious: I read reviews, browse the author’s other work, look up sales for comparable titles before buying it. The latter stresses me out because I until a customer brings that book up to the cashwrap, I have no idea whether it’ll sell.
Pro tip: you want yours to be one of the easy ones.
And so do I! Look, I want to sell dozens—nay, hundreds—of copies of your book. I want you to be wildly successful, and I want to share that triumph with you. So I’m rooting for you, but I need this to work for me, too.
And I’ll tell you what that means, but first, a totally uninspiring exposition about the finances of bookselling:
Because book prices are fixed and my wholesale discount almost never changes, I keep a little less than half of every book sold. It’s even less if you consider the cost of a store-branded bookmark ($0.07), paper bag ($0.35), and credit card fee ($0.15 + 5% per transaction). So on a $10 sale, let’s say I keep about $3.50, on a good day.
To cover rent, utilities, and staff, I need thousands of transactions like that one each month.
Oh, and each of my (roughly) six thousand products needs to sell (roughly) six times each year or it’s not worth keeping in stock. This is what booksellers call “inventory turn,” and we live and die by the formula:
gross profit = (turn) x (inventory) x (price) x (discount)
So if I seem reluctant to take on a book, it’s not because I don’t appreciate you and your hard work—it’s that my frontal lobe is always preoccupied with whether this book will help me stay in business. So how can you convince me that it will?
No Thank You
There are a few things that make stocking your book incredibly difficult, if not outright impossible. Let’s get these out of the way.
Availability: how do I buy this book, and how do I buy more of it once it sells? If your book has to be acquired by some non-traditional means, it’s more work for me to get it. And I’m frankly all stocked up on work, so no thank you.
Wholesale Cost: my average discount is about 45%. If yours is less (aka “short discount”), there’s an opportunity cost. Meaning, if a customer were to buy your $20 book (which I got at 20% off) vs. another $20 book (at my usual 40% off), I just lost out on $4. Do that twenty times and that’s my electric bill for the month. No thank you.
Design: Your book has to fit the design standards of the industry and the aesthetics of my shop. Readers expect a book to have a particular quality and vibe, and the industry (mostly) delivers. Got a poorly designed book cover, sloppy typesetting, cheap paper, or DIY/self-bound book? No thank you.
There are exceptions, of course, but anything that doesn’t consider the above will face strong headwinds. But this is an article about how to make it easy, so let’s talk instead about what I do want.
What Kinds of Books I Buy
It does neither of us any good if I carry your book and it doesn’t sell, so let’s make sure your book belongs in my store at all, that people want to read it, and that we actually want to sell it. The following will help you determine a good “book-store fit.”
I. A Book that Even Belongs Here
It drives me completely bananas when an author walks in the store, takes three deliberate strides from the front door to the cashwrap, and brusquely asks me if I’ll carry their book. (This is usually preceded by “Are you the owner?” which makes me feel like I’m about to be served papers.)
My store is a biscuit shy of 500 square feet—take a lap!
For this part, you need not even break out your magnifying glass: just take a broad look at the sections. You’ll notice I don’t carry any kids’ board books, comic books, Tarot cards, or how-to guides for dummies—so if that’s what you’re selling, no thank you.
But if you think your gothic haunted house novel would tuck nicely into our Horror section, let’s talk.
II. A Book My Customers Want to Read
Of course I don’t love every book in the store. I’ve only read, let’s see…carry the one…generously 10% of my current inventory. But I can speak confidently to almost any book in stock because:
either I or my booksellers have read it
I researched it meticulously before I bought it
it tops the industry sales reports
a trusted customer asked about it, bought it, or recommended it to me
Those data points help me predict with some confidence whether my unique customer base would be interested in a book. That’s good news for you: my research findings are organized tidily on shelves, separated by genre, in alphabetical order by author. How convenient!
So go find your section and look closely at what I carry. You’ll notice that my handful of romance titles are rom-com or fantasy. So if you’re selling some steamy erotica, som Grey-inspired kink, or WWII historical heart-tugger, I’m just not the store for you.
But if you do see more than a few titles on the shelf that are akin to yours (we call these “comps”) or that inspired your writing of the book—or, a long-shot, an author who blurbed your book—well, let’s talk.
III. A Book I’ll Personally Want to Sell
As a sole proprietor, I decide what to buy. Even if it’s a smash-hit national bestseller, or it’s an Oprah Pick, or the author is smart and charming and standing right in front of me with puppy-dog eyes, it doesn’t guarantee I’ll carry the book. Is it because I’m needlessly cruel and drunk on power? Well, yes, obviously—but it’s also because I have to be able to sell a book with confidence.
Many a book sits in my shop unsold although NPR featured it, or Reese Witherspoon picked it, or HBO Max adapted it, or the author (who’s local) signed it, or a committee of Swedes saw it fit to coronate the author with the Nobel Prize. And some books are blockbuster international bestsellers, but I won’t go anywhere near them (hi, BookTok!).
On the contrary, quite a few of my all-time bestsellers have never received an award or a nod from Oprah. Some were only available from a small press or were written by a completely unknown author.
How, then, did those random books become my bookshop’s bestsellers?
We sold them. By hand.
That’s the unique magic of the indie bookshop: customers come here expecting a recommendation that The Almighty Algorithm wouldn’t spit out, or that they won’t see in the window of a Barnes & Noble.
So when talking to a bookseller about your book, find out what they read. Reverse booksell me: ask me what I recommend, what I’ve read recently that I liked, or what my all-time favorites are. Know going into to if the bookseller is your target audience—and if not, know that it’s a tougher sell, and adjust your pitch to account for that.
Conclusion
In case the previous section didn’t make it clear, this is a sales process. I’m sorry, I know, that sucks. You’re a writer, not a salesperson. Or even if you are a salesperson by day, you don’t want to treat your magnum opus as a “product.”
But from a business perspective, it is. Remember: your book would be one of about six thousand products in my store, each of which needs to be sold about six times a year to keep me in business. (If I knew how to make emojis, I would put here: a book, a rollercoaster, a money bag, a poop, and a person shrugging their shoulders.)
The content inside and how much it means to you—and, to an extent, how much it means to me—is a separate, more elusive, harder-to-sell thing. So let’s focus on that selling part: assuming you’ve done your initial “fit assessment” of your book and my shop, here are a few tips on closing the sale:
Have a pitch: an author who can’t explain their book in a pithy, catchy way is dead in the water. Even if your book isn’t pithy and catchy, you still need to get the concept across easily. Here, free-of-charge, are two stock formulas:
(X + Y)
or
(X - Y)
As in: it’s a Franzen family saga plus zombies. Or it’s a Franzen family saga minus the laboriously overwritten descriptions of dinner. There, you at least have my attention.
Know your audience: A book you write for yourself is called a journal. Clearly, you wrote this so that someone else would get something out of it. Who is that someone? what age group? what life experiences do your readers have in common? what else do they read? what do you they do when they’re not reading your book? what do you expect them to take away from your book?
Know your comparable titles: We booksellers can talk at length about a book we’ve read, but customers usually just want a quick rec and be left alone to decide. So a bookseller loves to confidently say, “Oh, if you read X, then you have to read Y.” Or “people who read X really loved Y,” or “Y is a great antidote/counterpoint to X.” Boom! Book sales. Put that magic in a can for me and I’ll buy it all day.
Make it about me: Here’s the rabbit from the hat and the best way to get a bookseller to really listen to your pitch: empathize with the bookseller.
Sure, I want you to empathize with the fact that I’m busy and stressed and I’ve got six events coming up and three people waiting behind you at the register and the kids’ section is teeming with sticky-handed toddlers and where the hell is my latest shipment from Ingram, and good god somebody please get me a coffee.
And I would love for you to empathize that this conversation is potentially uncomfortable for me because as an INFJ I really, honestly don’t like saying no, but for my own emotional and financial well-being I can’t always just say yes.
But that’s asking a lot. To win the sale, just empathize with the job of the bookseller.
Imagine a customer comes in the store, and after we get through the requisite “what have you read lately” questions, they’re steering loosely toward a book like yours. Put yourself in that bookseller’s Doc Martens: what would make your book the one-in-six-thousand recommendation? Make your pitch memorable, brief, and crisp so that it can be repeated by anyone. (Imagine even the customer going on to tell a friend about your book—can they repeat your pitch with confidence?) Gussy this up by making your comp list attractive, relevant, and realistic, so that we can say, “Oh, it’s like Lauren Groff’s style in Kristin Hannah’s historical settings…with zombies.”
If you can do that—if you can help a bookseller recommend your book with confidence—then this is going to be a great relationship, and I look forward to bragging about that time you just waltzed in my shop and handed me your book. After, of course, you looked around the place for a while.
Until then, I wish you the very best of luck.
- how do I get my book in your store? -
The Author’s Punchlist
My book’s wholesale discount is competitive
The store already has a section for my book
They carry other books in my genre or classification
They carry direct comps of my book
My book appeals to this community / customer base
My book aligns with the quality and aesthetics of this store
The bookseller reads books like mine
I have made my book painlessly easy to handsell
“make it easy for me to sell your book,
and it will be easy for me to buy your book”
@transombookshop trnsm.com/blog
PS: If you’re a bookseller and would like to share this or use it on your own website, go for it! No credit needed, but I never mind a shout-out. If you’re an author, editor, or publicist, and would like to share feedback with me on this post, please do so here.
