Hi, I’m Dale Beaumont and welcome to get published TV. This is the only dedicated show on the internet to office and inspiring office to write, publish and market their own best selling book.
Now in today’s episode actually in the last episode we were talking about the five biggest reasons of why you should, why you should sell your book in bookstores. And if that kind is bit confusing to you as to why we have say that and watch the last episode then come back and continue watching this episode right now. Because now were going to talk about the five reasons why you should not sell your book in books stores and then were going to have a little conversation either at the end if we got time. Or maybe tomorrow where we’re going to look, we’re going to look at you know making that decision why your not the person who comes in deciding which way to go. All right so the reasons why you should not sell in book stores.
Number one is entirely competitive and it’s also very price sensitive. Now if you’re going to a bookshop and it’s a neat of bookshop you know look at any section and there are hundreds if not sometimes thousands of books and it’s very highly competitive and often times you know all we’ve got to really sell your book is just the spike. That’s pretty much it, so it is hard to really stand out, so one of the little tips that you can do is go in and find your book and it is face like that and move some books aside and turn that in face the front.
Your books will sell a lot a quicker and faster if they’re facing out as supposed to facing with their spine counts. Like cover out is what you need to go for that just the sort of a side line point there but it’s very competitive. And unless you go around and turn them all out you’re really—you know you’re going to find it difficult to sell a huge amount of copies unless you have people going into the bookshops specifically to buy your book.
Because they’ve heard it through a friend or they’ve seen you on television, or heard you on radio, seen an article from you, got an email from someone. And that’s why marketing is so important, so—but without any promotion it’s highly competitive and its price sensitive. Meaning that if you’ve got two business books to a lot of people don’t take the time to sit there and read and compare every single line. They’ll look at it, they’ll kind of feel it and if it’s a gift for someone they might want to even read you know the lobe on the back cover they might discover this ones 24.95 this one is 19.95 they don’t just buy this one. So they’re not as interested you know in the quality as they are in the price. So it’s convert price sensitive and so they are for if you being a pricing yourself above other books then you can find that you know you’re not going to make as much sales. So that’s number one.
Number two is you have to give a wide, a large percentage of the recommended retail price that if you sell publish it’s up to 70% that you’re giving away. Because you only going to have to pay your distributor and then the bookshop is going to take all the bookstores going to take they’re money as well. So you were left with about 30% out of which you need to take your expenses, so you maybe left with maybe 10 or 15% of the recommended retail price. Maybe more but that’s been pre-conservative or if you go through a publisher then you’re already going to get you know 10% sometimes even 6 or 7%. So you’re already going to verse small percentage of the recommended retail price that’s because the bookshops had taken the largest chunk, you’re distributor, and publisher is taking another size of all chunks as well.
The third reason is that it typically takes quite a while to get paid, now every country has slightly different rules or you know guide of to how you get paid or when you get paid. But just let you know how my distributor works, because books are normally sold to the bookstores at what’s called the sale or return policies. So that you can sell the book or if they don’t sell it within I think it’s 60 to 90 days they can return it for full credit. Meaning that they don’t actually pay for it, they just get back you know a replacement books. And they can then send it back. So the bookstore can’t actually go with the book distributor or sometimes your book publishing can’t give you a 100% of the revenue because they have to allow for returns. So the way my book distributor works is I think they pay me half of the money. So if they owe me you know a $100.00 they pay me $50.00 in 90 days and then they pay me the other 50% or $50.00 in one year.
So basically what that means is they can be up to a year before you get paid your money from books that are actually sold. So for a lot of people that’s just way too long and they struggle with having enough money to do a second pre-run because the bookstores that print the distributors that demeaning in other 5,000 or 10,000 books because they want to sell them but you haven’t even got paid for the 5 or 10,000 that you’ve already given them. So that can be a really challenge for a lot people say, if you can negotiate a better deal meaning getting more money coming in quicker and fall to us to like maybe 50% in 90 days. And then maybe your other 50% within six months or something along those lines then that can be much, much better.
Now that if you sell publish, if you go through a major publisher then of course you normally get paid in advance which we’ll talk about later on which is a chunk of money out front. Which is basically money that they really paying you out of your future roulettes, so what they basically do is that they pay you maybe 10 grand or 20 grand up front you write the book, you’ve give them the manual script. They do all of their bits and pieces and then in the first $20,000 that you make in roulettes that 10% component goes to the publisher to kind to pay off that advance and then after that only then do you start receiving income. So I mean you’ve got a bigger event then sometimes it can be six months to a year worth of your book being sold before you get back into the black and then you actually start making more profit. So that’s another reason why you have bookstores can actually you know be frustrating to deal with is because that it takes a long time to get paid.
Now before is where I was kind of referring to the books that are sold on a sale or return policy. So what that means is if they don’t sell the books with they’re period of time they can pass them back for a full credit. So you think, “Oh, wow, I just sold 5,000 books this month” no, I mean 5,000 have going into bookstores but you don’t know how many of those are going to come back.
Now if you have a great book and I’m feeling none of them will come back and you sold all 5,000 and you get paid for all 5,000 books and hopefully you will go to the prices and again and then the numbers will grow even beyond. However, I found many cases where by people have sold or they think that they have sold 5,000 books and 3,000 or sometimes 4,000 books come back. Because there was no publicity there was no interest, there was no to hap around the book, no marketing and therefore no one knew about the book and all of it, most of those then came back. So that is a—it’s why it’s very important to make sure that you’re timing of marketing and promotion to heat with that impacts to avoids those returns. Because you can be budgeting for all this money coming in and you find it you know you’re already getting half of that and that can really hurt your business significantly.
The last one that I’m going to share with you right now is that bookstores normally not always but often times give preferential treatment to major publisher. So if you’re actually a self publish offer then sometimes you can actually get pushed to the very side or the very back of the bookshelves. And because why the publishers are the ones that normally pay the bookstores for primary placement. So sometimes, they have boxes where they actually store lots of the books or they pay for advertising with that particular chains magazine. So there for they give those big publishers preferential treatment and sometimes it’s a self publishing you can be you know pushed to the background. That’s have been always the case, I’m obviously big amateur to get a lot of good placements and be just as competitive with major publisher’s books. So there are things that you can do differently but I’m just letting you know here what the restrictions. I hear the challenges now; we need to figure out ways around those so we can position our book in a much better way to have more success.
So now, I’ve given you the protocols why you should sell your book in bookshops and why you should not sell your book in bookshops. Hopefully you’ve got some good value from this particular episode, I’ve got through and I am going to take a big drink of water right now. Because I’ve been talking quite fast and my mouth is trying to catch to up to my brain but please leave us your comments below. Were sharing with you lots of good information so please it’s the way I’m giving it back. Leave us your comments it only has to be short or leave us some question and I would be more than happy to answer it in the future episode of the get published TV this is Dale Beaumont signing off thanks for watching see you next time.
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