From BookstoMarketNow.com:
Calling All Self-Published Authors!
Do you yearn to see your book in book chains, your local independent book store, catalogs and on all of the major book-selling websites beside Amazon.com?
Would you like to be doing 30 or more broadcast and internet radio shows that showcase and promote personal development authors — and then see your sales leap as a result?
Are you too overwhelmed with work, promotion and coaching to launch a social marketing campaign for your book?
Do you have $7500 and want to give up 30% of sales? So it goes. Nobody ever said that distributing to bookstores as a self-publisher is impossible, it just takes a whole lot of money. If you’ve got around $10,000 to spend, you’re in luck. A place like Greenleaf Book Group will want to hear about your aggressive marketing plan and/or publicist. Just having $10,000 on hand isn’t really enough. Basically, it comes down to passing a similar muster with a distributor as it would with a publisher: is your book marketable? Will bookstores want it? Will it sell?
So these are some of the hurdles. I can’t say I’ve personally hired out one of these distributors because I don’t have $10,000 in cash on hand. But once a service lowers its price for bookstore distribution to something more manageable, all bets are off and self-publishing will be no different than traditional publishing. Of course, by that point, ereaders will be so commonplace that mainstream book distribution will no longer be as necessary.
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Isn’t this interesting. Beats ten or more years of wasting time that could be used working at a paying job, trying to find an agent. Surely one’s time is worth at least minmum wage here.
Perhaps someone will discuss how these clever people actually do this. If they can do it for a price and nothing more, assuming they have prior approval for the book, are they not simply uber agents for which one is paying more than years of (assumed) free time?
Has anyone out there actually done this? Talk about finding a need and coming forward to meet it! Please let us know how this turns out in the marketplace.
You’re all picking on the affiliate marketer–not unjustified. We hate ’em all. But you’re missing the bigger picture here, and that is the stores that accept pay-to-stock inventory. That is flat-out lame.
Not to mention the issue of paid placement merchandising! A-W-F-U-L. A big lie that few consumers are aware of when they walk into a bookstore and are steered toward the overpriced, needlessly overproduced hardcovers. Blech.
What a shitty industry. But I’m not at all regretful that I am a writer!