My Local Bookstore

Last Wednesday I delivered the first order of “An Island Between Two Shores” to my local independent bookstore. It has been available on Amazon as an eBook for six months and several thousand copies have been downloaded. However, I’m old school enough to feel that until a book is available in print at my local bookstore it doesn’t feel like it has really been published.

Those dozen books sat in a box in the backseat of my car. My two dogs smelled them and were alert when we drove up the alley behind the bookstore and pressed the buzzer at the freight door. The invoice was for barely a $100 and I was more excited than if I was delivering a $5,000 order. I worked for enough years in publishing to know that you lose money delivering small orders. We used to wait until there were enough small local orders to justify a “milk run.” But in the new publishing world we handle small print runs and deliver even tinier orders.

I then went home and ordered another 100 copies from my Print on Demand supplier. With freight it costs under $4 for each book and takes about two weeks to receive them. Ten years ago it was common for me to order 7,000-10,000 books for an average print run and we usually had hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of inventory at any one time. The printing, warehousing and managing this inventory was deceptively high and the risks were enormous.

I appreciate the lack of stress there is in the modern publishing workflow. If you make a production error or editing mistake you fix it in the next hundred copy printing. If you want to market your book you chat on Twitter, Facebook or promote the book on a host of book sites. These efforts can get astonishingly high levels of discussion and increase a books discoverability enormously.

Modern publishing offers independent writers and small publishers great opportunities. However, if you’re not entrepreneurial or web savvy you have a distinct disadvantage. These days there is a suite of skills required to succeed and producing a well crafted book is simply not enough.