Why authors need book stores

As blog post headlines go this has to be one of the most stupid of the lot, doesn’t it? Authors need book stores because they sell, er, books. It’s like asking why haemophiliacs need blood banks. And yet, and yet…

Believe it or not – and those of you outside the lunatic asylum that goes by the name of the publishing industry may find it utterly incredible – there’s a growing feeling in parts of this business that visits by writers to book stores make no sense at all. The reasoning runs something like this….

• From a publisher’s point of view book tours are horribly expensive. You have to put your people in fancy hotels, have them met at airports, ferry them around in limos, feed them, pamper their (on occasion extravagant) whims
• No one turns up much for book store events these days, even for big name authors sometimes
• The world is going digital. Pretty soon most people will be buying books online and getting them delivered through the post, or buying ebooks and skipping paper altogether.

Put that way and it starts to make a little sense. The expense side of things is real, and not helped in the US by the fact publishers never seem to do things economically (this is the ‘don’t hire a cab when a limo will do’ rule). The logical answer – agree a tour budget with the author then let him or her spend the money, or not, as required – never seems to be on the table. And besides, much of this is increasingly irrelevant. Marketing and publicity budgets which have been steadily diminished over the years are now being devastated as part of the current round of cutbacks. The reality is that, for most of us, marketing has been devolved down from the publisher to the author. If you want to do it, fine, but you’re on your own.

To which I can only say: great. The two-week tour I just did in the US was run on that basis. I organised it, paid for it, chose the independent stores I visited based on feedback from fellow authors, and decided where I stayed and how I got around. It was, for the most part, enormous fun. But was it worth it? What, to use a business expression, did it represent in terms of return on investment?

OK, hands up. I honestly don’t know. Nor do I much care. I’m a UK author who visits the US once or twice the year usually. It’s not my principal book market, or even my second largest one at the moment. But it’s important, and it’s a place I like, where I have many friends. I’m willing to spend some of my own money trying to build up sales a little in places that matter, which invariably turn out to be the many great independent book stores you find scattered across the US.

People who don’t frequent these stores fail to understand what goes on when they get visited by an author. Here are just a few.

• Staff in the store put a face to a name. If they like you, they tell people. And the people they tell are people who are usually there buying books.
• You get to hear feedback from those in the front line of this business, about your books, about their covers, about your publisher, about how well – or badly – you’re doing
• From a foreigner’s point of view you get a better understanding of a market that’s quite unlike the one back home – and the US market is, as I’ve discussed here before, unique
• You meet a few readers
• You sell a few books

A few? You’re crossing the Atlantic to meet a few people and sell a few books?

Yes, on paper anyway. Book store events don’t attract huge crowds, it’s true. Sometimes you scarcely get a handful. On the rare occasion maybe no one at all except a passing customer who happened in. And in terms of books that cross the counter… not many. But what lots of people, including some in publishing, fail to realise is that the deal is a lot more complicated than that. Many indies have a large and loyal customer base, sometimes extending beyond the US. Their customers trust their opinions. They know that if they ask for a recommendation they’re going to get one based on knowledge, not a flyer from some publisher.

So you end up selling a lot more books than might first appear. Stock for local people who couldn’t make the signing. Stock for mail order customers who’ve placed an order. And just plain stock, books that will be sold because they have a name inside the cover, which gets them better placement within the store and adds something that readers can’t get easily elsewhere. The number of books you actually sell from a signing is several times greater than the number of copies that pass over the table in the store while you’re there.

Visiting book stores is, in short, an investment, both in yourself as a writer and in the store. A mutual act of faith. And it’s one that makes a difference. Need proof? Last week I visited Vroman’s in Pasadena, one of the largest and longest-established book stores in the Los Angeles area. It’s a big, impressive store, one I’d never visited before. I got a nice little crowd of fewer than ten people, some of whom I knew already, personally or through Facebook. I did my little presentation on Dante’s Numbers, chatted to people, signed a handful of copies for them, and then a stack of stock copies, and left.

That was last Wednesday. If you go to the local news site Hometown Pasadena here you can see Vroman’s latest bestseller list. Take a look at hardback fiction and you’ll see I’m in the top ten alongside John Grisham, Walter Mosley and my good friends Denise Hamilton and Jacqueline Winspear. Sure, that’s one store among many, albeit a big and important one. Maybe I won’t be there next week. But I made an impact and my name is now known by people who didn’t know it before. If they like me there’s a back list of seven other books they can buy.

Small stuff? Maybe, but the way the book business is today every sale counts, particularly if it might just generate another down the line. Authors ignore the people who sell their work at their peril. We really should get out more if we want to survive.

Related posts:

1. Authors write books, others sell them
2. Advice for first-time authors
3. Book theft myth No 2: It's about price
4. The case for United Authors
5. The state of the book nation