Making Special or Non-Traditional Sales.
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he book trade consists of book distributors, book wholesalers and bookstores. There are three types of bookstores: chain stores such as Borders, traditional independent stores and online stores such as Amazon.com.
Publishers call sales outside of the book trade “nontraditional sales” and they set up “special sales” departments to handle them. The regular sales department invoices a few copies of several titles. The special sales department invoices many copies of a single title. The two departments have different discount schedules.
For my first eight years, sales outside of the bookstores were virtually my only sales. I thought I was simply a supplier to the parachute and hang gliding industries. I attended my first book fair in 1977 in Los Angeles and discovered for the first time that it was a “book publisher.”
Author-publishers should remember three guiding principles:
- Write what you love and sell to your colleagues.
- Turn your passion center into your profit center.
- Bookstores are lousy place to sell books.
- Focus the marketing on your non-traditional markets.
Write what you love:
Do not write about a subject just because you know a lot about it.
Think: What do you want to be writing about? What do you want to be thinking about? What do you want to be speaking about? What do you want to be dreaming about? What will make you wake up at four o’clock in the morning so excited that you can’t sleep? That is how to pick your subject.
I turned my avocation (skydiving) into my vocation by writing technical books on parachutes and popular books on skydiving.
Sell to your colleagues:
Focus on specialty stores not bookstores. For example, the largest dealer for my parachute books is a parachute catalog. Book are also sold to skydiving schools, parachute clubs and parachute dealers. These dealers purchase books by the carton, think a 40% discount is wonderful and pay within 30 days. They never return a book. Compare that experience with bookstores.
Today, I have a distributor to handle the book trade so that I may concentrate on my passion center: the user groups.
Focus your promoting on your market:
Pitch people interested in your message. Don’t annoy the rest.
–Review copies and articles. Don’t send review copies or articles to large newspapers. For a nonfiction book, The New York Times is not your audience. Very few of their readers are interested in your subject. Instead, send review copies to specialized magazines and newsletters. For periodicals targeted to your books and subject matter see http://parapublishing.com/sites/para/resources/maillist.cfm
For example, there are 68 parachute magazines and newsletters worldwide. When I sent them review copies of a new book, they all review it. Readers want to know about new informational products. Editors know this and want to share information on new products with them.
–Social networking using social media. Discuss your favorite issue (your book’s subject matter) with your friends on social media such as Forums/listservs, blogs, Facebook and Linked-in. Social networks allow you to find people worldwide who are vitally interested in the subject matter of your book. Through these networks, buyers come to you.
Most nonfiction authors are experts in their field. (Joe Vitale reminds us that the word “authority” contains the word “author.”) But the book industry is new and mysterious to them. While they should learn as much as possible about the book industry they should concentrate their promotional efforts and their marketing in the industry they know best. “Sell to your colleagues.”
