Barnes and Noble's Six Book Problem
My neighbor from up the street emailed me last week. He'd walked into my local Barnes and Noble and asked an employee to help him find my books. After all, I live 4 miles from the store and my books are on both the Amazon and iTunes bestseller lists. Of course the employee explained that Barnes and Noble doesn't carry my books in stores but could special order them.
Not wanting to wait, my neighbor contacted me directly and I sold him two full sets of my trilogy. I don't mind BN kicking customers my way. It's happened before and I make more on direct sales. But the incident got me to thinking about the future of my local bookstore.
See, losing a six book sale isn't a big deal. It's maybe a couple of bucks of profit. But when you think about how many self-published books are out there, including the backlists of traditionally published authors, it isn't a stretch to think that this is happening at every store across the country on a regular basis. Add that to the popularity of self-publishing and that many serious readers are now also writers, and you can see how fast a six book problem can become a six hundred thousand book problem.
It would be unrealistic to think that BN would or could carry every title on their shelves. No one expects that. But if it were my business, I would have the community relations person in each store become more involved in reaching out to local authors and writers groups. Barnes and Noble could be more welcoming, maybe developing a process and/or criteria for carrying indie books. Another idea is a local author bookshelf. Or incorporation of POD machines, such as the Espresso book publishing machine.
I sincerely hope my local Barnes and Noble is still there ten years from now. I'm a bookstore person. I enjoy going there and I still occasionally buy hardcover. But I can't help but think that my BN just trained a customer to check Amazon or the author's website first before driving to their store. And, in my opinion, that type of policy has long term and far reaching consequences.
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Oh my gosh, exactly my point. And, they already have community relations managers who schedule school functions and such. It's just bad business.
What's crazy about this is that GP and I as well as other local authors went to an author fair just up the road at a college. Each of us hand sold probably close to 20 books each and that wasn't even to people that we knew!Think if B&N did that and could possibly even sell up to 20 of our books a day? Author Laurie Larsen did an event in Bloomington in which B&N wouldn't carry her books and ended up selling 200 copies by herself.
It's becoming more of a 600 book problem instead of a 6 book problem.
I hardly ever go into B&N because I am a Amazon / Kindle person BUT if they had a section for local authors and had signings, I would go. At least B&N would get me into the store more often and when I am in there, I never leave without buying something.
I am a store person i own a nook but i love books better i can hold them and crinkle the page. My B&N does not have your books the sales lady asked me if i could show her a picture of the book. It makes me sad that an all book store does not have your books in store.
That is the exact reason why many "brick and mortar" stores are failing and closing. We have lost almost every major chain bookstore here in my area of N. Seattle. I stopped buying there many years ago due to their prices. I do miss being able to run in and pick up that book I just could not wait for...or the browsing ability (the same thrill the library held for me as a child) but at the same time, that doesn't make the store any $$ either. I've been an Amazon customer since Amazon started shipping books...and I'm a 3x Kindle owner raising my own little bookworms. Digital books are the way of the book world now - which is good, but sad at the same time. Good because I have read dozens of books I would never have discovered if I did not own a Kindle - self-published authors, or books that just are outside my normal genre. I feel sorry for the brick and mortar stores, but at the same time I think they were slow to realize the impact of e-commerce stores and digital books - and now they are paying the price!
I can add a similar experience (and another thing a B&N Community Relations person should do) with my father-in-law in New Jersey. He is a daily visitor to his local Barnes & Noble and each time I release a novel, he asks if they can carry it in the store.
He's explained to them that all three of my novels are #1 Amazon-Bestselling Geopolitical Thrillers (a point I told my f-i-l may be the reason why they won't ever carry my novels) and that between him, his family, friends, and coworkers, they would probably sell up to 50 copies of each of my novels, just from his word of mouth alone. Each time he asks, they do exactly what you said in your article - turning him away.
End result: he points everyone he knows to Amazon, even though he continues to frequent that B&N location virtually every day. Now I write at least two novels a year and expect to up that to three. If my f-i-l's estimate is correct, that means they would be selling 100 to 150 of my novels per year. Perhaps not bestseller by B&N standards but not bad for a single store. Multiply that into your equation and ... boy oh boy, they're not just missing the boat, they're missing the ocean it sails on. And all for not employing one Community Relations Manager with an aggressive mandate.
The ironic thing is ... up until I began writing novels myself a few years ago, I was a lifelong buyer from B&N. Like you, I too loved the experience.
B&N should consider this: taking your six-book example and adding in my 50-book per, word-of-mouth example, it wouldn't cost B&N so much to dedicate perhaps one small area of each store to local authors and popular indie authors (popular could simply be defined as authors/novels asked for by regular customers).
Seems like we're doing the thinking for them.
Continued success,
GdeM