Yesterday my local bookseller wrote a note that he was unwilling to work with me through his distributor, Ingram, because he couldn't return unsold books, according to Ingram (one of the biggest distributers). I was appalled because I definitely paid for that service in my original contract with IUniverse.
After a phonecall and email, today I have a note from IU that they had a technical error that created that message, and they are manually trying to change it on all the distributor's lists.
If a bookstore was willing to purchase books through me personally, the discount to them is 40%. Certainly this leaves me with a better profit than the $3 through a distributor. Our local store is willing to do that, and if he can't sell them, he can return them to me. At least there's options!
I have a description of the book that I wrote on Beth's Book Review Blog:
http://bethsbookreviewblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/guest-post-morning-star-author-of.html
It will be fun to see if anything comes of it!
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I'm struggling with the math here... what's your discount per book - and then you have to give a bookstore forty percent - does that leave anything much in the way of profit? I'm guessing, without having the exact figures, that it's going to be less than your royalties, or about the same. But I'm awful at math so I may be totally wrong here!
ReplyDeleteIt's so lucky you found out about this glitch and were able to alert iUniverse to it. If not, you might just never have known why bookstores were not picking it up. Sheesh. iUniverse is good, but not perfect!
Hmm, my comment disappeared! I was just saying an easy way to calculate your profit when selling books at the bookstore (unless you use the freebies!) is this: If you get a fifty percent discount and give the store a forty percent discount, your profit per book will be ten percent of the cover price. A good reason to sell them somewhere other than the bookstore, I guess! PS I read your guest blog at the Beth blog and it's great!
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