Can self-published books be sold in stores?

Most self-publishing Authors publish their books through Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) distribution system—formerly Createspace. KDP claims it can distribute your book to physical bookstores if you choose that option, and that's true, to a degree.

scribemedia.com - How To Get Your Self-Published Book Into Bookstores - Scribe Media

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How Brick-and-Mortar Bookstores Actually Work (And Why They’re So Risky)

1. Wholesale versus retail pricing

When a bookstore sells your book, you split the money from that sale with the bookstore. That’s how bookstores make their money. Let’s say your print book retails for $14.99. That’s the price listed on the cover. If the bookstore gets a 30% wholesale discount, that means they’re paying 30% less than the retail price, or $10.49. When the bookstore sells it, they get to keep the extra $4.50 (30% of $14.99.) You also have to pay for printing and shipping out of your $10.49. That’s about $3.00 to print a 150-page book + $2.25 shipping, so you’ll get to keep around $5.24. Since the bookstore is only making $4.50 per book, they have to sell a LOT of books just to cover their expenses (salaries, rent, electricity, etc.). That’s why book retailers are struggling to stay open—a factor that affects your own risk, as you’ll see in a minute.

2. How and when books get printed

You have to print a lot of copies of your book if you want to be in a lot of stores. That might seem obvious, but it’s a huge downside for most self-publishing Authors. Self-published books are usually sold as print-on-demand, which means that copies of your book aren’t printed until someone actually buys them.

Here’s how it works:

Someone buys your book at the retail price of $14.99 After they sell it, the retailer orders that book from the printer for $10.49 The printer prints and ships the book, keeping $5.25 total You get $5.24 But if you want your book to be in bookstores, that order flips around. Now, bookstores become your customers instead of actual people. And those bookstores order your book BEFORE they sell it, instead of after. Also, because it costs more for books to take up their shelf space, bookstores want a better discount (usually 40%). Here’s how it looks now: The bookstore buys copies of your book at $8.99 each The printer prints and ships the book, keeping $5.25 each You get $3.74 each The store puts those copies on a shelf, hoping they’ll sell IF people buy the book, the bookstore gets $14.99, or $6 more than it paid This doesn’t sound terrible—except that bookstores won’t buy your book in the first place unless they have the right to return it if it doesn’t sell.

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3. What “returnable” really means

Here’s the problem:

If the bookstore doesn’t sell your book—even if that’s because the bookstore went out of business—you have to give them back the $8.99 they paid for every single copy. There’s no way around it. Making your book “returnable” is the only way bookstores will order it for their shelves. And, remember, you didn’t get $8.99 per copy. You got $3.74 per copy. So you’ll owe the bookstore more than 2x what you actually got per book. And it gets worse. If a bookstore returns your books, you only have 2 choices: Pay for shipping and delivery of the books Or tell the bookstore to destroy the books and give them their money back anyway Now, imagine what would happen if bookstores across the country all returned your book at the same time (like because of a pandemic).

You would owe $8.99 per book—for potentially thousands of books.

If you wanted those books back, you’d also have to pay for shipping on thousands of books and then find a way to store them.

You can see why I said this can bankrupt a self-publishing Author.

In fact, I personally know Authors who were trying to get their books into bookstores and failed. But they ended up extremely grateful that they did. Their books were only in a handful of stores when the pandemic hit, so they only lost something like $50 when those stores shut down and returned all their inventory. But bookstores were already struggling before the pandemic, and today, they have less foot traffic than ever. If even a small chain goes under, it can cost you thousands. The risk of mass returns is by far the biggest risk of being in brick-and-mortar bookstores, but there are other aspects of bookstore sales that you should be aware of too.

4. Distributing your book through Ingram

Most self-publishing Authors publish their books through Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) distribution system—formerly Createspace. KDP claims it can distribute your book to physical bookstores if you choose that option, and that’s true, to a degree. But VERY few bookstores will order your physical book through KDP for its physical shelves because the KDP system won’t let you make your books returnable. Why? Because Amazon doesn’t want to end up in the situation I just described.

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It doesn’t want to eat all those returns, and it doesn’t want to tell its KDP Authors that they have to eat those returns. Amazon isn’t going to put itself in that situation. So if you want your book to be in physical stores, you’ll have to distribute your print book through IngramSpark.

And the IngramSpark dashboard is a lot more complicated than Amazon’s KDP.

5. The reality of wholesale discounts

Here’s the good news: if you want your print book to be in ONLINE retailers (Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Walmart, etc.), you can set the Ingram discount as low as 30%. Ingram keeps 15% for shipping, and bookstores get 15% when they sell your book (and you still pay for printing). For a book that retails at $14.99, you’d get to keep about $7.49 per book. But that doesn’t work if you want your print book to take up shelf space in physical stores. For that, you need to give retailers a 40% discount—which means you have to set your Ingram discount at 55% (because of the 15% Ingram keeps for shipping).

And you can’t pick and choose between online catalogs and stores.

In other words, you have to set that discount to 55% everywhere, so you only get $3.74 per book—even for the books that sell online. In other words, you’re leaving money on the table with every online sale.

6. Bookstores won’t sell your book for you

Based on those numbers, you have to give up about half of your revenue per online sale if you want your book to be in stores. So you’d have to sell just as many EXTRA copies in physical stores simply to break even. That’s not very likely, not only because physical stores are seeing less foot traffic, but also because of this simple fact:

Bookstores won’t sell your book for you.

Putting your book on a bookstore shelf does NOT mean it will sell. Bookstores give high-traffic placements and prominent endcaps to national bestsellers and established bestselling Authors.

scribemedia.com - How To Get Your Self-Published Book Into Bookstores - Scribe Media

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