Wi11 Panelists Weigh in on Working With Self-Published Authors

Bookseller panelists at the Winter Institute 11 education session “Working With Self-Published Authors” on Tuesday, January 26, discussed what their stores have done to create partnerships that benefit both self-published authors and the bookstore’s bottom line.

Authors can pay $75 to get their self-published book on one of Boulder Book Store's main floor displays for two weeks.

The panel, moderated by ABA Membership and Marketing Officer Meg Smith, featured Jane Streeter, owner of The Bookcase in Nottingham, England; Sam Kaas, events coordinator at Village Books in Bellingham, Washington; and Liesl Freudenstein, consignment coordinator and children’s buyer at Boulder Book Store in Boulder, Colorado.

All three booksellers agreed that a store’s relationships with self-published authors can be profitable, but it is hard to measure in dollars and cents. The benefit lies, they agreed, more in improved community engagement, when, for example, local authors bring friends and family to their book events, or when they help create new customers by exhorting others to visit the store and purchase their books.

Streeter said her store became involved with the self-published community because so many local authors were asking what the store could do for them. Over the past five years, The Bookcase has gone from one shelf to one-quarter of the shop dedicated to works by local writers and books about, or that take place in, the local area.

“As you all know, it’s a really difficult balance to strike. Sometimes, if I’m really honest, the quality of the books that are self-published are not exactly those we’d want to put on our shelves, so monitoring that is difficult,” said Streeter. “We want to create a positive feeling between ourselves as booksellers and the self-published author community and to find ways we can help them put their books out there and also make them feel valued by us.”

Each of the three panelists’ stores uses a different model to provide services to self-published authors. Streeter has created a separate website called Nottingham Books, specifically dedicated to books by local authors and about the local area. When self-published authors approach the store, The Bookcase will ask them to supply copies of their books on a full sell-or-return basis. The store gets a 25 percent commission on any sales, but does not charge authors for space in the shop or on the website.

Among the services Streeter offers to self-published authors are a book launch party with wine and cheese; reviews of selected books for the local newspaper; and outreach aimed at connecting local teachers with self-published children’s book authors. A book festival the store hosts in June also allows self-published authors to hold their own speaking events.

“We ask local self-published authors to bring their own guests to the launch party because that means it is their friends and their family, and they will buy copies of the book, so that helps,” Streeter said. “We also think that that is a great opportunity for the shop to become more widely known because some of those people may never have visited our shop before.”

Village Books’ Kaas has been involved with the local self-publishing community, or as he calls them “independently published authors,” since the beginning of the store’s 36-year history. Over the past 10 years, however, the increased ease of publishing through nontraditional means has led to more of a demand for author services at the store.

For books that are printed and ready to go, Kaas said, one of the store’s two consignment coordinators will charge a one-time $25 per-title processing fee to get the book entered into inventory and onto the store’s shelves. Village Books does a standard trade split — authors get 60 percent of the sale — and pays those authors quarterly. The book must sell roughly three times a year in order for the store to continue to carry it.

“For our consignment program to work well, we had to carefully lay out terms and make them consistent, make them professional, and make them fair. We have worked very hard at that and have evolved the program over the years,” Kaas said.

An extra $54 will get authors an event hosted by a staff member with pre-event marketing by Kaas, who added that he tells the authors the fee essentially replaces the traditional co-op fee the store would receive from the publisher. Events are typically a 45-minute talk or reading followed by time for a signing and questions, with book sales at the register.

“We book them just like we would any other author, and like for any other author, we promote their books heavily for about a month before the event,” said Kaas. “I have a large media list that I send out press releases to. We also have a quarterly full-color print magazine that they are placed in, and, of course, their books are featured on in-store displays.”

Kaas has developed a pre-event questionnaire for self-published authors that serves two purposes: It gives him a sense of the kind of promotion authors are willing to realistically do, and it gives authors a sense of what is expected from them.

Village Books has created its own publishing services arm that will, for a fee (starting at $99), guide local authors along their self-publishing journey.

“Authors will come to us with a manuscript and our publishing coordinator, Brendan Clarke, will help them get it formatted and connect them with editors, designers, and proofreaders in town as needed, and then he will ultimately help facilitate the printing,” Kaas said, either through a local printer for smaller runs, or using Ingram Spark’s print-on-demand warehouses, which allows for the book to be available nationally.  

Freudenstein said that Boulder Book Store is approached by many self-published authors from across the country. The store’s basic handling fee for consignment books is $25. The store will initially take five copies of the book and agrees to display it for three months. For a fee of $75, for at least two weeks during that period, Boulder Book Store will feature the book on a main floor display.

For a fee of $125, the book will also be featured in the store’s e-mail newsletter and on the Local Authors page of the store website for at least 60 days. This level also enables people to purchase the book online for the entire time the book is in stock at the store. For a fee of $225, Boulder Book Store will also include a book signing event with two to three other local authors. Each author is expected to bring at least 10 people.

All three panelists agreed that it is important to manage the expectations and aspirations of self-published authors whose books they showcase.

“It’s about being generous with your time and allowing their expectations to be fulfilled,” said Streeter.

To help meet authors’ expectations that their books will get into the hands of readers, Streeter created a special “local authors” promotion. Customers who buy from a table displaying self-published books that the store wholeheartedly recommends are allowed to choose a free book from a bin set up nearby containing lower quality self-published fiction titles (given with the authors’ permission) that have been sitting on their shelves for a while.

Kaas always makes sure that everything in the store’s information packet for authors is also printed on the Village Books website and is easily accessible; there’s a special tab on the site designated for self-published authors.

Throughout Boulder Book Store’s consignment process, Freudenstein tries to emphasize to authors that they need to tell their friends and family their book is available.

“Advertising is really hard,” said Freudenstein. “Authors have to promote themselves, and it is sometimes hard to get that across. There is, I guess, a naiveté sometimes that you are going to have an event and all these people are going to come. The authors may or may not realize that is it is hard to get people to come to an event. So we are trying to scale those expectations back a little bit.”

“I think with the fee-based model we are treating self-published authors’ books the same as every other book in the store in that the book succeeds or fails on its own merit,” Freudenstein added. “We are not calling it out as a self-published book or author. We are putting it right on the exact same shelf right next to a Random House book and if it doesn’t sell, then it doesn’t sell. So it kind of evens the playing field.”

To take a look at the handouts Village Books and Boulder Book Store use in their consignment programs for self-published authors, click here.