The Tears and Triumphs of a New Author Chapter 23

Chapter 23



We had made stops at two large Barnes & Noble stores in our area. Even though 'Lady Justice' was available online at Amazon.com and Barnes&Noble.com, it was not in the brick and mortar stores.

We kept getting the brush-off from the managers and finally we discovered why.

Evidently, individual Barnes & Noble store managers don't make decisions on which self-published novels to stock. Everything comes from the corporate headquarters in New York.

One kind manager told us to go to the Barnes & Noble website and look for the self-publishing submission section.

We found the site and sure enough, if you were self-published, you were required to send a copy of your book along with other submission requirements, if you wanted your book considered for inclusion in the brick and mortar stores.

So we sent what was requested and actually received a reply that our book was somewhere in the huge stack to be reviewed. They promised to let us know --- some day.

So, if that's how the system works, maybe it's the same for Borders. We went to the Borders website and were shocked to read that Borders will absolutely not stock a self-published book!

HOLY COW!

If you're self-published, you might as well have leprosy, because nobody in main-line publishing wants to have anything to do with you.

It's really sad. How many REALLY great pieces of literature will never see the light of day because they are written by a new author?

So, the big book chains are a long shot. How about the small, independent bookseller?

I found a website for the ABA, American Booksellers Association, comprised of small, independent bookstores.

Like the newspapers, we pulled up the websites of each store, one by one, and state by state.

We had prepared a sales campaign brochure which we emailed to EVERY member of the ABA in ALL fifty states; over four hundred independent bookstores.

We did the same thing as with the newspapers and saved the emails in a special address book for our next attack.

By this time, we were getting feedback from our previous sales. Readers were emailing us, saying how much they enjoyed 'Lady Justice' and were looking forward to the sequel.

Armed with positive reviews, we sent our next barrage of press releases to all the newspapers in Missouri,Kansas, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Arizona, Florida and New York.

We waited two weeks and sent a follow-up solicitation with reader reviews to the 400+ independent bookstores.

We're nothing if not persistent.