this…this is meaningful…
Author Kristin Kathryn Rusch writes about a major change in book distribution and what it potentially means for writers.
It’s a really long article. It’s really worth reading. The *exceedingly* short take-away of it is that you may soon be seeing copies of NO DOMINION on bookstore shelves near you…
(x-posted from The Essential Kit)
TL;DR: Baker & Taylor and Ingrams have both removed the self-publishing section of their websites/ordering system, so all books are released system-wide, whether self-published or traditionally published.
They are also now offering to select bookstores (good customers who pay bills on time & order a lot) a 45% return on self-published books, rather than the previous 5% or 0% return. Furthermore, a bookstore can return only one book, rather than the 5 that were previously necessary for them to accept a return.
The upshot of this is that books released through Amazon's extended CreateSpace program are beginning to appear system-wide through the book-ordering sysem as soon as they're released, and they may even be turning up on bookstore shelves. I'm not personally familiar enough with how a bookstore finds and determines what books to order to be sure how to get, say, NO DOMINION on their radar, but it appears that it is now possible to get POD indie books into the bookstores.
Now it's a question of figuring out how to inform bookstores they need to be looking for the new CE Murphy (or Harry Connolly) books, apparently.
Another interesting and probably important detail in that blog is that returns, which were steady at 50% or higher for a Very Long Time, dropped by 27% by the end of 2012, which appears to reflect bookstores buying fewer copies and being able to order new ones for swift delivery when the first ones sell. Next week (or soon) she's going to talk about how this affects print runs and a bunch of other things.
I realize that was long for a TL;DR, but it was the best I could do.
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Sorry about that.
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