May 17

What does a book distributor look like?

Distribution, Retail, Sales No Comments »

The ABA (general market booksellers and publishers) has long embraced the distributor as an important way to supply books to the bookstore market. Some of the leading players in this sector include Publisher Group West (PGW), National Book Network (NBN), and MidPoint. Publishers large and small are using these ‘consolidators’ to sell and distribute their books.

Consolidation can eliminate overhead

This phenomenon is increasing for three reasons:

  1. Retailers want to use fewer vendors, not more.
  2. Retailers are free to spend more time with their own customers rather than more time receiving product, paying invoices, and processing returns.
  3. Publishers can consolidate their sales and distribution to drive costs from their own supply chain management.

stock.xchng item 97581645

The CBA (Christian market booksellers and publishers) has been slower to see the benefits of the distributor as a long-term solution although there have been spurts of activity in the past. In more recent years Send The Light/Advocate Distribution Solutions has become an important vendor of this supply chain solution.

Wholesale replenishment business is key to a healthy retail business. Leonard Shatzkin, in his excellent book, The Mathematics of Bookselling (Sun River Press), shares his own research of booksellers who buy into the wholesale replenishment model and see their turns go from two or three times to six or more times per year. The result is a healthier business with more choices for customers, more staff time devoted to helping the customer find what they want/need, and more cash flow.

Shatzkin spends considerable time talking about the importance of inventory and the importance of measuring how quickly a store can turn the inventory dollars on the shelves into cash flow for increased investment opportunities. He says that inventory in the average store represents more than 65% of the store’s investment, or more than four times more than any other investment a store makes. It makes sense to maximize the turns by using the supply chain to do so.

The new paradigm combines wholesale replenishment with publisher distribution. This concept brings the best of both worlds to retail – selection, speed and service – along with discounts and freight options, all combined in an easy, one-source solution. Retailers can conveniently place one order with one supplier, receive one shipment and one invoice, and are provide one address for returns. Retailers can order many types of products including products from the largest publishers in the industry at competitive wholesale discounts along with some products at publisher discounts, while always receiving the maximum discount by publisher or manufacturer. Finally, the entire order combines to give the retailer the best deal on freight and payment terms.

Send The Light (STL) Distribution offers both the wholesale model and the distributor model in one-source to retailers. Some distributors offer only a handful of publishers in one box, which doesn’t allow booksellers to conduct supply-chain management across the wide range of products they need to source. In addition, other wholesalers offer order consolidation, but don’t offer replenishment on the wide range of product that retailers need (i.e., gifts, remainders, homeschool products, etc.). And most wholesalers will go to great lengths to match discounts offered by other wholesalers.

In the end, the difference will be the best combination of selection, service and speed. For authors and publishers, this is an important part of the supply chain management strategy that needs to be deployed to help booksellers be more profitable with your books.

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Jan 26

12 Must Do’s When You Win a Book Award

Authors, publishing No Comments »
  1. Send out a press release announcing that your book has won an award.

    Courtesy iStockphoto.com

  2. Announce the award on all your social media sites (Facebook, Twitter, Linked In, etc.)
  3. Send an email to your existing email subscribers announcing the award.
  4. Add the award information to the book’s website.
  5. Update all the online listings for your book (Amazon.com, BarnesandNoble.com, CBD.com, etc.) to reflect that the book has won a prestigious award.
  6. Add the information to your media kit and update your author biography to state “award-winning author.”
  7. Order the award stickers from the award organization and apply them to your book covers.
  8. When you reprint the book, make sure you incorporate the award symbol on the front cover of your book.
  9. Add the book award announcement to your email signature.
  10. Put the award on your letterhead and business cards.
  11. Notify all the professional organizations that you are a member in.
  12. Hold a celebration party.

Reprinted by permission from the CSPA Circular, the monthly newsletter of Christian Small Publishers Association (www.christianpublishers.net). CSPA represents, promotes, and strengthens small publishers in the Christian marketplace. ©2011 CSPA

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Jan 19

What should I ask when I am hiring a cover designer?

Authors, Design, publishing 1 Comment »

This is a guest post by Charles Brock, an award winning principal/creative director at faceoutstudio. Charles is a proud Okie currently living in Oregon. Most of his life was spent in and around Tulsa, Oklahoma before moving to Bend. He has been designing book covers for the last 14 years since graduating from Oklahoma State University. In his spare time, Charles enjoys photography and spending time with his wife, Kimberly and their Bullmastiff, Zoe.

““You can’t judge a book by its cover.” This tired phrase may be overused, but truthfully, a good cover design is one of the single most important elements of the book package. That being said, a book cover does not sell a book. The sole purpose of a book cover is to quickly grab the attention of the consumer and entice them to pick it up and investigate further. At that point the flap copy and or back cover copy has to do its job and convince the consumer that the content of the book is of interest to them.
So, you’ve finished writing your book and now you need a cover. What is the first step? Research. You should do some research and find an experienced book cover designer. Unfortunately, the best book designers don’t typically show up in a Google search result. One way is to go to the bookstore and find covers you like and see who the designer is. It’s standard practice to have the designer credited on the back flap of jackets or the back cover of paperbacks. What an experienced book designer offers is their knowledge of publishing, genres, sub genres and trends. This is invaluable when trying to communicate to the right audience for your book, especially if it is a niche book.

Once you‘ve identified options for cover designers, how do you pick just one? First and foremost ask to see the designer’s book portfolio. The proof is in the work. When looking at the designer’s cover portfolio, be critical. How do the covers stack up to what you see in the bookstores? Unfortunately, the quality of most self-published book covers is not great. So, look beyond the world of self-publishing. Millions of books are published every year and your book is competing with all those for the attention and money of the consumer. You don’t want a poor quality cover to put you at a disadvantage.

Another important aspect to consider when selecting an artist is the designer’s process. Ask them how they work. A good designer will want as much information as possible about your book and your audience. If it’s a work of fiction, it would be helpful if the designer was available to read it. This is not as important with non-fiction books as long as there is an in-depth summary in the brief. The more questions the designer asks you about your book, the more it shows their commitment to delivering an appropriate design for the message and the audience of your work. Will the designer share ideas or rough sketches before delivering a finalized presentation? A few well thought out ideas are much better than a bunch of options that are off the mark.

Cost. Not fun but necessary. Most experienced book designers will not be on the low end of the price range. If someone is quoting you $150 for a cover, be very suspicious of the quality of the work. When discussing price with a designer ask what is included in the price. How many options or “comps” are included? How many revisions are included? Does that include the full design and print ready mechanical? Does that include “art” costs, i.e. photography, illustrations? What is the time frame? Typical turnaround for a cover presentation is two weeks. If you need something sooner than that, expect a higher cost. If the cost is too high you could try to negotiate fewer options or comps.

You’ve spent a lot of time and hard work writing your book. Give it the cover it deserves. Don’t go with the cheapest option. Find an experienced designer that will be dedicated to giving your book the cover it deserves.”

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Jan 17

Whoever said the world is getting smaller, was being enormously understated.

Distribution, Printing, publishing No Comments »

This is a guest post from Chaz Nichols, the Director of Business Development and Alliances with Snowfall Press. Chaz works extensively with our print network, especially helping international printers who are interested in plugging into the Snowfall operating system.

Publishing, as we have known it, has changed forever. And it has changed in astonishing ways, at an astonishing fast pace. The changes are huge, dynamic. But, ironically, these grand changes are best highlighted by how globally small the industry has become. In fact, the phrase, “it’s a small world,” has become a colossal understatement.

Courtesy iStockphoto.com

A theological professor logs into a global network, uploads the PDF of her book, and with a few key strokes starts a single copy printing on a press miles away. In a few minutes, once printed and trimmed, the book will be shipped directly to a friend for review.

A small, growing publisher is keeping its spending low and cash flow healthy using a virtual book inventory model. Books are printed, one at a time, as they are sold. Once printed the books are then shipped directly from the printer to the end-user customer. This model has given the publisher the financial strength to find profitable target markets outside of its own country – further expanding its cash flow and revenue base.

An entrepreneurial American, seeking to reach the Russian market in Northern California, logs on one night to a global print network, finds his uploaded books and initiates a print run of 50 books. By noon the next day they will be in a Mendocino bookstore ready to be purchased.

Another enterprising person, wanting to build a library of literature for a unique people group, writes all of the literature on their computer and air expresses the data to a friend – who then uploads the copy to a book printing network. In a few weeks the perfect bound books are flown back. The turnaround only took weeks rather than months.

There are two common threads of all these stories. The first is that none of the stories took place in the United States or Europe.

The seminary professor is from Colombo, Sri Lanka. The publisher is located in a Former Soviet Union (FSU) country. The entrepreneurial American is working in a closed country in the middle of Asia.

And the enterprising person is actually a missionary in Papua New Guinea. He is in the jungle most of the year and rarely gets to any location that could rationally be called civilization. By using a high frequency radio signal, he can email his desires for books to a friend and then send a memory stick to his friend when a supply helicopter lands in his village every so often. The friend can then make a PDF of the content on the memory stick, upload it to a global network and have the book printed and shipped back in a relatively short amount of time. Where there were once very few books in the tribal languages of the people this missionary serves, there is now a growing supply of literature.

The second common thread to these stories is that all these people are publishers…publishing in an astonishingly small world now…but in really big ways. The technology is so sophisticated now that it has become simple enough to be embraced by anyone with access to the internet.

And the really amazing aspect of the new publishing world is that the professor in Sri Lanka, the growing publisher in FSU country, the entrepreneur in Asia, the missionary in Papua New Guinea have equal, and in some cases better, access to printing globally than people in more developed parts of the world.

With distance measured by the speed it takes for an electronic file to traverse the internet, the world, and the publishing industry, has become very small.

What other ways can print networks be used to bring content to new readers around the world?

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Sep 21

Our retail adventure

Sales No Comments »

We have moved into the second week of our most recent adventure – Christian retailing! In August, we finalized a partnership with a company in Tennessee,  to operate two temporary book events in the SW suburbs of Minneapolis, called the $5 Christian Book Sale.

St Louis Park

Fortunately, we had some retail ownership experience, and so many of the business licenses, and other fun details were familiar. Our first shipment of product arrived on September 7, and we were open for business in the first store (Eden Prairie) on September 11.

Having been in Christian publishing for 15 years, and having traveled the world to visit hundreds of Christian bookstores, I had a pretty good idea of what I was getting into, and both Christen and I were excited to be able to share great quality resources at bargain prices with our community. So far, that is exactly what we are doing, and the response has been wonderful.
The bookstores are not called the $5 Christian Book Sales for no reason. Our marketing boasts that the stores carry (more or less) 20,000 books at $5 or less. Bibles and reference books are sold at 30% off and we even have some nice gift items to round out the inventory.

So, for the next 90+ days, we will be sharing Christ, one book at a time with the Southwest metro area. Come on by and check us out if you are in the area.

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