About Buying Books – Mine or Any Other Author’s
In the back of this book, you’ll find ads for my books. They’re linked to Amazon.com because I’m an Amazon.com affiliate.
I would, of course, love to have you buy my books, and the links are there in case you are so thrilled by my writing that you find you must have them the instant you finish reading this book. Or for those of you who live someplace where there are no bookstores.
But, honestly, while I hope you’ll buy my books, I would actually be happier if you didn’t buy them from me.
I can feel the eyebrows lifting. But this is something so important to every author that I feel it deserves space here at the front of the book.
If you like the work an author does, the kindest thing you can do for him and his career (and the possibility that he will be able to afford to keep writing the books you like) is to buy his books from your local bookstore. Even if they aren’t on the shelves there when you go in to look for them.
ESPECIALLY if you don’t find them on the shelves there.
Every author you read, every author you like, is struggling to sell his work against an increasingly hostile computer ordering system that routinely decreases the size of book orders until it has decreased the author right off of the shelves.
This system, called ordering to the net, is wiping out the midlist faster than you can blink, and with it, thousands of writers whose work you have read and loved for years. If you make it into print with a professional publisher, you too will be fighting against this pervasive evil.
It works like this. The chains put in an order for 10 books per store. (That’s pretty high, incidentally, but I’m ever the optimist.) Of those, seven sell, one is read to death in-store and has to be scrapped, and two are still sitting on the shelves.
This is a 70% sell-through, which will have your agent and you and your editor and your publisher dancing in the aisles.
Nobody ever sells through at a hundred percent. 50% is considered acceptable, a 70% sell-through is considered terrific, 80% or better and you might as well be walking on water where you publisher and editor are concerned.
I’ve had a number of books sell through at 70% or better . . . a couple way better.
The sounds of jubilation are spectacular. While they last.
Because then the chains reorder. Logically, if you have a book that sells through at 70%, you will order twice or even three times as many of that author’s next book, because sell-through remains constant. If you sell 70% of ten books, you will sell 70% of twenty books. Independent booksellers know this, and follow it.
Chain stores do not. Chain stores order to the net – that is, they let the computer automatically reorder only the number of books that sold before. Therefore, they will not order twenty copies of your next book. They will not even order ten. They will order . . . seven. Why? Because they sold seven.
And because sell-through remains constant, they will sell roughly five copies of your next book. (70% of seven is four-point-nine, or about five.) And because they only sell five copies of your second title, they will order . . . you guessed it . . . five of your third title.
And because sell-through remains constant, the chains will sell three-and-a half copies of your third book, and will also show a three-book pattern of dwindling sales.
The fact that they and their computerized ordering system caused this pattern will not be brought out in your favor.
The fact that your books are still selling through in great percentages will not be brought out in your favor. Only the fact that the computer has been ordering less and less of your books will ever be considered within the chains. So after three books, all things being equal, you are probably doomed.
The chains won’t order your titles. Your publisher won’t be selling enough of your books to make it worth his while to publish you. And you can go forth to write under a new name, or you can go back to work as whatever you were before.
You as a reader are the key that can break this destructive chain. If you can, buy the books you want locally. Special-order them if they aren’t in stock. Tell the booksellers that these books and this author, whichever books and whichever author it might be, need to be in stock.
This may be futile with chain stores (nothing seems to slow the onslaught of the chains’ computers), but you might be able to get through to someone somewhere.
It cannot hurt to try. Special-ordering the books you want and recommending titles to keep on the shelves will definitely be helpful with independents.
For your consideration of this vital issue, you have my thanks. This is something that you do for me and every other writer like me . . . and it is something you do for yourself, both as a reader who wants to see your favorite writers keep writing, and as a writer who wants to make a living in this tough environment.
Keep writing, keep believing, and never give up on your dreams, Holly Lisle
