I’m still catching up with my contacts made from the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. I had to manually make a few credit card charges. My new Intuit card reader quit working and the backup I brought with me would not work, either. Bummer. I have had a merchant account system connected to my website for years and I can fill out credit card forms when I sell books out in public and charge the customer’s card manually when I get home. So that’s what I had to do.
If you don’t have the ability to take credit cards and if you want to sell books, you really should get a system either through Intuit, Paypal or some other company. You want to accept every form of payment or you will miss sales.
Some authors balk at having their books at amazon.com because they make little or no money through Amazon sales. I maintain that it is important to have your book available everywhere. Amazon is often the first place someone is going to look for a book and if it isn’t there, you could miss sales. It could be that someone will browse through Amazon to locate books on a particular topic. If your book is there, they might see it. Perhaps they won’t buy it on the spot. But then they might read a review of your book someplace and notice it again. When they see it at a local book festival, they are apt to buy it then—why? Because they are familiar with it. It is familiar to them. It often takes a potential customer seeing a book (or another product) numerous times before they make the decision to purchase it.
I had someone ask me this morning how to sell books to libraries. Here was my response:
“Is yours a book that libraries would want? They do love reference books, for example. And they want books that are sturdy—have a spine, etc. I guess the best way to get noticed by librarians is to consider soliciting a review in Library Journal. Here is a link that might help: http://reviews.libraryjournal.com/?ref=menu
Use a library directory to locate and contact libraries individually or library systems.
http://www.librarydir.org
http://www.americanlibrarydirectory.com
http://www.publiclibraries.com
You will also want to have your book distributed by Baker and Taylor. They sell to libraries. http://www.btol.com
Two keys are, a book that fits their requirements and locating contacts to libraries. Offering them a discount doesn’t hurt, either.”
Do you want to know which libraries your books are in?
http://www.worldcat.org
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