The Business of Bookselling with BrocheAroe

Intro: So far this season, we’ve discussed how to open publisher accounts for ordering directly and the terms and conditions that come with that, and I laid out a typical yearly cycle for placing orders, plus three things you can do to ensure you’re not overwhelming your cashflow by going order crazy – as much as we may want to order all our favorite backlist books and the exciting new frontlist titles coming out soon. 

You may now think you’re ready to start placing orders, and if that’s all you want to know about, I’d skip ahead to the next episode. 

In this episode, I’m going to be covering two more big buying questions that we haven’t discussed yet: 

Welcome to the Business of Bookselling!

Transcript (there may be slight differences between the text posted here and the audio recording):

Maybe it’s just because I’ve always had the pleasure of being a reader – no really, family lore goes that I taught myself how to read at around the age of three because my parents, both of whom worked, couldn’t spend enough time reading to me during the day and would often fall asleep while reading to me at bedtime (I totally get that now, by the way, Mom & Dad.), but apparently I found this so frustrating that I solved the problem by simply teaching myself to read. Considering the fact that we were living in Japan at the time and I was attending Japanese school, but my parents would read to me in English at home, this meant that by the age of five, I spoke and read Japanese but could only read English and barely spoke it, and so when I did start learning English when we moved to the States, I mostly spoke college professor/classic British literature English pronounced in very unique ways and heavily accented, so you can imagine how much fun public grade school in America taking ESL classes in the 90s was for me. Especially considering the bowl cut I had at the time. But I digress.

My point it is, I’ve always been a reader. And I’ve always known my own mind, formed opinions quickly, and rarely have any trouble making decisions. And so in all honesty, the first time I was asked these questions – how do I find out about upcoming titles, and how do I decide what to order – I was really thrown. I thought, if you didn’t know where to find out about books and you didn’t know what books you wanted to order, what were you doing opening an independent bookstore? 

But then I checked that judgy-as-fuck opinion and realized that a) there are many many reasons for people to open community spaces that carry books, and that may not be because they have all the answers to all the details involved, and b) not everyone has been immersed in the book world for what feels like their entire lives, even if they love reading at this particular moment in their lives so much that they want to share it with other people by opening a bookstore. 

Some people didn’t spend lunch breaks in the library in high school and close down the library at 2 am for fun in college. Some people also really struggle to make concrete decisions by their very nature. And some people are very sensitive to wanting to serve their communities and agonize about having the right mix of stories represented on their shelves. Some bookstores are generalist bookstores that want to have a little something for everyone who walks through their doors, and some bookstores have a niche and an “if you build it, they will come” mentality, hoping their audience of readers finds them. 

In that second case scenario, where people are trying to serve specific communities and order certain types of books – whether that’s genre or children’s-only bookstores, or offering books written by queer authors and featuring only queer characters, or written by BIPOC authors and featuring only BIPOC characters, or whether that’s trying to find books in the US that are written in languages other than American English, or whether that’s a vegan bookstores – yes I know of one that exists, they’re called The Locals’ Bookshop and are based in the northeast, and I’m not going to lie, I don’t know all the ins and outs of their business model, but I imagine that there are some specifics like how a book is made in addition to the content of the book that they are going to concern themselves with – all of these types of stores are doing an extra level of curation on their books that generalist bookstores are not doing to the same extent. 

So I’m being vulnerable here and admitting to you all that I was 100% wrong in my thinking the first time I was asked that question. I’m also rarely that judgemental and so my very strong judgment took me by surprise. I had to take a moment to check myself and really think about how to answer. That gave me such an unexpected opportunity to reflect on exactly where we get information about books, and that led to a reflection on what books and authors we’re not hearing about. And I realized, thanks to these very basic and honest questions people have the courage to ask when they’re starting out in this business, that it led me to a greater understanding of the gatekeeping that happens in traditional publishing, a greater awareness of the stories we don’t have widespread access to, and it made me start to go search those out more so that I could actually be more thoughtful about what books I was choosing to read and sell. And this entire experience made me realize that there are two very distinct ways of buying books as a bookseller to resell to their customers. 

One isn’t better than the other, and they can often work hand-in-hand together, but there’s the generalist, more mainstream way I already mentioned, where a store tries to have a little bit of everything or at the very least a little something to offer everyone who visits their store, and there’s the extensively curated, focusing on a specific genre or serving a specific population way.

If you are crunched for time and simply want to start discovering books available for you to sell, open up a web browser, type in Edelweiss+ – that’s literally e-d-e-l-w-e-i-s-s-dot-or-period-p-l-u-s – make a free account, and start exploring this incredibly helpful but admittedly somewhere overwhelming and possibly intimidating book platform that lists publisher catalogs, frontlist and backlist titles, now has general reader communities that create community-sourced booklists for specific topics and genres, and all sorts of other helpful information and resources in a one-stop-shop. 

Edelweiss took the place of physical catalogs for booksellers and librarians about 15/16 years ago. It first appeared a little earlier, but more widespread adoption by publishers and booksellers really started taking place around 2010. When I first started out as a buyer in this industry, pre-2010, my favorite way to prepare for rep appointments would be to take a stack of catalogs and a box of sharpies to a wine and cheese bar or a wine and coffee shop (you may be sensing  a theme) and sit with a glass of wine and some snacks and spend a very pleasant and long evening reviewing catalogs. I would put the quantity of each title I wanted to order next to each listed book, whether I wanted that book for an event or book club or other type of program, the point-of-sale system code that corresponded to the section I wanted to shelve it in (and I did have around 300 of those memorized at one point), and any other notes I needed to make about it, such as local author, or a certain type of representation, or if I wanted it for a holiday or other type of display inclusion I wanted to make sure to flag. 

If I was buying in a larger store, I would then leave the catalogs out for other staff members to look through so that they could add post-it notes of what they were interested in, and then I would go through all of that in 2-to-6 hour appointments per publisher with my publisher reps. Once I had had that appointment, I would then manually add the notes and system codes into the spreadsheet the rep would send me confirming the quantity of books I’d actually ordered, and that whole thing would be uploaded into our point-of-sale inventory management system. 

While I appreciate that Edelweiss has definitely saved time and saved trees – we no longer have all those physically printed catalogs anymore – both of which are great industry updates, I’m not going to lie – I miss the analog catalog method as I simply spend too much time on a screen these days. You can, of course, take your tablet or phone to a wine bar or coffee shop and have a similar experience, but I do warn you that Edelweiss isn’t the most mobile-friendly platform I’ve ever worked with, and also there’s just a different level of color-coding satisfaction that I got from using different colored sharpies and post-it notes that I just don’t get with the online platform these days. BUT those caveats aside, Edelweiss is currently the best, single-location tool for learning about books and creating orders, if you take the time to learn it, so go ahead and get started if that’s all you’re looking for.

And now, if you want to dive deeper into how to find out about and how to choose the right books for your store, keep listening.

First, let me contradict myself by acknowledging that all bookstores, to some extent, do curate the books on their shelves. That’s just simple logic. If you’re a city block size space like Powell’s in Oregon you’re going to have a lot more room for a wide breadth and depth of books than a 180 square foot microstore that simply does not have the room to have on their shelves. And even Powell’s has buyers who curate their selection because we have so many new books from so many publishers coming out every year, and we have backlist books that we’ll want to keep on our shelves year-round, and we’ll have seasonal titles we need to order in for the appropriate holidays and seasonal displays every year. We have book club titles, special program titles, author event books, etc. that we need to order in, and people always want some obscure book from 20 years ago that’s probably out of print but we’ll try to find it for them anyway. Those are the usual things buyers do regardless of what size store you have. But what I mean by mainstream ordering is that there are certain books, thanks to marketing budgets at publishers, that are going to be represented in the general zeitgeist of books.

Books are everywhere these days and that’s honestly wonderful to see! I’m old enough that the two national/celebrity-esque book clubs I remember from my early bookselling days are Oprah’s and Book of the Month. We didn’t have Reese’s and Jenna’s and Jimmy Fallon and Stephen Colbert (RIP to his show) and magazines like Cosmo all highlighting and supporting books. Books weren’t being turned into movies nearly as often, and more mainstream platforms like Wattpad didn’t exist – only LiveJournal, the blogosphere, and fanfic sites, for the average human who thought they had something to say and wanted to share that something with other people who wanted to read it were around when I started selling.

All of this is to say that even in a time when up to 27% of adult Americans read zero books a year and the majority of adult Americans read between 4-to-12 books a year, according to polls by Gallup and Pew Research Center, and despite the very real book bannings and censorship that is happening right now (in 2026 when this is being recorded) books are experiencing a renaissance in popular culture, especially with the rise of the open romance reader, and with the shows to match! As an OG romance reader myself, I can tell you we’re now publishing romance novel content into mainstream traditional publishing that is hitting New York Times bestseller lists that I used to read behind a paywall in the early 2000s. If you know, you know.

Where I’m going with all of this is that while the type of books – more genre fiction – and representation in books – more queer and BIPOC authors and disabled authors and content – has definitely changed and increased – definitely for the better! – there are still lists of books in various ways that are part of the book establishment, and those are the best places to start for considering what books to bring into your shop, simply because you know readers are going to be asking for them!

On a week-by-week basis, national and regional bestseller lists exist to let you and everyone else know what the general reader is buying these days. The New York Times and USA Today are the major national lists, currently, that are supposed to represent all reported books sold across almost all sales channels. The New York Times has a special secret algorithm they use to make their list, while the USA Today list is supposed to be a straight by-the-numbers list reporting. Publishers Weekly also publishes national bestseller lists, and independent bookstores have their own bestseller lists, too, put together by the ABA. The ABA list is made also of a special secret algorithm that weighs different stores in different regions, well, differently, and they also include Bookshop.org sales as one additional number that they add to their algorithm to spit out the bestseller list nationally. They also report weekly regional bestseller lists, and what’s cool about the LA Times bestseller list is that it’s compiled in conjunction with CALIBA, the California Independent Booksellers Alliance, showing just how important indie bookstores’ sales really can be! 

The ABA bestseller lists are made up of ABA member stores self-reporting their sales to the ABA, which is why it’s so important that all member stores do this – if we want that list to be accurate, it’s on us as independent bookstores to report our sales. The ABA does report sales as an aggregate number to the New York Times, but many independent bookstores report their sales to them directly; some independent bookstores also report their sales directly to USA Today, and I believe the ABA may also report aggregate indie sales to USA Today now as well, but that’s changed over the years, so I would double-check that if it’s important to you for some reason. I’ll talk more about why reporting is different and how that impacts a store’s working relationship with publishers at another time, but for now, just know that it’s incredibly important, and in my personal opinion, I consider that one of our business responsibilities. But back to where to find out about books. 

The Wall Street Journal used to have a book bestseller list, believe it or not, but that ended a few years ago; they do, however, still post book reviews in their newspaper and online, and so, of course, do the New York Times with their and USA Today. Some stores do displays that showcase different bestseller lists every week; some stores do displays for books that have received starred or featured reviews in various publications. Book reviews may seem like a dime-a-dozen with every Storygraph and bookstagram/TikToker reviewer out there, but there are some industry publication tastemakers whose reviews are given greater weight in the book community. The big publications I already mentioned top the list, of course, along book industry-facing publications like Publishers Weekly and ShelfAwareness, consumer-facing publications like the LA Review of Books and the Sunday Times Culture Section, but there’s also NPR Book Reviews (NPR also has a yearly Books We Love round-up of, like 350 or more titles during the holiday season every year), the New York Review of Books (which is not the same as book reviews from the New York Times), The New Yorker and The Atlantic, Library Journal and School Library Journal, Kirkus Book Reviews, Booklist, the Horn Book Magazine, Foreword Reviews, and, most important for indie booksellers, there’s our very own industry Indie Next List!

The Indie Next List comes out monthly for adult recommendations and bi-monthly for kids recommendations. They used to have a seasonal book club recommendation list, but that’s stopping in 2026, and they also have a holiday season gift guide. These lists are curated, nominated lists of newly-releasing – so frontlist – titles that have been selected by independent booksellers, covering all genres for adults and picture books through YA for kids. Many stores have an Indie Next List showcase shelf, often right near the staff picks.

In addition to bestseller lists and book reviews – and look, nothing I said earlier was entirely comprehensive, and I hope most of these are still around when you listen to this episode, but you know how things are going in 2026 – but these can be incredibly overwhelming, so I’m giving a taste of where you can go to start finding out about these things – and of course the celebrity book clubs, so many pop-culture sites and publications like People Magazine and Cosmo are increasing their book review sections, so if you’re a pop culture fiend, there are books being recommended to you through those sources.

In addition to all of that, there are also the book award lists. There are, roughly, a trillion book awards out there. Some come, some go. And some are more important than others. But there’s definitely a list of pretty big ones that readers who care about such things pay attention to every year, such as the Pulitzer Prize, the Booker Prize, the National Book Awards, the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Nobel Prize in Literature, and the PEN/Faulkner Award for general categories; the Hugo Awards, Nebula Awards, Edgar Awards, Bram Stoker Awards, and Lambda Literary Awards for genre and queer works. And there are all kinds of specialty prizes for fiction, nonfiction, and/or poetry for adult works: 

For children’s awards, the American Library Association’s Youth Media Awards are the primary awards people pay attention to, such as the Newbery for writing, the Caldecott for illustrations, the Coretta Scott King celebrating African American creators, the Printz for YA, the Pura Belpre Award celebrating Latine creators, the Schneider Award for disability representation, the Stonewall Book Award for queer representation, and the Sydney Taylor Book Award for Jewish representation (and many many more).

Bestseller lists, reviews in newspapers, magazines, and on websites, book award lists, and celebrity book awards – or celebrity favorite lists, such as former President Barack Obama’s yearly favorite reads – are the top suggestions for where to get started for finding out about books that the average reader may be looking for from your bookstore. 

Before I move on, I also want to give major props to the teachers, librarians, other booksellers, nonprofit organizations, and other individuals out there who provide lists of topic-specific recommended titles for all kinds that are diverse, global, inclusive, and representative. Check out the organization We Need Diverse Books, the podcast Minorities in Publishing, the organization and community A Mighty Girl, the organization and community Amy Poehler’s Smart Girls, and Reading Rainbow to name a few, and don’t be afraid to check out your fellow indie booksellers’ themed lists on Bookshop.org, and find social media content creators whose book lists you trust. There is no shame in making use of booklists other people have already put together! Work smarter, not harder.

Now, especially for those of you that are looking for more niche or hyper specific types of books, this is where working with publishers is incredibly important! A publisher rep’s job is to sell you as many of their publishers’ books as possible, of course, but a good publisher rep’s job is to tell you as many books as possible that work for your store. This means it’s up to you to tell your publisher rep what you’re looking for. Your publisher rep should be able to provide you with a list of backlist titles from their publisher that fit your niche; they should also be able to point out the books on each season’s frontlist that work best for your store. Also, if you’re opening a store that has a specific focus, whether that’s a type of identity representation or genre, I have to assume that you’re reading some of those types of books yourself, so take a look at the publisher of those books and go to their website and start poking around. OR – this is where you can now go to Edelweiss yourself and start taking a look at publisher catalogs. 

Most publishers on Edelweiss have more than just one catalog listed. They usually have the upcoming season, current season, and perhaps the last season or two, but they also usually have themed catalogs that, for instance, have all the works in translation or all Spanish language titles or all titles by Black creators, along with title lists for specific holidays, including Chanukah and Ramadan – and if they don’t, ask your rep for them!

While the major publishers are going to be the easiest ones for a lot of people to start with, if you’re looking for a more intensely curated selection and to have an increased representation of books, take a look at the publishers that are part of the Independent Publishers Caucus. This is a group of small and independent presses that are often publishing genre, identity representative, and more politically-minded books. Just remember, some of these presses don’t do their own fulfillment and distribution, so there are is a chance that some of those bigger presses, like Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, and HarperCollins, will distribute the titles of these smaller and independent presses, so make sure to take a look at the distribution client catalogs on Edelweiss. Also take a look at the list of publishers distributed by Consortium, when searching for books that are more representative, and don’t forget to look at your state or region’s historical presses as well, depending on what type of niche representation you’re going for.

A quick aside here on what could be a much longer conversation at some point – newer booksellers often wonder how they could possibly order in and recommend books to their customers that they haven’t read, and at some point, I’ll probably do an episode on handselling basics – handselling being the art of recommending specific titles to specific customers, or literally selling books by putting them into customer hands with a personalized recommendation. But since that’s not what this episode is about, I will give you a little bit of advice and then one resource. The advice is this – let it go. My apologies if you now have the song from “Frozen” stuck in your head, but there is absolutely no way that you’re going to have time to read everything you sell. You’ll start to develop a feel, an instinct, for what authors sell well in your store, what imprints sell well in your store, what genres or plot themes sell well in your store, but that does all take time. You’ll also start to perfect your own art of handselling, whether that’s quickly scanning the back of the book, or absorbing a recommendation from a co-worker, or seeing that a different favorite author has recommended that particular book and so you can make that connection for the reader. That said, one of my biggest pet peeves is when a customer says, “I’m looking for a birthday present,” and the first follow-up question is, “Is it for a boy or a girl?” The follow up questions should never be about the child’s gender. They should be about interests and reading level! “How old is the child going to be? What does the child like to do for fun? Do you know any other books the child has been reading lately? Do you know if they have a favorite bedtime book? Do they play a sport or an instrument; what are their hobbies; do you know what grade they’re in?” These are all questions you can ask even if someone starts off by saying, “I’m looking for a book for an 8-year-old boy.” I did say this wasn’t an episode about handselling, but I couldn’t help myself there. 

Anyway, while you’re developing that instinct for buying and perfecting the art of handselling, in the meantime, ask your publisher rep for their Edelweiss catalog mark-ups. Mark-ups are basically the personalized, editorialized version of the frontlist catalog for that season that is full of the rep’s own notes about what makes a title special (or not special) and why you should (or shouldn’t) pay attention to it; those are going to be key for making those buying decisions and they often provide nuggets of background and behind-the-scenes information that are handselling gold. You’re going to read the book description, read the catalog mark-up notes, and go with your gut. If your gut is occasionally wrong, that’s a learning moment for next time. While catalog mark-ups are certainly a resource, they’re not the resource I meant earlier.

The resource I want to recommend to you now is for all those booksellers thinking, “I don’t know enough about children’s books. How do I know if I’m bringing in the right books or recommending age-appropriate reading material to my customers?” First, I want to say that at the end of the day, it is up to the child and the parent or guardian of that child to make a decision about what they’re reading. That’s not on you. So while it’s important to have books labeled by section, such as beginning readers, early chapter books, middle grade, and young adult, there’s no need to gatekeep, police, or otherwise censor what a customer of any age has picked up off your shelf. IF a customer comes to you with a question about content or age-appropriate reading level and you don’t know the answer off-hand, the resource I wanted to recommend is called Common Sense Media. This is a nonprofit organization that maintains a website that provides ratings and reviews of media of all kinds geared toward children and families. If you want to know if a book has violent or overt sexual content, swear words, etc., this is a good place to go for that information. 

If I haven’t mentioned this enough, I completely understand how overwhelming this all sounds, and to be honest, this is just the tip of the iceberg. There’s a very real chance that by giving you all of this information, I’ve made decision paralysis worse and not better. I’m going to say something else now that I promise is meant to be encouraging, despite how it might sound at first – it’s really important to remember that your store IS a business and it is in competition with not only other independent bookstores but also all the other retail locations both physically open and online who are selling books to the general consumer. So with that in mind, what’s setting your business apart? 

There’s no wrong answer here, by the way. For some, it may be having shelves that display all the titles reviewed in the establishment review sources such as the New York Times, Atlantic, New Yorker, LA Times, etc. For some, it may be the exact opposite and displaying books that will rarely or never appear in such publications. But owning a bookstore and buying for your bookstore is a constant conversation between the books you want to sell and the books your customers are looking for. It’s something that’s constantly evolving, and you can either build the type of community that engages with you while looking for what you’re offering or you can listen to what your community is asking for and bring in more of their requests. Or both, of course, but the point is, because this is your bookstore, start from a place of what you want to read. Expand upon that by deciding which are your trusted sources for book suggestions that you are going to, well, trust, when adding books to your inventory. Add to that your favorite publishers and look through their frontlist and old backlist catalogs to choose books that fit the mission of your store. Incorporate recommendations and suggestions from your customers. And over time, you’re going to discover newly formed and new-to-you resources for book discovery that will impact your book buying habits. Underlying all of that is the mission of your bookstore and trusting yourself to make book buying decisions based on your own expertise. I can’t wait to hear what inspiring books you’re going to order for your store.

If you have any questions about resources or something I discussed in this episode or something you’d like me to explore in another episode, you can send me an email at [email protected]. Happy bookselling!

Intro: Welcome to the Business of Bookselling! In the first episode of this season, I went over opening a publisher account. And why do most stores open publisher accounts? To place direct orders, of course! So in this episode we’re going to go over ordering schedules and three things to do to make sure you’re making ordering directly from publishers work for your store’s cashflow.

Transcript: My first independent bookstore buyer position was as the children’s department manager for a store that had been newly renovated. My predecessor had been with the store for 20 years, but had retired prior to the renovation, which meant I got to choose all the new children’s books & sidelines – that’s puzzles, toys, stuffed animals, and other gift products – to fit into the newly expanded space, AND I had to learn and then keep up with meeting the expectations of a community who had known the previous buyer for 20 years! Following that, I had the opportunity to be the first general manager for a store that was opening for the first time. I chose their point-of-sale system, created their inventory system from scratch, opened all their brand new publisher accounts, and ordered all of their book inventory for opening day.

At both stores, I also ran the weekly reports for backlist orders, met with reps for seasonal ordering, visited warehouses and met with reps for remainder book ordering, went to national and regional book, toy, and gift conferences and tradeshows to scope out new products, open new accounts, and place orders, placed event and special customer orders, and did yearly inventory and quarterly returns. Both of those stores were large brick-and-mortar enterprises, and so when it came time to open my own novel model store and start opening accounts and ordering books for pop-ups, I knew a lot about where to get started and then learned a lot more about creating new systems and scaling back for a business that wasn’t a brick-and-mortar, large volume location.

This episode is going to talk a lot about standard practices as they were taught to me, but I’ll also discuss some updated methodology and you can form systems for whatever works best for you and your store, which are often dependent on the size of your store, size of your staff, your point-of-sale and inventory management system, available money in the bank, projected budget, cash flow, and any other number of factors that are specific to you and your store.

It used to be really common for bookstores to place orders with publishers in this type of cycle: on a weekly or bi-weekly basis, usually on a Monday after the busy weekend days, the bookstore would order any backlist titles that they’ve sold recently and are currently out of (plus special orders for customers, plus books for an upcoming event, preorder campaign, or other promotion). 

Then, once a season – which, depending on the publisher can be two, three, or four times a year, depending on how many seasons they have defined for publishing their books, and no, sorry, that’s not standard across the industry – the bookstore would meet with their sales rep either in-person or over the phone, and they would review the frontlist titles together, and then the store would place a very large frontlist order for many months at a time (sometimes as many as six months ahead of time!). 

Due to the discount and ordering terms I’ve mentioned in previous episodes, stores that place large seasonal orders like this don’t have to pay upfront for the frontlist order. They would be invoiced as the books ship and in accordance with the special promotional terms being offered for placing that season’s frontlist order (sometimes that would be an extra discount for ordering extra copies of top seasonal titles; sometimes that would be extended or delayed dating, meaning the store would have longer than the standard 30 days from the shipped date to pay the invoice; or any many other types of special promotions). Separate orders for frontlist event books would be placed whenever needed, and usually are placed outside of the established frontlist order or weekly backlist orders.

Even with all the discount terms and extended dating, that sort of buying schedule may not work for your store these days for cash flow, staffing, seasonality, or any other reason. Don’t worry, there are many other ways that you can go about organizing your own store’s ordering schedule. As this is the Business of Bookselling podcast, I’m going to focus on some options and additional considerations for creating a buying schedule that prioritizes a healthy cashflow for your store.

Say you’re a new store and you don’t know whether a traditional buying cycle suits your customers’ buying cycle, or if you’re an established store that has had changes in your community that have impacted customer buying habits, or if your community and/or country are going through turbulent times and consumers are spending less overall and you’re just not sure how to predict buying patterns and store cashflow three-to-six months from now – if you’re worried about cashflow and ordering direct from publishers, here are three things you can do, depending on what works best for your store, to have better control over your inventory cashflow (that is to say, these are three things to do after you’ve already created your order and due date spreadsheets and tried to stagger your ordering on a calendar so that all your invoices don’t come due to each publisher at the same time – this is specifically in regards to backlist, of course; though sometimes, like after the holiday season, you just can’t help it – many invoices are always going to be due in January and February – but after you’ve done all that, here are three other things to consider):

This may be something that’s required of you as a new wholesale account anyway, especially if you’re a new business and don’t have many credit references. By prepaying for books, you’re putting a credit card on file at the publisher, and you’re only buying books your card will let you afford. 

Two things to note with this:

1) if you need to place a bigger order than what your card will allow for some reason (say an author event, or a subscription box book you chose suddenly went viral and you now have 1000 orders to fulfill), you can always get a certified bank check or wire transfer sent to the publisher’s account department directly and they will release the bigger order, and 

2) this doesn’t mean you can’t make use of the other terms being offered, just because you’re not using the dating term (that’s the 30 day dating); you can still use the discount and freight terms of regular discount terms and special promotional offers.

What does that actually mean or look like? It looks like reviewing what books you want to order from a frontlist, not-yet-published books catalog, and separate your order by publication month, and then order only a month or two or three at a time in advance. 

This means that if you’re having a slower season, customers aren’t buying as much, you have a lot of inventory left on your shelves and not a lot of cash in your bank account, whatever the reason, you can adjust your frontlist orders to be smaller or even skip ordering certain books altogether until you can afford it; overall you’re placing smaller orders until business picks up again and you can afford to pay larger invoices. To not forget to order the books you skipped, you can add those books onto a separate order that you’ll place in the future, most likely by placing a backlist order for the books at that point.

Remember, backlist orders aren’t only for books your store has ordered before. Backlist simply refers to books that have already been published, or that have “already come out” (to my queer family out there, that is not a coming out of the closet reference, that’s just how we talk about books being published). 

Going back to frontlist orders for a minute, if you have placed, say, 6 months worth of frontlist orders at one time, and 2 months into that frontlist season, you’ve realized that you’ve way over-ordered for customer demand and are hemorrhaging money paying frontlist invoices, you CAN reach out to your rep to see about amending your not-yet-shipped frontlist orders. That said, there may not be a chance to edit all your frontlist orders in time to receive fewer titles and reduce the inventory coming in. 

Just don’t forget, in the shorter frontlist timespan ordering, to prioritize ordering anything that may sell out if you order too late. This includes limited print runs, special first printing editions, books that are guaranteed to be HUGE bestsellers that all your customers are going to be asking for – those are the books you want to make sure to order. The reality is, if you choose to not order a deluxe edition of a frontlist title, the deluxe edition may run out by the time you have a chance to stock it. Figuring out exactly which titles to bring in or not bring in is the eternal bookseller question. That said, if something catches your eye in a frontlist catalog that you want to make sure to bring it at some point – for instance, I have a whole list of books titled “Order in Paperback” of books I think look interesting but which I’m not convinced are going to sell well for me in hardcover, so I make sure to check every few months to see what’s coming out in paperback soon – or if you move something off an order you had initially placed, essentially everything you don’t order immediately when looking at a frontlist catalog, you can place it on “possible order” lists and then send those in when you’re ready and feeling more comfortable with your cashflow.

In terms of those backlist orders, keep those in mind as well when you’re prioritizing your healthy cashflow, and increase the time in-between placing large backlist orders to start stretching those out, because those are the invoices that are going to be due a lot sooner than the frontlist order for books coming out six months from now. Backlist orders are most likely going to have invoices due in 30 days, unless you’re using a backlist special promotion from a publisher that provides you with extended dating (meaning you have longer than 30 days to pay it off). 

Here are three big things to be careful of or to keep in mind when delaying backlist orders: 

If you’re a store that allows special orders, the majority of what customers are ordering are backlist titles and they’re looking for them right away. Of course some customers are going to preorder frontlist titles, and that’s great news, because you have plenty of time to know exactly how many books of that frontlist title order based on the number of preorders you’ve sold. But for backlist special orders, what are you going to do with those if you’re not placing a publisher backlist order as often? You might be delaying a special order in that case, and risk losing the order and possibly the customer, as a lot of customers aren’t into delayed gratification thanks to things like next-day shipping and same-day delivery that big box retailers can offer. So what do you do in this instance?

Well, a lot of stores use wholesalers to fulfill special orders, as wholesale distributors do often offer faster shipping (keep in mind that the holiday season is its own special scenario, so I’m talking about 10/11 months out of the year, not November/December in this case). As long as you’ve reached the wholesale order minimum (and you can sometimes do this easily by keeping a running list of inexpensive items supplied by the wholesaler, like sticker books, that you don’t mind ordering in bulk, or holiday season titles you know you’ll sell a ton of so there’s no return risk, or staff favorites to handsell that you can throw onto a wholesale order that’s close to meeting the minimum order needed), using wholesalers to place a weekly customer special orders plus emergency restock orders is a good way to go. That’s going to ship to your store directly.

A second option some wholesalers offer is a direct-to-home shipment option, where you as the store can basically place a special order for someone via your own wholesaler and have it shipped directly to the customer as opposed to your store. There are no minimums to meet in this case, but direct-to-home shipments often cost the store more in lower discounts, hidden convenience fees, and higher shipping costs than what you possibly charged the customer, if you charged them shipping at all, so beware of this option if you’re truly counting your pennies and make sure it’s a cost-effective one for you. Adjacent to this scenario, for stores that have a Bookshop.org account, you can also place an order for the customer special order book using your store’s Bookshop.org account, but have it ship directly to the customer; by doing this, there are no hidden fees, and though you may get a smaller percentage profit (as an ABA member affiliate store, you receive 30% of the sale; if you’re an affiliate bookstore that’s not an ABA member, you’ll receive only 10% of the sale), you still know upfront what your discount is and what the shipping cost will be, so there’s no losing surprise money being lost on this transaction, and it’s a much faster way to look up what to charge the customer in real time.

I’m going to sidebar for a second here on special orders. A lot of OG stores don’t require customers to prepay for their special orders. None of the stores that raised me in my early career days charged customers upfront from their orders. Even at the time, in my early 20s as a newbie bookseller, I thought that was a poor financial choice. I’m not saying I don’t understand the customer service act the stores want to provide. As it was explained to me when I inquired, a customer may not always know if they want the book for sure, and if the store orders the book and the customer decides they don’t want it, the store will just put it on the shelf and someone will surely buy it at some point or they’ll pull it for a return at some point. Considering the often razor thin margins of the bookselling business, I think that’s an absolutely bananas take to have – a bookstore is not a lending library. A bookstore, whether for profit or non-profit as a business entity, still needs to turn a profit to exist. So why would I, as a store owner, want to accept the risk of ordering in a book that a customer may decide they don’t want, incur and potentially eat the cost of that book that I may not be able to then sell to someone else, and then if it doesn’t sell, completely eat the cost of the return shipment, or if I can’t return it for any number of reasons, either make a smaller percentage profit on it if I end up discounting it to sell or perhaps not selling it at all, zeroing it out of my inventory, eating the entire cost, and then donating it? Also, do you know how many customers place special orders that they never come to pick up? It’s an astonishing number of customers. 

While this may be an unpopular opinion amongst OG and even newbie booksellers, from a purely financial business perspective, I would recommend having all your special orders be prepaid and having a clearly stated policy that any special orders, prepaid or not, that have not been picked up within three months from the first date you call or text or email to let the customer know their book has arrived will become store property without a refund being owed (special circumstances notwithstanding, of course). At that point, you can either choose to donate the book, put it back on the shelf to be sold to someone else, or send it back to the publisher or wholesaler for a refund with a clear conscience and without having lost any money other than the staffing time for dealing with it in the first place. We can agree to disagree as business owners on this if we ever meet in person, but I’ve never had a customer push back on prepaying for a special order for my own store; people are used to prepaying for the goods and services they’re getting from other businesses – why should the goods and services I and my bookstore provide be any different?

If you’re wondering what I’m talking about, remember back at the beginning of this episode when I talked about a traditional buying schedule and mentioned how many stores place weekly restock backlist orders? In a system where you place fewer backlist orders farther apart, you do run the risk of forgetting something that sold a few weeks ago that may drop off a backlist report for some reason. In order to not do this, my advice is to continue to run your out-of-stock and what’s sold reports on a weekly basis and add those titles to your backlist order, even if you’re not going to be placing that order right away. You can continue to build your order up over time, and when you are finally ready to place a backlist order again, you can review the order and make sure you really do want all those books prior to placing.

Those weekly stock review and then pre-purchasing review steps should help you watch out for another issue that sometimes arises when delaying backlist orders.

3. This third thing to watch out for when placing delaying backlist orders is kind of two issues, but it’s really more like two sides of the same coin, and that’s either forgetting to put a book onto a backlist restock that is perhaps a deep backlist title that’s important to you personally or to have representation of some kind on your shelf, but it only sells once every 4 months or so, and yet you always want to reorder that one copy when it sells, but if you run an out-of-stock report only once a month, you might miss the fact that it’s sold and then forget to order it for when you need it next, OR you miss out on ordering a book that was for a time-specific opportunity, and by the time you DO place that backlist order, that time has passed (this happens a LOT with seasonal titles for specific holidays), and so now you have 10 copies of a Valentine’s Day title that have come in on March 1st.

Try really hard to avoid doing that, is my advice, BUT if that does end up happening to you, you can fix that problem by doing the third suggestion for helping with the cashflow issue:

Before I dive into all that, though, here’s how returns work: the bookstore pulls books off their shelves that are in like-new condition, usually 90 days or more after having received the book, packages them up in a box, creates an invoice or packing list or credit memo that lists what is in the box, what discount you received it into your point-of-sale system as, and what credit is owed to you for the book, and send it all back to the returns warehouse address, and then 4-6 weeks later (roughly), the store will receive a credit to your account that hopefully matches the credit you had calculated as owed to you, and you then ask the accounting department of that publisher to apply that credit toward any outstanding invoices for the store. 

Now to break that down a bit, first and foremost, you need to make sure that when you have opened a publisher account, you have opened up a returnable publisher account if you would like to do returns. Publishers will often have a different discount schedule for accounts that are returnable vs non-returnable, and yes, the non-returnable accounts will often have a higher discount. BUT, if you buy non-returnable, it does prevent you from having returns as a viable part of your cash flow strategy. This is not to say one is better than the other; they both just have different considerations. 

Also, please note that even if you are a returnable account, many publishers offer B2B discounts for YOU, which means if you’re purchasing a bulk order of books that you’re selling on to a customers, such as a school or business, since this is a guaranteed non-returnable order, the publisher will give you a higher nonreturnable discount on that bulk order so that you can still profit off of the sale, since you’re usually giving your own customer a discount for placing the bulk order with you in the first place, which means your own profit is even more limited off the sale. If you don’t know if a publisher offers a B2B discount for you to use, please just ask before you place your bulk order. 

But back to returns – once you’ve established that you have a returnable account, the next most important thing to know is that you ARE paying for the return shipping of these books to the publisher. So I recommend only pulling returns a few times a year so that you hopefully have enough books going back to the publisher to make the return worthwhile. My threshold is usually if I’m going to be receiving around $200-$250 worth of returns credit, that makes shipping the books to the warehouse via the cheapest method possible, often media mail, worth it for me. The strategy behind returns is to basically have a clear out a few times a year that makes room on your shelves for new books and that gets money credited to your account that you can use during the lean months to pay off any outstanding invoices. 

I usually do this in January, after the holiday season; some stores combine this with a yearly inventory and as they’re counting every single book on the shelves, they pull out the ones that match their returns reports. Returns reports are usually run to include books sitting on the shelves that have been there 90 days or more, as the average “turn” (short for inventory turnover) or time it takes to sell a backlist title is 90 days. 

As an aside, great turn is selling a book three times in 90 days, or roughly once a month for a quarter of the year. If a book has done that, you want to keep it on your shelves. If a book hasn’t done that, you might want to consider why. For instance, is it shelved in a place where it’s not getting attention and should you consider moving it? Is it the movie tie-in cover of a movie based on that book and that’s no longer in vogue, or vice versa, your customers only want the movie tie-in cover? Often when doing inventory or returns, I’ll keep a note on the side about random themed displays I’d like to do, like, “Books with dog in the title,” or “Orange book covers,” or “Books by someone named Jane,” and sometimes I won’t return titles that fit a display idea just to see if I can sell it off the random display. You may also want to keep some books on your shelves in order to make sure you have a certain kind of representation in a certain genre or category, or you may have ordered titles as remainders or nonreturnable at a steep discount for a certain holiday, and just keep those in stock until they sell through. But I digress. 

Here’s an average yearly returns schedule:

You can probably tell why having a shipping/receiving manager, or an inventory manager who also does shipping/receiving, would be helpful! 

Now the important thing to watch out for when doing returns is that the credit memo that the publisher sends to you does reflect the discount you originally received for each book you’ve sent back. The reason this is so important is that you may have ordered a book at different times under different special promotions, and so the discount you’ve put down may not match whichever order and discount (most likely the most recent one) that the publisher has pulled for your account’s history with that title. Also, please note that because this is money credited to your account, the publisher cannot automatically apply that money to outstanding invoices, as much as that makes sense that you’d want them to do so, because even though it’s not cash in your bank account, it is a type of cash in a sense that does belong to your business, and so you have to dictate exactly what happens with it. This means you have to tell the publisher accounting department to apply that credit to whichever invoices you would like them to apply it to. It means you can save up that credit for future use, or you can use it all on the next invoice. Entirely up to you.

Most publishers will NOT send you a check for the amount of credit you have on your account at the end of the year; they will simply roll it over to the next year. I know of only one publisher who has ever sent me a check for credit on my account, and no, I’m not going to name it here in case they don’t do that anymore or in case mentioning it violates the Sherman Act for some reason, but all of that’s just to say that the point of returns is to accrue credit on your account that should offset the amount of money needed to pay an invoice, thus leaving you with more cash in your actual bank account, which is why this can be such an effective strategy for managing cashflow. 

Hopefully this episode either alleviated any worries you had about ordering directly from publishers or gave you some new ideas to consider implementing in your buying and returns store processes.

As always, if you have any questions about something I discussed in this episode or something you’d like me to explore in another episode, you can send me an email at [email protected]. Happy bookselling!

Intro: In this season, we’re going to explore working with publishers, why publisher-bookstore relationships are so important, and how they can become a mutually beneficial relationship, even as it is, by nature, a transactional one – they need us to sell their product – primarily books – and we need their primary product to sell in our shops. But there are a lot of places indie booksellers can acquire books and book-related products. So why concern ourselves with establishing publisher relationships as opposed to, say, buying all of our books from one wholesale distributor or a remainder warehouse or sourcing books from the community or online? That’s what we’re going to explore in these episodes that are a combination of general informational overview and how-to guide. Welcome to the Business of Bookselling! This is the first episode of season 2.

Transcript: Before we go further, I wanted to assure you that there’s bound to be something I haven’t covered that you’ve heard about or something that changes in how booksellers and publishers work together between the time I’ve recorded these podcast episodes and the time you’re listening to them, so don’t forget to always double-check any business-related information I’ve provided here. This is all advice based on my own lived experience and public information currently available to me, and may not reflect someone else’s experience or what information is available whenever you listen to this.

Also before I give you any new information, back in season 1, episode 5, A Bookselling Glossary, I defined (as one might expect from an episode with “glossary” in the name of it) a lot of bookselling words, including providing the distinction between what a publisher is versus a wholesale distributor, and what a publisher of a book versus the distributor of a book is. Here’s a quick recap to make sure we’re on the same page with the primary terms I’ll be using in this episode.

The word “publishing” usually refers to everything up to and including the point of printing, warehousing, and shipping the book. But, not all publishers have the ability to do all of those things for themselves, because costs. If that’s the case, Publisher A may be the publisher of a book, meaning they edit, design, and print the book, while Publisher B may be the distributor of the book, meaning they store, sell, and distribute the book for Publisher A. Penguin Random House, for instance, is a publishing company of their own books, while also being a distributor of smaller presses, such as Beacon Press. This information is particularly important for this episode because when you consider working with publishers, what’s the first thing that probably comes to mind? 

It should be, purchasing books from them at a greater discount so that you can maximize profits! 

If other things like, events, or free advanced copies, comes to mind, those aren’t wrong answers, but from a business of bookselling perspective (see name of this podcast), I’m, of course, going to talk about the biggest impact to the financial well-being of the bookselling business first. 

So when you work with a publisher to purchase books from them, you’re not only able to purchase the books they themselves publish, but ALSO the books they distribute for other publishers, known as their distribution clients. The books publishers create themselves are organized into different imprints, which is a collection of books within a publishing company; publishing companies usually have multiple imprints that publish different genres or children’s books vs adult books, etc. They will also distribute all the imprints that are housed within the other publishing companies that are their distribution clients. 

Now, a wholesaler distributor, or wholesaler, is an organization that sells you books by multiple publishers, often with lower discounts and higher minimums to be reached when ordering from them. They also often distribute self-published authors. 

The reason so many bookstores order from wholesalers, even with the monopoly held by an industry wholesaler leading to longer shipping times, reduced customer services, lower discounts and higher minimums for reaching maximum benefits when ordering from them, etc. is because they have many many more books to choose from than ordering from one single publisher at a time. Also, while jumping through those ordering hoops can be tricky, it is still often easier for a one person or small staff store to order all their books from one place, rather than placing a number of different orders with different publishing companies. Despite monopolies in general being bad, I’m not passing judgement on stores that order only through wholesalers and certainly no shame should be felt by booksellers going that route! This episode, however, is exploring the wonderful working relationship between the publishers of books and us – the independent booksellers who sell the books being published to our joint end customers – the general reading public. 

The way we’re going to analyze working with publishers is by using a triple bottom line sustainability framework. This is the business lens that I use to evaluate the benefit of just about everything impacting the bookselling business ecosystem and my own specific shop. Triple Bottom Line sustainability, in short, means taking into consideration the impact of something on the three P’s – people, planet, and profit. It’s about not only looking at the financial impact of business (that’s the profit part), but also looking at how business impacts the environment (that’s the planet part), and society or cultural impacts the business has as well (that’s the people part). When most business people think of triple bottom line sustainability (shortened to TBL), they’re thinking about the impact their business has on the three P’s in the world at large. And while I DO look at my business’s impact outwardly on the three P’s, I also make it a priority to look at how the decisions I’m making for my business are going to impact the three P’s within my business as well. In my mind, this is the equivalent of putting your oxygen mask on first. If you’re making conscious decisions to prioritize triple bottom line sustainability within your business, it’s naturally going to be prioritized in the parts of the business that are impacting the world at large. 

Another reason I use TBL as a foundational lens is that it also provides opportunities for different markers and measures of success. For instance, while we can all recognize that it is hard work to turn a profit as an independent bookstore, independent bookstores are often hyper aware of their very real impact on culture and society at large, and especially within their community, whether that’s providing book access to generations of readers and defending freedom of speech, existing as third spaces and places for people to meet outside of home and work, or being taste makers for the educational and entertainment content being consumed. They’ve got that “people” part down pat. And thanks to shop local movements, and the resources available from organizations like the Institute for Local Self Reliance and the American Booksellers Association, small, independently-owned, and locally-owned businesses have more language to talk about how shopping small and shopping locally keeps more money in the local economy.

Did you know that on average, for every dollar spent with a locally-owned business, 70 cents stays within the community, contributing to greater community financial health, as opposed to just 30 cents out of every dollar spent with a corporate or chain organization? Spending money with locally owned businesses also creates a multiplier effect that results in more jobs being created locally, increases in local payroll and subsequently more money spent locally, and contributes to the local tax base which results in greater community benefits. So in addition to those cultural benefits stores provide, there are very real economic – or profit – benefits that impact the community, simply by nature of being a locally-owned small business. So that’s two out of the three P’s that indies have aced. Unfortunately the book industry isn’t one that’s particularly environmentally friendly, but there are definitely things individual businesses can do to improve their impact on the planet and we’ll be sure to explore some of those in a future episode.

Bringing this discussion back to publishers, to illustrate how to use this lens to measure their impact, I’m going to use a people example. There is a marked difference in the TBL “people” measures between my relationship with publishers and my relationship with my wholesale distributor. My relationship with my wholesaler distributor is entirely transactional. I order books from them, they ship books to me, they invoice me, and I pay them. Despite having worked in the book industry for 20 years, I have no established relationships with anybody from my wholesaler – in part because my wholesale rep changes frequently and in part because their own business model doesn’t prioritize having a relationship with me. 

I’ve had the same cell phone number my entire life. You heard that right – I was in college when cell phones became a thing that the average person started to have, and my parents kindly got cell phones and cell phone numbers for their kids. After having worked in this industry for 20 years, you can imagine how many book people’s phone numbers I’ve put into my phone! I have four Rolodex books of business cards – yes, I said Rolodex, and if you don’t know what I’m talking about, enjoy using a search engine to find out about an obsolete piece of technology that I still enjoy using – and I have over 300 book industry phone numbers saved into my phone. Not one of them is for anyone I’ve met from my wholesale distributor. To my mind, that’s a pretty epic fail on behalf of that third P, the people, or cultural, part of that wholesaler’s relationship with me personally and my business. By contrast, my full-time job for the last 5 years has been working for the publisher Sourcebooks. I’m bringing that up now for two reasons – 1) so that for the sake of full transparency you as the listener can understand that when I’m speaking about booksellers and publishers working together, I have experience on both sides of that coin. My job at Sourcebooks is specifically to work with independent bookstores, and I got that job because the woman who hired me was someone who I had worked with previously as a bookseller for many years. An opportunity came up for temporary work at Sourcebooks, and she reached out to me directly to see if I was interested. A three-month contact turned into a longer freelance contract, which then turned into a full-time salaried role. All because of the relationships I’ve cultivated with publishers AND with independent booksellers over the last 20 years, because without those relationships, I wouldn’t have known about the role, been the right fit for the role, and ultimately been offered the role. 

All of that said, the second reason I bring this up is to make the very public disclaimer that all the views expressed on the Business of Bookselling podcast are my own and do not reflect the views of Sourcebooks in any way, nor is Sourcebooks endorsing me or this podcast in any way.

But back to using a TBL lens to assess the publisher vs wholesaler relationship – so far publishers win out on the people part (in my experience), but how do they compare on the profitability side of things?

The reality is that publishers DO offer better discounts for their B2B customers, which indie booksellers are, than wholesalers do! B2B means that the publisher – a business, the first B – is selling their product directly to us indie booksellers, another business, the second B – and as a result, we get a better discount for ordering directly through them (often shortened to the term “ordering direct”). While other entities such as wholesalers and the website Faire also offer B2B terms, publishers offer better overall terms in terms of consistently higher discounts, free shipping minimums, invoicing dates, and returns credit options than wholesalers and Faire. These other entities may offer the occasional promotion that increases a discount or offers a free shipping special, but those are rarer instances than publisher standard terms. Also, publishers never have their full inventories up on Faire, and Faire is usually nonreturnable, so while it’s not a bad way to get started for book ordering, it remains less than optimal.

To further explain why publishers offer greater profitability when independent bookstores order from them, I’m going to do another quick review of a few terms related to discounting on this episode now that I outlined already on Season 1, Episode 5. 

The word “terms” itself (imagine that in air quotes) is short for the two words, “discount terms.” Discount terms, or terms for short, refers to the special deal that you as a business are getting as a wholesale customer from the business you’re purchasing the product from, and whatever those terms are is then going to impact your profit when you sell the product on to your retail customer. The thing to remember about books in America is that the publisher sets the price of the book. This is known as the Manufacturer’s Suggested Retail Price, or MSRP, and you can’t charge more for your books than the MSRP that’s printed on the book. This does not take into account special cases like bundling a book with ticket, creating a mystery book package that has a value you’ve chosen based on the cost of the items included in package, or including a flat shipping fee for mailing a book ordered from your store online, etc. The MSRP refers to the price charged in an average retail transaction when a customer wants to buy a book from your bookstores directly, and you charge the MSRP, also known as the cover price (plus tax if you’re in a state or county that charges sales tax).

Before I define the word “terms” any further, I have another disclaimer to make. Because I am an independent bookstore owner talking on a podcast about the business of bookselling to an audience of mostly other established or aspiring bookstore owners or bookstore owning dreamers, I need to be careful about what I say about terms thanks to the Sherman Act’s antitrust guidelines, which say that competitors can’t discuss price or pricing policies. Because of those guidelines, I’m going to use general examples from this point on in order to demonstrate the definition of what terms actually look like from a financial perspective.

Most independent bookstores get their newly published books for a discount between 40 to 50%, regardless of where they’re purchasing the book, which means they’re paying 50 to 60% of the cover price for that book. This excludes used books and remainders, by the way; I’m talking only new, never-before-owned, recently printed books. In vague, general terms, not mentioning any names, but a good rule of thumb for your calculations if you’re putting together a business plan is to estimate getting a discount of 40-43% from a wholesaler, a discount of 45-50% from a publisher, and a discount of 60-75% from a remainder company. 

Discounts terms are one part of terms offered – how many units of a product the wholesale customer has to order in order to receive the largest discount on offer. I said “units” because you can purchase multiple copies of the same title, and you also might be ordering more than books – you might order stickers or toys or puzzles or games at the same time – so the word “units” covers all those bases. So in this example, which is the same one I used in episode 5, just for consistency’s sake – Publisher A has terms defined as an order of 20 units equals a 45% discount, meaning you as the wholesale customer would need to place an order for 20 units of the product, and in meeting the order minimum quantity, you would receive a 45% discount off the MSRP, meaning you would pay Publisher A 55% of the MSRP.  For example, if a bookstore ordered 20 copies of a book priced at $18.99, the retail cost is 20 x the MSRP, the “quote-unquote-price of the book”, $18.99, which equals $379.80. Luckily that’s not what you’re paying as a bookstore. You’re paying only the wholesale cost. The wholesale cost in this scenario is that $379.80 retail cost minus your 45% wholesale discount, which equals $208.89. When a store charges their retail customer the $18.99 MSRP printed on that book, their potential profit on that book is the wholesale discount that you received on that book. So the most a bookstore could make in profit on 20 copies of an $18.99 book for which they received a 45% wholesale discount when originally purchasing the product would be $170.91 once they’ve sold all their product to the consumer. The publisher would make more than you; they are making the $208.89 that you paid them on those 20 books. As a side note, wholesale customers are exempt from paying tax on the products they purchase as their stock, so we don’t need to factor tax into this equation yet. As a retailer, you will still charge your customers tax though, if you’re in a state that has sales tax. The wholesale discount is just one type of discount term offered.

Another part of discount terms is what’s called “dating,” which is the amount of time you have to pay the invoice for the product you purchased. Standard dating is usually 30 days from the time the product has shipped out, not 30 days from when you ordered it in the first place. That said, you might not even receive the product until 7 days into its 30-day invoicing countdown. If you order a book on standard terms and it doesn’t sell before the invoice is due, as a bookstore, you’re going to be paying for that book out of your own bookstore pocket, which means that you could be paying for the majority of the books in your store upfront, before anyone purchases them. This is one of the main reasons that it’s so expensive to start a new book bookselling business and one of the main reasons why paying attention to all of the terms being offered is so important. Publishers occasionally offer specials with extended dating terms, which means you have more than 30 days to pay the invoices for the books you order using that promotion. These promotions are sometimes offered for specific titles, authors, or seasons; for instance, some publishers offer them for orders placed between September and November, knowing that indies will do what’s called “ordering up” – meaning they’re placing bigger orders with anticipation of larger than usual sales – for the holiday season, and as a result, indies will be able to pay those bigger than average invoices due to the increased amount of cash they’ll have on hand at the end of the holiday season.

In addition to the discount and the dating, the other terms piece to consider is freight. Most publishers will throw in free freight as part of the terms you receive when you’ve met the minimum unit order quantity. 

Why is free freight so important? Well, if you’ve met the free freight minimum for your book order, but not every book on your order is ready to ship right away, you could be charged freight on every single package that ships out carrying books from your order if the terms specified that all books ordered need to ship together in order to meet the free freight minimum. This is usually the case for wholesalers, but is NOT usually the case for publishers. This is yet another reason why ordering direct from publishers can really add up in terms of the positive benefits to your financial bottom line.

The reason so many publishers will offer free freight on all books in an order even if they’re not shipped together at one time is because of the way the publishing cycle works. As a bookstore, you’re purchasing books that have already been published, known as backlist, AND you’re ordering ahead – you’re ordering books that have not yet been published, called frontlist. Some publishers require that frontlist and backlist orders are placed separately; some publishers offer different promotional discounts each season for frontlist vs backlist orders. This is because most backlist titles are going to ship out right away, as they’ve already…been published. But for those that are out of stock, they’re often being reprinted, and so will be back in stock at some point in the future, and publishers want to make sure that the bookstores that still want to stock that book have it on order, which will be fulfilled when their reprint finally comes back in. Otherwise, the publishers is left with a whole lot of reprinted books that no one is selling. Now as for frontlist, most frontlist titles on an order are not going to ship out at the same time, as they, obviously, are published on different days (but always on a Tuesday – pro tip, in case you didn’t know that – new books come out on Tuesdays!). It’s so much easier for both the publisher and the independent bookstore placing the order to agree that if the terms of the order are met, there’s free freight for all shipments, regardless of whether that shipment has 20 books in it and is going out tomorrow or one single title shipping out to the store in three months, just in time to hit the shelves for the pub date.

With this much ordering going on, cashflow can become tricky because books don’t always ship when you think they’re going to ship, invoices come due all the time, and businesses can have peak and slow times, which impacts how much cash is actually sitting in a bank account at any given moment. The next episode is going to dive deeper into the book buying cycle and things you can do if you’re worried about cashflow and ordering directly from publishers that will help you have better control over your inventory-related cashflow.

That said, I hope I’ve laid out a case for why publisher accounts for ordering direct do offer increased benefits on the profit side, and throughout this whole season, I’ll be adding to the case for why cultivating publisher relationships – that people part – can be so beneficial as well. Unfortunately on the planet side, as I said before, the reality is that the book business is not one that focuses on environmental sustainability, BUT some improvements have been made, such as using Batch for Books, an online invoicing and payment system that a lot of publishers have gotten onto that can help cut down on some of the paper trail aspects of invoicing and payments.

Now that you have a better understanding of why you should open direct ordering publisher accounts, here’s how to actually do it!

I’m sure it will come as no surprise to you that every single publisher has a different way of opening an account with them, but all account applications are essentially asking for the same information. 

Most publishing companies won’t have the wholesale application on their website, so you’ll have to search each publisher’s website for the proper email address to reach out to. Some publisher sites may have a link for one of these words – “booksellers, bookstore, independent bookstore, or independent booksellers.” Some may have a link for “wholesale inquiries.” These links are often in the footer at the bottom of the publisher’s homepage. 

Once you have the correct or even generic email address to reach out to, send an email saying, “ABC Bookstore is an independent bookstore located in City, State, and we would like to open a wholesale account. Can you please send me an account application?” Some publishers have an online form to indicate interest, but you’re essentially saying the same thing on that form.

Once you’ve received the account application, you’ll need to fill it out and send it back in with a copy of your resale certificate. I’ll get to the parts of an application in a minute, but I wanted to let you know why sending in your resale certificate is so important. Also, this can sometimes be called different things in different states, such as a retail tax certificate or a seller’s permit. What it means is that you can purchase products for wholesale without being charged sales tax. There is no fee for getting this certificate from your state; I found my state’s generic resale certificate under the “Sales and Use Tax Permits” page on my state’s Department of Revenue website and simply downloaded it as a PDF, filled it in with my own store’s information, and listed the items for purchase as “books and other literary items.” All publishing companies will need this on file. You can send them a generic one that has your information filled out, the items that you’re purchasing listed as “books,” and they can fill in their own publishing company information themselves.

As for what the account application will ask for, here’s a general list of questions most account applications will ask (if some of these terms are new for you, I’ll be explaining them in brief on this episode, but they’re more defined fully in Season 1, Episode 3, The First Five Business Things):

You may also get some business-specific questions about the type of business you’re looking to do (do you do events, preorders), what your POS system is, other optional self-identified demographic information (Black-owned business, for example), but all of those are optional things to answer. Most account applications are only concerned with the business aspect of things. 

Once you’ve submitted your application with your resale certificate, it can sometimes take 1-2 weeks before being given an account number. Ideally this would come with a welcome email of information and introduction to your new sales rep, but if that’s not been provided for you, you can email back and ask for at the very least your discount terms, credit rep, and sales rep. Your credit rep is the person you want to talk to if you’re going to be paying an invoice late, questions about invoices and credit memos, or have any other questions about the financial status of your account. Your sales rep is the one who should be getting to know your store’s buying habits and who you go to with questions about ordering books (more on that relationship in another episode).

There are many other reasons for and ways to work with publishers, which we’ll be exploring in future episodes this season, but for now, enjoy those new publisher accounts! 

If you have any questions about something I discussed in this episode or something you’d like me to explore in another episode, you can send me an email at [email protected]. Happy bookselling!

Intro: Welcome to the Business of Bookselling! In this podcast episode, I get to do my best impression of a dictionary and define some commonly used book industry terms that may or may not be familiar to you. If I don’t define something you’ve always wanted to know about or if your definition of a term differs from mine, shoot me an email at [email protected], and I’ll try to address it in a future episode. Now let’s dive in!

Transcript: We’re starting off with some very important basics – frontlist and backlist. These two terms – frontlist is one word and backlist is another – are probably two of the most used, industry-specific terms you need to know. Frontlist refers to books that are forthcoming. They’re not yet published. Quick aside here that not yet published is sometimes abbreviated to the initials NYP. Frontlist titles are new titles coming out on this season’s or a future season’s list of books from a publisher. Let me back up a minute, in case words like “season” and “list” in this context are also new to you! So, each publisher has books grouped together every year by season. Season refers to the time of year the book comes out. You might think this would be standardized across the industry, but surprise! Every publisher defines a season in their own way, and it’s a happy coincidence when multiple publishers have seasons that coincide. So, a spring season of books may be publishing between January and April or between March and August. Publishers might have two seasons – Spring/Summer and Fall/Winter, or 3 seasons – spring, summer, winter, or 4 season – spring, summer, fall, winter. Regardless of how many seasons a publisher has, each season is comprised of a list of books being published over a certain set of months, and THAT list is what is known as frontlist. 

Now, you might think to yourself, “If frontlist refers to not yet published titles, surely backlist means ALREADY published titles.” And you would be right in thinking that! Mostly. It’s not quite that simple. Each publisher also defines backlist as separate time periods as well. One publisher might define it as anything published the season prior and older. Another might define it as anything published before today. And another might define it as anything published last calendar year. Why is it so important for you to know how a specific publisher defines backlist? Because publishers often offer independent bookstores backlist and frontlist specials! So a backlist promotion might say something like, “Stock up for the holidays! Receive an extra 3% off on orders of 20 units or more placed in October. Use promo code BLSPEC25. This code may be used twice between October 1 and October 31, 2025.”  Now, if you saw that special come through and you wanted to plan out your two orders – say, one for the first week of October and one for the last week of October – you would need to know if books published DURING October counted as backlist or if you should use whatever frontlist special is on offer to order those titles.

Don’t confuse the word backlist with the word back order. Those are two different things. Here’s what a backorder is: any time you place an order with a publisher or distributor, they’re going to try to fulfill that order immediately by sending you the books they currently have in stock. If a book is not yet published or if a book is out of stock at the warehouse and they are waiting for reprints to come in, the books they can’t send out to you yet will be backordered for you until they’re able to do so. I’ll do a whole separate episode about how to make buying decisions, but for now, let’s keep moving on to other definitions.

In addition to backlist and frontlist titles, there’s also a special phenomenon called drop-in titles, or drop-ins for short. These are books that the publishers didn’t announce as part of their original season of titles, but they’ve announced them now and the book is going to be coming out very soon, so get those orders in now. Drop-in titles are usually really hot titles that publishers are trying to keep details under wraps about so that information doesn’t leak before they’re ready to publicly announce the titles, but that does mean that bookstores have to stay on top of whether or not they’ve ordered that special drop-in title once it IS announced because you’re probably going to want to carry it and not miss out. Because these are hot titles, publishers could run through their first printing, and if you haven’t ordered it quickly, you won’t get it during the first rush when customers are really looking for it. A lot of celebrity memoirs are drop-in titles, or more recently a lot of self-published authors who have really blown up on TikTok and other social media channels and have been offered publishing contracts from traditional publishers to help with sales and distribution of their hot titles into a wider market have been dropping in never-before-published titles, or reprints of old titles, or collector’s editions of their old titles as well.

So far I’ve been defining terms that refer to new books. Books that come from a publisher or wholesale distributor are considered new because no one else has cracked that spine and read that copy yet. Wait, what’s the difference between a publisher and a wholesale distributor, also known as a wholesaler, you might be asking? I’m going to back up again for a second: in common language practice, the word “publishing” usually refers to everything up to and including the point of printing, warehousing, and shipping the book. But, not all publishers have the ability to do all of those things for themselves, because costs. If that’s the case, Publisher A may be the publisher of a book, meaning they edit, design, and print the book, while Publisher B may be the distributor of the book, meaning they store, sell, and distribute the book for Publisher A. Penguin Random House, Macmillan Publishing Services, and Hachette are just a few examples of publishing companies who also act as distributors, meaning smaller presses, such as Beacon Press, publish their own titles while Penguin Random House distributes them. A distribution client, however, is not the same as an imprint. An imprint is the name for a collection of books being published under a certain theme, idea, or person’s direction. To stay with our Penguin Random House example, they have more than 300 imprints that they publish, meaning they have more than 300 distinct departments or groups working together to put out books under a certain imprint name every season, such as Berkely, Crown, DK, Knopf, or Penguin Classics (all examples of PRH imprints). PRH distributes all their own imprints’ titles, of course, in addition to their distribution client’s titles, and usually when a bookstore orders from a publisher, they can order any of the books published by that publisher AND distributed by that publisher, but sometimes there are special deals for certain publishers’ books only. A publisher that is selling or distributing the book would let you as an independent bookstore know, through your rep that you were assigned when creating an account with them, about this special offer. A wholesaler, or wholesale distributor, is an organization that stores or warehouses books by multiple publishers, also often distributing self-published authors (books that remain self-published, not ones brought into traditional publishing) as well, and it’s usually easier to meet the minimum requirements for placing an order at a wholesaler because they have so many more books on offer. This is why many independent bookstores who are just getting started begin by ordering from one wholesaler, rather than through many different publishers.

Admittedly it gets tricky sometimes to figure out and remember what imprint is published by which publisher, and what publisher is distributed by which publisher, especially because large publishers often buy and sell smaller publishers and also buy and sell other publisher’s imprints. The American Booksellers Association (also known as the ABA) has a resource on their website called the Book Buyer’s Handbook (https://www.bookweb.org/), which lists publishers, imprints, distribution clients, and even discount terms, and it’s mostly up-to-date at any given time. I believe publishers are in charge of updating their own entries into the handbook, so anything that’s out of date is because the publisher hasn’t updated it yet. You do have to be an ABA member in order to use the Book Buyer’s Handbook. It’s one of the biggest resources available to independent bookstores, so becoming an ABA member is highly recommended.

Before I continue on to defining other types of books other than “new” books, I’m going to define a really important word just used. That word is “terms,” which is short for “discount terms.” Basically, it means how much do I have to buy this item for as a wholesale customer, as whatever that cost is will then impact my profit when I turn around and sell it to my retail customer? What you might not realize is that you as the independent bookstore are also a customer; you’re a wholesale customer purchasing books from publishers and wholesaler distributors. When you’re wearing your wholesale customer hat, you’re going to want to purchase from the place that gives you the best discount because as a retailer – that’s when you’re operating as the bookshop selling books to your individual customers – you can’t charge more for your books than what’s printed on the book, also known as the MSRP or manufacturer standard retail price. In the case of books in America, the publisher sets the price of the book, it’s printed on the book, and no one can sell it for more than what’s listed on the book. Used books and antiquarian books are a different case, but this is focused on new books. You can charge for more than the book itself, if you’ve bundled the book into an event ticket of some kind, but in that case, it still has to come with something extra; you can’t actually charge more for the book itself. You can always sell it for less, and there’s where Amazon has significantly devalued books, by selling them as a loss leader to get customer information so that they can then sell additional products to them not at a loss for the company, and this is why retailers discounting products is so dangerous – it’s a very slippery slope, it devalues the product, and it trains customers to not want to pay for the full value of a product. But I digress. Back to terms. 

Because I am an independent bookstore owner talking on a podcast about the business of bookselling to an audience of, I’m assuming, mostly other bookstore owners or bookstore owning dreamers, I need to be careful about what I say about terms thanks to the Sherman Act’s antitrust guidelines, which say that competitors – which we technically are from a business perspective, even if we don’t necessarily feel like competitors in our hearts –  can’t discuss price or pricing policies. I’m going to use general examples from this point on in order to illustrate what terms actually look like from a financial perspective.

Most independent bookstores are getting their books at between a 40 to 50% discount, which means they’re paying 50 to 60% of the cover price for that book. That’s one part of terms offered – how many units of a product the wholesale customer has to order in order to receive the largest discount on offer. So one publisher may have their terms defined as an order of 20 units equals a 45% discount, meaning you as the wholesale customer would need to place an order for 20 units of the product, and in meeting the order minimum quantity, you would receive a 45% discount off the MSRP, meaning you would pay the publisher or wholesaler 55% of the MSRP. I’m saying “units” because you can purchase multiple copies of the same title, and you also might be ordering more than books – you might order stickers or toys or puzzles or games at the same time – so the word “units” covers all those bases. So to keep this simple, let’s say a bookstore ordered 20 copies of a book priced at $18.99. The retail cost is 20 x $18.99, or $379.80. The wholesale cost is that $379.80 minus your 45% discount, which equals $208.89. When the store charges their individual customer the $18.99 for that book, their potential profit on that book is the wholesale discount that you received on that book. So the most a bookstore could make in profit on 20 copies of an $18.99 book would be $170.91. The publisher or wholesaler would make more than you; they are making the $208.89 on those 20 books. As a side note, wholesale customers are exempt from paying tax on the products they purchase as their stock, so we don’t need to factor tax into this equation yet. As a retailer, you will still charge your customers tax though; that’s sales tax. Now, all of that is just one type of discount term offered.

Another part of discount terms being offered by a publisher or wholesaler is what’s called “dating,” which no, doesn’t mean candlelit dinners and long walks on the beach, but the amount of time you have to pay the invoice for the product you purchased. Standard dating is usually 30 days from the time the product has shipped out, not 30 days from when you ordered that. Thais said, you might not even receive the product until 7 days into its 30-day invoicing countdown. If you order a book on standard terms and it doesn’t sell before the invoice is due, as a bookstore, you’re going to be paying for that book out of your own bookstore pocket. This means that you could be paying for the majority of the books in your inventory, on your shelves, upfront, before anyone purchases them. This is one of the main reasons that it’s so expensive to start a new book bookselling business. Of course the hope is that a customer is going to buy that book at the MSRP, thus covering the cost of that book and putting extra money into your account, technically called profit, above and beyond the price you paid for the book. But if you’re receiving only 40-50% of the MSRP of a $18.99 book after you’ve paid for its cost to your store, that’s not a lot of profit leftover for you to pay your bills, including line items like staff salary, your overhead (that’s line items such as rent and associated costs for your physical space and physical running of the business), and the rest of your as-yet-unsold inventory. Independent bookselling runs on really thin profit margins, sometimes called just “margins” for short (like how discount terms is shortened to just “terms”), and that’s why it’s so important to order from the place that’s going to give you the best overall terms for the product you’re purchasing. 

In addition to the discount and the dating, the other terms piece to consider is freight costs. Most book inventory publishers and wholesale distributors will throw in free freight as part of the terms you receive when you’ve met the minimum unit order quantity. Freight charges can really add up and obviously cut into your as-already-discussed very limited profit margin, so it’s really important to try to meet the minimum order required for maximum discount benefits. 

Another side note – if you’ve met the free freight minimum for your book order, but not every book on your order is ready to ship right away, you could be charged freight on your order if the terms specified that all books ordered need to ship together to meet the free freight minimum. You may still receive the discount terms and dating, but freight can sometimes have its own stipulations. If you’re lucky, you’ll still get free freight on subsequent orders shipping out when the books are ready. This is why it’s so important to know all the little details of the terms.

Also, whenever you’re calculating cost-of-goods-sold (also known as COGS, for short, or also known as your margins) in your accounting system, it’s important to factor in those hidden costs, such as shipping. The cost for the book or other product may be more than just 50-60% of the MSRP if there are freight costs for physically getting the book to your store. That said, staff time for physically processing and receiving the inventory into your point-of-sale system and shelving the book into its appropriate display or section does not count toward your COGS. 

Depending on what the order minimum is, it can be difficult to meet, especially if you’re a smaller shop, a novel model, or niche store, and it can be time consuming to track the terms for the different publishers, which is hard to commit to if you’re a one person or smaller staffed store. This is why so many stores simply use the wholesale distributor Ingram, because they have so many books by so many publishers, and as noted before, also by self-published authors. But for the sake of adhering to the Sherman Act, I’ll just say, please do your due diligence in checking which publisher or wholesale distributor gives you as their wholesale customer the best discount on the books you want to order from them, and it’s up to you to decide if convenience is worth paying more upfront for your books or if the higher discount is worth more and worth ordering direct from a publisher. 

Also, sometimes when looking at books on a wholesaler’s inventory website, you might run across a short discount book. This means that for a variety of reasons, the standard, or regular discount (often represented by the initials REG, short for regular), does not apply to this book, and if you order it, you’re going to get a smaller discount on the book, meaning you’re going to have to pay more for it and you won’t make as much money when you sell it. 

One other bottom line advantage of ordering directly through publishers, is that they often offer more special promotions at even higher discounts (such as backlist or frontlist specials), extended dating opportunities (that’s invoicing that is not due in 30 days, but could be due after 60, 90, or even 120 days), and waived minimum order opportunities than wholesalers, so it’s a money game that you should commit to playing if you want the most optimal COGS, or cost-of-goods-sold, for your inventory.

Now back to defining types of books! Of course the opposite of a new book is a used book – one someone else has read before. Some bookstores sell new books only, some sell used books only, some sell new and used and remainders. And there’s another word to define – remainder.

Remainder is basically a nice word for leftover, though no one calls them that. Sometimes remainders are called hurts or bargain books, in addition to remainders, though. Whatever they’re called, and I’m going to keep using the word remainder, these are books that remained in a warehouse as they either never made it onto a bookstore shelf or made it on to a shelf but didn’t sell and so it was returned to the publisher. This often happens with hardcovers, for example. Say a publisher prints 100,000 copies of a book in hardcover but then the paperback comes out a year later (as it often does), and the publisher still has 3,000 hardcover copies left in the warehouse. What are they going to do with them? Well, they sell them! But not directly to us bookstores, usually; they sell them to a remainder company, usually by the pallet for basically pennies. Then the remainder company has to sell them on, so they sell them to bookstores for probably around a quarter of the cover price. The exact prices differ by book and remainder company. Then we, as independent bookstores, sell those remaindered books to customers at a reduced or sale price that’s less than the cover price but more than we paid for it. Why not sell it for the full cover price, as it’s a new book? Because remainders all have a small bit of damage done to them intentionally to indicate they’re remainders. This can look like a dot or a slash somewhere on the edges of the book with a permanent marker, or a pen slash through the bar code, or a box cutter gash on the barcode or cover itself. But however it’s marked, that imperfection declares it’s a remainder and so it should probably only be sold at a reduced price.

Since I just talked about a paperback coming out after a hardcover, let’s really quickly define industry standard language for the types of books out there. Hardcovers are, of course, books published in hardcover. A hardcover can have a dust jacket – that’s the cover of the book that’s detachable or often covered in plastic (called mylar) at the library – or it can be what’s called “paper over board,” which is less common, but it means there’s no dust jacket on purpose. The reason I’m defining hardcover is because sometimes publishers publish a book in both hardcover and in a library binding. While a library binding is technically a hardcover book, the binding is actually reinforced to last longer, and that is why a library binding book will cost more or have a higher MSRP than a standard traditional hardcover book. A paperback book can come in a few different trim sizes, meaning how tall and wide a book is from top to bottom and side to side (the depth – front-to-back – of the book is determined by how many words a book is and the font size), but the only trim size that’s really called something different is a mass market paperback. The term trade paperback or just paperback usually do NOT refer to a mass market or pocket-sized paperback. The mass market paperback sized books are the ones in the spinner racks most often found in airports, convenience stores, and big chain stores, though indies can certainly sell them, too. They’re usually the cheapest format of an adult title; though a lot of genre books – those are books published in the romance (bodice rippers, for example, as they used to be called – the historical romances with a half-naked woman on the cover), fantasy, science fiction, and mystery genres – were traditionally published in the mass market size, it’s been many years now that genre titles are being published in the more traditional paperback and hardcover size book. A traditional publishing schedule for a fiction title might look like this – first version, hardcover; a year later, trade paperback; anywhere from 6 months to several years later, a mass market version; somewhere in that span of time, possibly a collector’s edition. And don’t get me started on reprints with new covers, etc.! A book can have a thousand different publishing lives if it’s what’s been identified as a classic or if it’s having a hot moment. Anyway, those are the standard formats for most adult titles. 

Young adult or YA and middle grade titles also have hardcover and trade paperback editions, and though publishers might play around with the trim size of book, YA and middle grade are usually not published in mass market format. Graphic novels come in various trim sizes and formats, including hard cover paper over board, hardcover with dust jacket, and paperback, and books called beginning readers or leveled readers – those can be books that are literally printed with level 1, 2, 3, or more on them and are in a spinner rack, or they can be books intended for the age 7-to-9-year-old learning to read on their own, shorter chapter book-style books – often have trim sizes that are the same if they’re going into those leveled reader spinners, but can also be published in varying trim sizes and book formats if they’re not intended to be part of one of those leveled reader series – I’m thinking of the “I Can Read” series that goes into spinners vs the Elephant and Piggie series by Mo Willems (which has its own spinner) vs the Mercy Watson books by Kate DiCamillo and Chris Van Dusen. Picture books and board books also go rogue on the sizing and format. A hardcover picture book with a dust jacket is often a larger trim size and price than a paper-over-board picture book, both of which are going to be more expensive than a paperback picture book. And board books come in all kinds of exciting sizes and shapes and interactive elements nowadays; I personally believe board books are one of the most creative book art forms out there today. Activity books and work books are mostly paperback with some hardcovers thrown in there, and while hardcover cookbooks have their own binding style to make them lay flat, they’re still just considered hardcover or paperback in format. I’m sure there are a million exceptions people will think of, but I’m trying to give a general overview here, so I’m going to stop there for describing general physical book formats.
There are also audiobooks and e-books, of course. These are both book products that you can sell your customers, and they’re also formats you can explore when reading books on your own. By that, I mean you can sell them to your customers thanks to Libro.FM for audiobooks and Bookshop.org for e-books (you do need to open a wholesale bookstore account with each of those places, but then you can direct your customers to purchase their audiobooks and e-books from your Libro.FM and Bookshop.org stores), but you can also receive free ALCs, or advanced listening copies, of frontlist audiobooks that publishers select for booksellers via Libro.FM each month, and you can download DRCs, or digital review copies, which are free e-book versions of frontlist titles that publishers make available for booksellers on Edelweiss (or NetGalley, but Edelweiss is the primary book ordering ecosystem for independent bookstores, so I recommend using them over NetGalley once you become a bookseller). Publishers will also send out ARCs or arcs, while I’m defining book-related acronyms, also known as Advanced Reading Copies or sometimes called galleys, to bookstores and specific booksellers. Picture book advanced copies are also called ARCs, but they used to be called F&Gs, which stood for folded & gathered, which was essentially the different sections of picture book pages that hadn’t been bound into a completed book yet. That’s more of an old school book person term; not many still use it in a bookselling context, but sometimes it’s fun to learn things like that. The publishers make ALCs, DRCs, and ARCs available to booksellers because they want you to read upcoming titles, they want you to submit reviews for them to the Indie Next List put together by the ABA, they want you to choose them for staff picks, for upcoming book clubs, for events, for preorder campaigns, and ultimately, they want you to sell the heck out of them and then report your sales so that the books can become bestsellers. The more you as a bookseller interact with a publisher by telling them you love their books, you’ve chosen their books for store opportunities, etc., the more likely the publisher is to send you advanced copies of your favorite author’s not-yet-published titles, and that is one of the very best perks of independent bookselling.

Intro: What is handselling? How much do I sell a book for? Should I open a brick-and-mortar, a bookmobile, or a pop-up shop? How do I host author events? And most importantly, how can I turn my passion for books and reading into a profitable and sustainable, independently-owned, small business?

Welcome to The Business of Bookselling, a live-workshop and interview-style podcast about business and book culture. This podcast uses a diversity, equity, and inclusion lens, combined with triple-bottom line sustainability business principles, to offer actionable advice, bookselling basics, and deep dives into the book ecosystem.

Learn from bookstore, business, and book industry experts about how to turn your book-loving dreams into a profitable and sustainable book-selling business.

Transcript:

I want you to close your eyes. Not if you’re driving, obviously, or doing something else that needs your eyes to be open to be safe, but if you’re able, close your eyes. And even if you’re not able to do that, you can do this next part – imagine your dream bookstore. Imagine your favorite bookstore or the bookstore where you’ve spent the most time throughout your life. I’m going to guess that this bookstore you’re imagining is what’s known in the retail industry as a brick-and-mortar space. That means there’s a physical location with four walls and a roof and a bunch of nearly floor-to-ceiling bookshelves all around it; in other words, a pretty traditional bookstore space. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with having that vision! And you can open your eyes at this point, if you haven’t already. 

But sometimes, some times, people with dreams of opening an independent bookstore of their own don’t have access to a traditional brick-and-mortar space. Sometimes the right physical space isn’t available in the general location you want to open, or sometimes you don’t have access to the financial capital you need to invest in starting up a bookstore business that is the size of a 1,200 square foot or larger physical space, or sometimes you want to test your consumer market before committing to a full space, or sometimes your community would be best served by not having a brick-and-mortar physical space, but instead a mobile space that would travel to serve different areas of your community rather than requiring the community to come to the one physical space, or sometimes a traditional brick-and-mortar space has unique qualities or characteristics about it that requires some outside-the-four-white-walls-retail-box-space thinking. Those unique alternatives, whether born of dreams or necessity, those nontraditional bookstores, are a type of business that’s recently been termed “Novel Models” by Candice Huber, owner of Tubby & Coo’s Traveling Bookshop, one of those very novel modes. Yes, the term “novel models” is a pun, but it’s so much more than that – it’s a bookstore business that fits your current set of circumstances. 

Let’s be honest here – novel models are usually born out of necessity, and that necessity is most often a lack of access to traditional funding due to systemic injustices that have made generational wealth, educational opportunities, amassing capital, and access to financial resources harder to attain and obtain. If you had access to capital for your business, if you didn’t need to draw a salary from day one as a single person to support your entire family (however many people that may be), if you didn’t have a significant debt load due to higher education costs, if you weren’t the kind of person who, as an adult, has created community, lived in community, and shared resources with your community, you would probably open up that 3,000 square foot bookstore, cat cafe, and yarn store tomorrow. But in reality, novel models are most often owned and operated by people from traditionally underrepresented, marginalized, and historically excluded groups, such as people of color, members of the LGBTQIA2S+ community, immigrants, neurodivergent people, differently abled and disabled folks, and people who are from historically and generationally impoverished communities, who often don’t have access to capital, who don’t have generational wealth, who do carry a significant debt load, and who are often taking care of friends, family, and community with the limited resources they do have, instead of hoarding them. This is why novel models are SO important, this is why novel models are legitimate bookstore business models, and whether you’re considering a novel model as a stepping-stone or as your final end game, there is absolutely no shame and only celebration attached to you creating a bookstore business that fits the life you are currently and aspire to be living.

To help support you on that bookstore dream journey, in this podcast episode, I’m going to try to describe some of the different types of novel models that exist so that as you consider what type of bookstore reality best fits your bookstore owning dream, even if you haven’t experienced one of these in person, hopefully hearing about them will provide some additional suggestions for how to turn that dream into a reality.

Here we go:

Bookmobiles

Whether you’re riding a bike, driving a van, bringing a bus, or have outfitted a truck or trailer, if your shop is on wheels, you’ve got a bookmobile! A lot of libraries have these, even today, and sometimes you purchase decommissioned ones online. Businesses on wheels really exploded with the food truck revolution, and while you can certainly retrofit a space for yourself, you can also pay a ton of money (it’s most likely worth it) to have an expert build one out for you. You’ll see this as a theme of most of these types of novel models – they can be done on a shoestring budget that shouldn’t stress your personal finances too much to get started, OR you can choose to spend a lot of money investing in the various accoutrement for that specific type of store model. Up to you, but just beware that if you are choosing a specific store model due to budget, it is easy to quickly blow past that if you’re not careful.

Boutique Locations

This is having a shop within another shop, but is different from popping up in that this space is permanent/semi-permanent. So you may have a boutique location inside a coffee shop, for instance, or a grocery store, where you have carved out a specific retail merchandising space for your own products, in addition to whatever type of business the leaseholder of the space is running. Most of the time, your product is run through the larger store till, and then you’re paid a percentage of the retail price for your product. You may pay rent on the space, or you may pay a percentage of your product sales to the leaseholder. Some boutiques have their own register and staff that share the space. Some bookstores have multiple boutique locations! For instance, at one point through River Dog Book Co., I had a used book boutique location inside a consignment shop, a selection of new releases at a coffee shop, books on crafting at a craft store, books on essential oils and organic lifestyles at the CBD shop, and I still did pop-ups around town.

Co-ops

In short, co-ops, or co-operatively owned businesses, are member-owned. It’s a little like having stakeholders and selling shares only less “corporate America” feeling. Every co-op member gets a voice (if they choose to use it) in how the business is run, but the business can still create a day-to-day management hierarchy and have membership meetings on large decisions instead of having 200 members mill about looking for something to do every day. I used to belong to a grocery co-op, for instance, and got a little monthly newsletter, a discount on my groceries purchased there, could attend a quarterly membership meeting, and occasionally got paid a small slice of profits from the business earnings. Co-ops, while having a board and running similarly to non-profits, are not, in fact, 501(c)3 nonprofit organizations.

Employee-owned

Like a lot of things in the bookselling and business worlds, this is a catch-all term for a broad concept that can look like many different things. At its core, an employee-owned business is a business in which the employees own shares of the business. These are sometimes called ESOPs (employee stock ownership plans), so if you’re looking to learn more about the various types of employee-owned businesses out there, search for that term. Project Equity (https://project-equity.org/) is a great resource for finding out more about how to structure a business of this type.

Events-only

What’s fun about this one is that some bookstores choose not to do events because they don’t work in their community, while other bookstores choose to be events-only businesses, because that’s what they love to do best and they’re in a community that supports this model. This type of bookstore will both put together their own author events – often festivals or large panel events or even book clubs and school/adult bookfairs – at which they sell books, and they can also be the book provider for authors who tour or have events of various types (such as school author events or again, festivals, or even events the authors have put together themselves maybe at a library or a private home or for an organization) in the store’s service area. These bookstores may want to consider having non-returnable accounts with publishers, as they receive a larger discount this way; any books leftover from the event, they can make sure the author signs, put them into their store stock housed somewhere (usually these types of stores do not have a physical presence of any kind), and sell those autographed copies online. They can also offer the autographed copies up to other stores for them to sell; if they choose to do that, it’s customary to sell them to other stores at cost + shipping, the original store isn’t making a profit of their bookselling colleagues, but they are recouping losses and not losing money on the shipping.

Microspaces

I love this concept and wish more communities would create these types of opportunities for locally-owned businesses! Microspaces are exactly what they sound like – a very small space in which a bookseller can test out their idea, get started as a business, slowly grow their presence in the community, and not have such drastic overhead costs from a physical space before they can afford them. The size of the space can be everything from a few shelves to a few hundred square feet, but they all have one thing in common: they’re extremely curated spaces that offer only a select range of books in the physical stock. This could mean the store is focusing on a niche (more on that in the next section) or simply that they’re testing the concept of a store in that market area. Portkey Books in Coral Gables, FL is a great example of a microspace: they have about 180 square feet of bookstore space, but regularly participate in city-wide events, host book clubs, organize 300+ people midnight release parties, etc., as well as having a great website and vibrant social media presence. Small can be very mighty!

Multi-concept Store

A multi-concept store is a bookstore that is also a _______ store (you fill in the blank). This could be a bookstore-slash-yarn shop, -plant store, -cat cafe, etc. There are many bookstore cafes/coffee shops, bookstore wine bars, etc. already out there; the novel model angle comes in when making this concept more your own with your unique interest as the second (or third!) business concept that is part of your shop. This might feel like splitting hairs because a lot of bookstores regularly sell sidelines. So the concept of a book-and-toy store has been around forever and a lot of general interest “bookstores” (with no other “official” concept) sell everything from puzzles to stationary to chocolate to tote bags–how would a multi-concept store be different from this? It’s the intentionality of the store. If half the store is dedicated to fiber arts with cubbies for yarn and shelves of various types of hooks and needles and other fiber art supplies, and you as the owner want to call your shop Knit Two, Read One (or whatever, I made that up, feel free to use it if you like it or judge it as the worst name in existence), then your store is a bookstore-slash-fiber arts/yarn shop, and that’s a multi-concept store.

Niche Store

As promised in the previous definition, here is more information about a niche store. The definition of “niche” in this context (thanks to Dictionary.com) is, “a specialized segment of the market for a particular kind of product or service.” In this case, that product is, of course, books, and niche would refer to a romance-only bookstore, children’s only bookstore, LGBTQIA2S+-only bookstore, etc. etc. etc. Basically if the focus of the bookstore is more concentrated than “general bookstore,” that’s a niche bookstore. That niche can be as inclusive (genre-only) or narrow (cookbook-only) as you the owner would like it to be. Sometimes niche stores develop out of market demand – a general bookstore could find that they have a readership that leans more towards a specific genre, and decide to reduce or remove sections that are not earning their keep so to speak (having poor sales figures) – or you could choose to launch a store that celebrates that one genre you specifically love and, like a siren, draw all the other specific-genre-loving-readers to your bookstore’s physical or metaphorical door. 

Nonprofits

Some bookstores operate as nonprofit entities. Some for-profit bookstores choose to have affiliated nonprofit organizations they start to support their events program or their community activism or their school visits, etc. Opening any business is not for the faint-hearted, and a nonprofit does have a few additional bells and whistles that will need to be considered before officially launching one, such as deciding which type of nonprofit your organization is going to be (there are more options than the standard 501(c)3, and a different 501(c)# could be better for what you’re try to accomplish) and putting together a board. Of course, there are also some potential perks, such as grants – but those are tricky to apply for, not guaranteed, and come with a lot of reporting rules as well. The National Council of Nonprofits is a great way to find out more–and it should be noted that federal legislations around nonprofit entities often change with each new president, so what may sound like a good idea under one president may not always have the same federal support and benefits under another. Of course, the same could be said for small, independently-owned businesses.

Online/Virtual-only

This model is the one that usually gets the most pushback from traditionalists, when considering the concept of an independent bookstore. People will throw around words like “third space” (you can read more about that here, if that’s a new term for you) and say that an online/virtual-only bookstore can’t possible be creating the same type of community as a bookstore with a physical presence. But as the pandemic showed us – and I personally believed this was true long before the COVID pandemic began in 2020 – community can be created anywhere and everywhere, and online is certainly no different. That all sounds very altruistic, however, and the truth is, if you sell books online, even if it’s on eBay or on “the platform that shall not be named”*, you’re a bookseller, and it’s your choice how much or how little community around books you want to build or even be a part of. Some stores that are online/virtual only do everything from having Discord and other server groups, online book clubs, virtual events, etc., while others are truly focused on solely selling/reselling titles, and neither of those are wrong, and both are still independent bookstores. I’ll continue to state this until you’re tired of reading it – no one else can decide if your bookstore is a bookstore other than you. THAT SAID, the American Booksellers Association (ABA) does differentiate between their “Online Bookstore Members” and their “Bookstore Members (Core)” (among others, such as “Used Bookstore Members” and “Provisional Members”), so that’s something to keep in mind when deciding if you want to join the ABA and make use of their resources (find out more here: https://bookweb.org/membership). 

Pop-Ups

A pop-up bookstore is one that does not have a permanent physical space, but “pops up” at various opportunities, such as fairs and markets, within other businesses (such as coffee shops or any other business with a storefront willing to let you bring boxes of books and set up a table or other display) for a few hours or a few days, or, if in a physical space, is a temporary location with a clear end date (some business incubators offer spaces like these, some malls do this for empty storefronts over the holiday season, etc.). River Dog Book Co. has popped up in a women’s consignment boutique, a crafting store, an organic health-focused CBD store, at the Chamber of Commerce building for 3-day-long pop-ups where I outfitted the Chamber rentable room as a full-service bookshop for that length of time, at a Christmas market (no, it was not a “holiday” market, it was a full-on CHRISTMAS MARKET, and yes, I did bring generic winter books, Chanukah titles, etc.), and I’ve got my eye on a booth space at the local garden expo. Make no bones about it – these are a TON of work and while they can begin with nothing more than a foldable table, a selection of used books pulled of your own shelves, and a sheet from Walmart in one of your logo colors (ahem, personal experience talking here), they can also be a rather large investment in foldable/rollable shelving and/or additional fixtures, a tent that withstands various weather conditions (if you’re doing outside markets), crates or totes for moving books and merchandise around safely and securely, a vehicle that can fit everything you’re bringing, additional decor items such as rugs and chairs, signage, etc. Pop-ups are a great way to test a market, see what demand there is for what types of books/merchandise, and dip a toe into the bookselling water; it can also be extremely lucrative if you focus on doing hundreds of markets a year and make this your entire business model. Basically, it’s a great place to get started and feel out where you want to go next with your bookselling journey, if a brick-and-mortar, for whatever reason, is out of your reach at the moment.

Traditional brick-and-mortar with novel aspects

Can a traditional brick-and-mortar space be a novel model? Absolutely it can! In the first place, some of the above types of stores exist as brick-and-mortars (such as microspaces, boutique spaces, niche stores, micro-concepts, etc.). If your bookstore is general interest in books but has any kind of additional novel model aspect to it, you’re more than welcome to consider yourself a novel model because, why? Say it with me! Only YOU get to choose what type of bookstore you are!

Clearly there is no one set definition for what a novel model bookstore is, so if you’d like to consider your personal bookstore dream a novel model, you are welcome to!

Website: https://businessofbookselling.com/
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Links + resources mentioned in the episode:

Intro: What is handselling? How much do I sell a book for? Should I open a brick-and-mortar, a bookmobile, or a pop-up shop? How do I host author events? And most importantly, how can I turn my passion for books and reading into a profitable and sustainable, independently-owned, small business?

Welcome to The Business of Bookselling, a live-workshop and interview-style podcast about business and book culture. This podcast uses a diversity, equity, and inclusion lens, combined with triple-bottom line sustainability business principles, to offer actionable advice, bookselling basics, and deep dives into the book ecosystem.

Learn from bookstore, business, and book industry experts about how to turn your book-loving dreams into a profitable and sustainable book-selling business.

Transcript:

Once upon a time, someone had the brilliant idea to open a bookstore. For the purposes of this podcast episode, it’s not really all that important when and why and where someone else did that. The important part is when and why and where YOU want to open an independent bookstore.

There is no one right answer, but I highly recommend having a think on it and writing it down for future reference. You want to know what the wrong answer is? “To make money.” This is probably the biggest, not very well kept, secret of independent bookselling: it’s a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad way to make a living. (If you get that book reference, give yourself some bookseller bonus points.) Making money as an independent bookstore is not strictly impossible. Just highly improbable. Quite unlikely. The odds are stacked against you. You’re probably getting the point. There are many legitimate financial, circumstantial, and industry-specific reasons why that is the reality, which I will go into in a later episode, I’m sure, but for now, let’s proceed as if you’ve taken me at my word – no one opens an independent bookstore solely for the money. So, back to the original question: why do you want to? 

If you can’t answer that question immediately, that’s okay! This podcast episode is here to help. Here are some questions for you to consider when wanting to open your own independent bookstore:

I’m going to repeat that big one – WHY do you want to open an independent bookstore? – and – What type of store were you thinking of opening?

When I say type of store, if you’re thinking, “Bookstore. Duh.” that’s not quite what I mean. I mean get more specific! Spe-ci-fi-ca-ly, what type of store?

If you’re not quite sure or if you already feel overwhelmed making that decision, would you consider purchasing an existing bookstore for a more turnkey operation where not every single decision has to be brand new and on your shoulders?

Here’s something else to consider – WHERE do you want to open your bookstore? If there isn’t one already in that specific location, why not? If there IS one there already, will the consumer market support more than one? Some markets can absolutely support more than one independent bookstore, so simply because the answer is yes, doesn’t mean you’re out of luck. Instead, consider, if there’s already one or more than one bookstore in the area already, what are the others carrying and how will you set yourself apart (used vs new, adult vs kids, genre vs general, etc.)?

Speaking of which, what ARE you planning on carrying in your bookstore? Again, books, duh, but are those new books, used books, remainders? Are you going to carry sidelines, also known as gifts, stuffed animals, toys, greeting cards, art supplies, t-shirts, tote bags, etc., puppies? (Don’t carry puppy mill puppies, please, but do consider holding pet adoption events.)

Here’s a fun question for ya – How do you plan on funding the opening of your independent bookstore? Do you need to start drawing a salary from day 1 or can you wait 2-5 years before paying yourself a living wage?

And finally, do you enjoy spending time with your family and friends, or are you okay with the concept of never having a day off again as long as you live?

If you don’t know the answers to some (or even all) of these questions, or you now find yourself overwhelmed by the entire concept and don’t really want to continue listening – good! That’s literally the whole point of this podcast. I want to help you be as prepared as you can be prior to opening your independent bookstore so that you have a greater chance of actually making enough money to succeed (and by succeed, I mean you can afford to stay open and in business), so put on those big girl/boy/trans/nonbinary/genderqueer panties/pantaloons/boxers/briefs/thongs/underpants/undies/unmentionables/intimates absolutely no judgement whatever you want to call them or wear – or not – these can be metaphorical if that’s your thing, but either way, gird those loins, keep listening, and don’t panic (more bookseller bonus points for you if you get that reference, too). 

In the many many conversations I’ve had with new bookstore owners and bookstore owning dreamers, I hear time and time again that one of the scariest, most confusing parts of business is understanding the actual legal business pieces of it. We’re going to try to gently and in an overview fashion dive into some of those details, but first, a huge disclaimer that I am not a lawyer, business advisor, a registered accountant, a financial advisor, or in any other way officially qualified to give business or financial advice; I am simply presenting factual information and you will need to do your own research and/or work with a professional to make these decisions for yourself and your business.

Now, on to the business of bookselling!

 If I were to ask you – what type of legal structure is your business going to be – do you have a ready answer? 

On one hand, you may want to become a nonprofit to apply for grants or register as an LLC in order to protect your personal assets. But you must also consider how you plan to have your business pay taxes. That is because a legal business structure does not always mean that you pay your taxes using that same structure. Some business types allow you to pay taxes as if you’re a different type of business entity, and some states recognize certain types of business structures differently than other states, so what state your business is incorporated in matters just as much as what business structure you’ve chosen. As if that wasn’t confusing enough, some business structures require a separate registration at the federal level, in addition to registering the business at the state level.

Because this can all be really complicated, again, I cannot stress enough the importance of having a business lawyer, accountant, and/or business advisor to help you with this. Your nearest Small Business Development Center (SBDC) should have free appointments available with business advisors who can give you free advice (did I mention these are free??) and they can also recommend local lawyers/accountants who can provide paid services, and your local Chamber of Commerce should have people among their members who are lawyers/accountants who you can reach out to as well about their paid services. So you can always start with the free advice and then move on to more specific paid professionals if you need more assistance.

In a different episode, I’m going to go over the different types of bookstore businesses that I first asked you about, like pop-up, brick-and-mortar, bookstore/cafe/yarn shop, etc., but right now, I’m going to give you really basic information about legal business structures, and then you can find out more about them on your own by going to irs.gov, sba.gov, or that can be your first question that you ask your new business advisor when you make your free appointment at your nearest SBDC. Let’s begin!

If you are planning on going into business with anyone, please make sure your business partner(s) have the patience, understanding of your vision, and supportive nature of my parents encouraging their daughter’s origami stand instead of the more traditional American lemonade stand I opened as a 9-year-old (SO ahead of its time, I know. I’m sure people would flock to my origami stand today unlike how they did NOT in the early 90s…I digress). If they don’t have that, they better be bringing some other VERY good assets, connections, and knowledge to the table to make that risk worthwhile. Because while it might seem incredibly daunting to open a bookstore all on your own, it’s even worse trying to open a bookstore with the wrong business partner. And in this scenario, the wrong business partner includes predatory lending practices from banks and other financial institutions or potential funders.

There is absolutely no shame in starting off small, doing pop-up events, renting a micro space (300 square feet or less, roughly), or coming up with a different creative way to dip your toe into independent bookselling. Other options for avoiding partnership structures include being rich, romantically partnering with/marrying a rich person and gaining access to their money to start your business, winning the lottery, drawing up individual contracts for personal loans from friends and family members (sort of like unofficial crowdfunding), actual crowdfunding through websites like Kickstarter, GoFundMe, Kiva, and IFundWomen, and applying for grants if your store is a nonprofit or if you find a grant applicable to your business structure. We can also sneak in buying an existing store in an owner-financed circumstance, where the original owner essentially turns over the keys to you for the running of the business as the new owner and then the original owner takes a salary or percentage of profits from the store until receiving the agreed-upon amount to cover the purchase/sale of the store by you. (While there are many ways that scenario can be constructed, in this case, the original owner would not be a partner in the running of the business, but would simply receive payments. There are, of course, ways to construct this type of business sale where the original owner is still involved in the running of the business with the new owner, and this type of long term handover can occasionally prove to be very beneficial for new-to-independent bookselling bookstore owners.)

Don’t get me wrong – business partnerships can be lucrative, supportive, energizing, and affirming. Owning a bookstore can be a multigenerational family enterprise like Oblong Books in upstate New York, or can bring a couple closer together like Cavalier House Books in Louisiana. It can be a cooperative structure with many partners (like Raven Bookstore in Kansas) or a friendly financial and legal arrangement between friends/co-workers/colleagues, like Loyalty Bookstores in Washington DC and Maryland). Nonprofit bookstores have entire communities as partners (Bookmarks in North Carolina or R.E.A.D. in Virginia). Some bookstores have silently lurking partners, occasionally in the form of a single person or group of private investors – I would name some but that would give away the whole silent, which often means secret, investor part. Some bookstores are set up within other existing spaces, and the partnership structure looks even more different there, with rent and profit sharing coming into the mix (La Revo Books in Wisconsin has boutique locations within another business and they share spaces with other businesses, in addition to doing pop-ups). And then, of course, many many bookstores have financial partners in the form of traditional or specialty bank loans; those lending institutions are partners in the business, too. But those last two examples (setting up shop within an existing business and bank loans) don’t really impact the legal business structure of your bookstore, and that’s really the first thing you need to decide, so let’s dive back into that: 

Now, let’s move on to corporation structures. A corporation, in general, offers stronger protection for the owners from personal liability, BUT it costs more to form one and is slightly more complicated to maintain. There are also different tax implications for making a profit as a corporation than as an LLC; basically corporations pay income tax and sometimes the profits are even taxed twice – once when the profit is made (called an entity tax) and once when profits are paid to shareholders (so this would be on their personal taxes, so called owner tax). That said, a corporation is the best business structure when trying to raise capital for a business, as it also allows for different classifications of stock amongst shareholders, Board of Directors, officers, etc. Also, there are legal ways around double taxation if you work with a good accountant. Here are those corporation types:

If your head isn’t already spinning, here’s some more information that may make it start: the C Corp, S Corp, and nonprofit legal business structures can also be tax structures, separately from the business structure. So an LLC can file taxes as someone self-employed OR as an S Corp, if the business is arranged to do so. See what I mean about talking to a professional to get some advice on what would work best for you?

Take a deep breath in. Let it out. Do it again a few times. 

Now here’s the shortcut (and again, I’m not telling you to do this because I’m not a licensed business or financial person, I’m just sharing common practices): most independent bookstores start out as LLCs and pay their federal business taxes through a Schedule C form when they file their personal taxes around April 15 (or before, if you’re an early bird, or after, if you’ve gotten an extension, but really, the first three months of the year are usually the slowest in indie bookselling, so I’d recommend doing it when you’re supposed to, if you’re at all able). Though it can get a little messy, if you decide to change your business structure later, you can do so. You can turn your for profit business into a non-profit business, for instance. You can also run multiple businesses under one public-facing heading – for instance, Bethany Beach Books in Delaware runs a bookstore under that name and also a very successful subscription box service under the name The Book Drop (that’s a separate business, but is publicly linked to Bethany Beach Books), and many bookstores have both a for profit side and a non-profit side for events and programs, such as Dragonfly Books in Iowa. I cannot stress this enough – getting some professional business advice for how to make that work is most definitely advised!

BUT if all you want to do is start selling books tomorrow and the rest will figure itself out, save up about $300 for various filing fees, and here are the first five steps you need to take:

Quick note here: this does mean you have to decide on a name for your business…

While we all want to choose the most perfect name on the face of the planet for our very special and unique bookselling business, there’s something very important you need to know: if you do, for whatever reason, decide to change your mind about the business name, you can do so without registering as a new business entirely. This phenomenon is called a DBA or doing business as. It’s also known as a fictitious business name, an assumed name, or a trade name. So legally your business would be called one thing, while publicly, you would be doing business as a different entity name. What this looks like in practice is that you can register your business as Aunt Mary’s Curiosity Shoppe LLC, and years later decide to call it Uncle Jim’s Book Barn, and all you need to do is file the DBA update with your state (sometimes also with your county; AGAIN, check with your SBDC or your favorite search engine for the specifics required for where your business is registered). All of this is to say that if you haven’t come up with the most perfect special name for your bookstore business but you still want to get started, it’s okay! Pick one, register it, and you can always do a DBA later.

(Also again, I’m not a business lawyer, but common practice does have people dropping parts of their legal name, such as the LLC after the business name, on websites, business cards, social media, etc., and a DBA generally isn’t filed for that. For instance, a bookstore might be called The Book Shoppe LLC on legal paperwork, but go by simply The Book Shoppe publicly, without the LLC part.)

So what do you want to call your store? It can be traditional, like Your Name Booksellers. It can be place-based, such as any number of Main Street Books locations or Montana Book Co. in, of all places, Montana. It can be whimsical, such as The Wandering Jellyfish Bookshop in Colorado, or it can mean something special to you, such as Green Feather Book Company in Oklahoma.

In this age of social media, however, one big thing to consider is whether your social media handles are available. But even this isn’t a deal breaker – if your chosen name is taken on social media, try adding location initials or something else to stand out; for instance The Haunted Bookshop in Mobile, AL and in Iowa City, IA both include their city names in their Instagram handles for ease of recognition. Whatever you choose, I always recommend trying to get the same handle across all social media channels, even if you don’t plan on using all the social media channels, for ease of customer recognition and future tagging purposes.

Okay, back to what’s now no longer the super quick version of how to open an independent bookstore.

The third thing to do is to apply for your federal and state tax ID numbers.

Your federal tax ID number is also called your Employer Identification Number (aka EIN or FEIN) and you will be asked for this number roughly seven trillion times over the course of your business lifetime, so I highly recommend when you get this number that you have at least a PDF copy of the paperwork saved on your computer and a printed copy of it in an easily-accessible file somewhere near your desk.

For your federal tax ID number, IRS.gov has an EIN assistance tool for applying for this number AND a helpful phone number to call if assistance is needed.

For your state tax ID number, again use your favorite search engine to look up “How to get a state tax ID number in [state]” or read through the website you’ve already found for what your state requires in this department when you registered your LLC. Keep in mind that each state is different! In the state of Wisconsin, I had to complete a Business Tax Registration with the Department of Revenue AND I had to register with the Wisconsin Department of Financial Institutions; I pay taxes to the Department of Revenue on a quarterly basis AND I have to file an annual report with the Department of Financial Institutions every year to let them know my business is still operating. That’s all in addition to filing my personal and business federal tax returns.

#4 – Apply for any state licensing and permits that you need.

Because bookselling is a retail business, many states have some kind of seller’s permit that’s required. Again, search “seller’s permit, your state” in a search engine for how to get this for your state.

When opening accounts with publishers (and other vendors), you’ll also be required to submit a Sales and Use Tax Exemption Certificate (sometimes called a Resale & Tax Exempt Certificate, or something similar), which allows you, a retailer, to purchase from the publisher at a wholesale cost without paying tax on the original items (so you are technically in this scenario only tax exempt as a for-profit business – most nonprofits are tax exempt as well) so that you can resell them in your shop and collect sales tax from your customers at that time. Again, the search engine is your friend; if you haven’t already been pointed to this by whatever websites you’ve already been on, type in “Sales and Use Tax Exemption Certificate [your state]” and one will come up; you’ll want to fill out the “Purchaser” part of the document, and send that in to every publisher for them to fill out the “Seller” part of the document and keep it on file for you when you open your publisher account.

If you plan to have a bookstore/cafe or other type of hybrid business, other local, state, and federal permits may be required. Also, even if you don’t offer regular food or beverage, you can also get one-off permits for serving drinks at a special event. Some municipalities may also require permits for large events, say if you’re having an outdoor courtyard event with a local author reading and live music. At some point, it would probably behoove you to explore the wild and wonderful world of municipal permitting for your area to make sure you’re in compliance with everything. But you can do that later.

Lastly, open a business bank account

I recommend banking locally, if at all possible – what a shock, I know, to recommend local – but the most important thing is to avoid fees. When looking for a business bank account, I double-check if there’s a minimum balance I need to keep in the account without a fee, if there’s a deposit limit (either daily or monthly dollar amount, and also how many total deposits can be made in a month), if there are any transaction fees, and if there are any fees for using the debit card at a non-local bank ATM location (in case I travel for bookselling work), AND if there’s a no-fee credit card I’m able to apply for via the bank that can help me with my business (for instance, earning cash back or airline miles that can be spent on work travel to conferences, etc. – make that system work for you, my friends!). Opening a business bank account is the single most important thing you can do to avoid co-mingling your personal and business assets and causing yourself ALL KINDS OF HEADACHES when doing taxes or, heaven forbid, if you’re ever audited.

Now you’ve decided on your legal entity type, registered your business (and in doing so, chose a name, which is kind of a sneaky extra thing I slid in there), applied for federal and state tax ID numbers and any state licensing and permits you needed, and finally, opened a new business bank account –

Congratulations! You’re now in the bookselling business!

Website: https://businessofbookselling.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bizofbkselling

Links + resources mentioned in the episode:

It is a truth universally acknowledged that all cities, towns, and even neighborhoods are in need of an independent bookstore. And yet, there is no one single way to accomplish this. But, there are some universal truths about opening an independent bookstore, in America at least, that each new bookstore owner should acknowledge. And that is where this podcast episode comes in. Welcome to The Business of Bookselling: The First Five Things to do when starting to consider opening an independent bookstore. 

So now that you know the first five things to do once you’ve had the idea to open an independent bookstore, can you guess the most frequently asked question I get asked from people with this idea? “What books should I carry?” 

My answer is going to give you a little bit of bonus information for things to explore and start doing. 

Start with the books you yourself love to read, because that is what you know the best and you can use those books to practice what’s called handselling – placing a book in someone’s hand, excitedly telling them about it, so that they want to purchase this book that they didn’t know about before you told them about it. That’s essentially what being a bookseller is – putting the right book in the right hands for the right reader. Over and over and over again until the end of time. If that doesn’t sound exciting to you, you might want to start thinking about exactly why you want to open an independent bookstore. I’ll dive into that a little deeper in another episode, but in the meantime, if you begin with the books you love to read – in my case, much of my first season of pop-ups had inventory that I pulled off my own shelves at home, and I know I’m not alone in that – and then read through these industry newsletters and pay attention to things like the independent bookselling and national bestseller lists (each regional association does send out their own weekly bestseller list, and you can Google things like the New York Times, USA Today, etc. bestseller lists), national book awards, like the American Library Association (ALA) awards, the actual National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and others, and then keep an eye out for other books that are being talked about in the general zeitgeist – various celebrity book clubs, for instance, or movies and TV shows that are based on books, things like that – you’ll be able to pick and choose the titles that you want to carry that best fit your bookstores’s niche and the needs of your community.

Now, all of that said, here’s a very important piece of advice I want to leave you with: don’t let anyone – myself or any of the other wonderful, knowledgeable, and experienced booksellers you may talk to or who are featured on this podcast, or anyone else you go to for advice, or people you didn’t go to for advice but will still give it to you – tell you how to run your store. That’s what makes this industry so beautiful. Whatever distinctive ideas, partnerships, book clubs, decor, events, etc. you have or want to do in the future to make your store unique? That’s the whole point of independent bookselling. It’s YOUR bookstore, and you can do with it what you want to. Welcome to the community.

Website: https://businessofbookselling.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bizofbkselling

Links mentioned in the episode:

Bookselling Facebook Groups to Join (search by the group name in Facebook, if the link isn’t working):

Bookselling Facebook Groups to Join that are Region-Specific:

Bookselling Facebook Groups to Join That Are Point-of-Sale System-Specific:

Welcome to The Business of Bookselling with BrocheAroe, a live-workshop and interview-style podcast about business and book culture. This podcast uses a diversity, equity, and inclusion lens, combined with triple-bottom line sustainability business principles, to offer actionable advice, bookselling basics, and deep dives into the book ecosystem.

Transcript: My name is BrocheAroe Fabian, and I am a bookseller. For over 15 years, I have turned my love of reading into a book industry career, working at one museum library, three publishing companies, and five bookstores, teaching English and Creative Writing, becoming a freelance editor, writer, bookstore consultant, and sensitivity reader, all while earning two degrees and a certificate, and finally opening my own independent bookstore, River Dog Book Co., in 2018. With all of that experience, I thought I knew what I was doing, but since then, I have learned so much more about business in general, the bookselling industry specifically, and I still have a lot of bookstore goals I’m working toward reaching in my future.

At some point during my bookselling journey, my commitment to cultivating community met my desire to share knowledge, and the idea for creating accessible and inclusive content about the world of bookselling was born. I want to help other people make their independent bookstore dreams come true in a way that recognizes that we all begin this journey at different places, with different resources, serving different communities, and with different goals in mind. There is no one right way of opening an independent bookstore, so I am here to facilitate the transfer of bookselling knowledge from people in the industry to people who want to become part of the industry, in a way that is accessible for everyone.

Join me and my equally book-obsessed and industry savvy friends as we explore the vast and varied ecosystem of the book industry, from the nuts and bolts of opening an independent bookstore to the creation of a book as a product worthy of selling in the first place! My guests will be experts in their field and newbies learning along the way, fellow booksellers and publishing executives, writers and illustrators, and other industry stakeholders and thought leaders you may never have heard of. What’s the one thing we all have in common? We’re all dedicated, in one way or another, to the sales pipeline of one very specific product: the book. Welcome to The Business of Bookselling.

Website: https://businessofbookselling.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bizofbkselling