Where is your book now? With a distributor? In a book store? Or, did it already die an early death after a few months?

New self-published authors often believe they need a distributor to sell a lot of books. They want to use Ingram or Baker & Taylor because they think they need to get their book into "brick and mortar" bookstores like Barnes and Noble.

Authors go through many hoops and snags to accomplish this-- what I call "traditional publishing nightmare" of inefficiency and lack of support for authors. Usually author only gets around 10% royalties and has to pay back all promotion expenses such as book signings. So many hoops, some give up. So many authors I speak with who have gone this route still have hundreds, even thousands of unsold copies littering up storage space. Talk about discouragement.

Distributors Can be Dangerous to Your Book's Health and Your Wallet

One author wrote, illustrated, and marketed six beautiful children's books. Her books were well reviewed and received. For some time, profits rolled in until her distributor went bankrupt, owing her $160,000. After she stopped crying, she decided to take her books on road—to local fairs and talks where she could KEEP all profits.

Distributors take quite a chunk of money from author's profits too. They charge author for storage, and when books are returned, author loses those sales, and has to pay distributor too. Authors lose from bookstores because their payment is late or unreliable. Some authors wait way beyond 90 days. In fact, many just don't get paid. Writers are not always good at collections either. These middlemen not only take most of author's profits, they cause much stress too.

How Can Self-Published Authors Distribute?

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Summary: Learn this easy, three step, guaranteed process to make your first sale --- and it doesn't matter what you're selling.

Category: Writing, Small Business

Words: 800

Get Your First Sale!

Copyright © 2003 by Angela Booth

Nothing beats joy of your first sale. You can plot, plan, market and dream all you want, but until you get that first sale, you're not sure that you have a real business. It's 25 years since I sold my first book to an international publisher. I walked on air for days. To my mind, because real writers wrote books, I was real writer at last.

Your first sale legitimizes what you're doing to others, and not least to yourself. When you've got that sale, you get a lot more than money: you get confidence, feedback, and ideas on how you can make next sale and next.

How do you make that first sale? Here's how:

=> One: Give yourself a deadline

Although I'd made writing sales I didn’t sell a book until I gave myself a deadline. I gave myself a long deadline, ten years. I didn’t need that long, it took a year. However setting a deadline turned selling a book from a dream into a goal. If I hadn't given myself a deadline, I would have fudged for years: making outlines, doing research, writing a chapter here and there, and convincing myself that I was trying to sell a book, when I wasn't doing anything of sort.

Give yourself a deadline to make your first sale. You'll know how long deadline should be. Don’t make it ten years unless it's something where you need to learn a lot of skills first before you can produce a product.

Your deadline must be serious. The ten years I gave myself was absolute cut-off date. If I hadn’t sold a book by then, I intended giving up writing book-length material forever.

=> Two: Ask for sale!