Direct to Consumer Sales

Last month brought sad news that another national bookstore chain went out of business. This time, Family Christian Stores, the largest U.S. retailer of Christian books and merchandise, closed all of its locations. Executives throughout the industry, both mainstream and religious, hated to see another big brick-and-mortar chain go under. The sting of Borders closing…

Selling books to corporate buyers offers independent publishers an enormous – and somewhat untapped -- opportunity for increased book sales. But many book publishers fail to approach this segment because they are unfamiliar with the steps involved in the sales process. Once you understand how the system works, making a successful transition to large, non-returnable…

Bookstore sales dipped 1.0% in October compared to a year ago, according to preliminary estimates released this morning by the U.S. Census Bureau. Sales for the month were $774 million, down from $782 million in October 2015.

Riding Berlin trains, I'm often struck by the number of people reading actual books. In other cities I visit, subway commuters seem to universally stare at their phones these days. Is this due to some Luddite disdain for technology in the German capital? Or does it align with the fact that, after money, books are…

Paul McVeigh and Kirsty Logan are authors you may have heard of. Both of their debuts were published by Salt, an independent publisher. Paul McVeigh’s The Good Son was shortlisted for a bunch of awards, and won the Polari first book prize this year. Kirsty Logan’s The Rental Heart and Other Fairytales won three awards…

A funny thing happened on the way to the future: the book didn’t get left behind, after all. That’s a functional if simplistic interpretation of what the more-than 550 attendees at The Bookseller’s annual FutureBook Conference in London on Friday (December 2) found themselves hearing. Now deep into the digital shakedown, the industry seems to be coming…

Amazon is debuting its new ‘Amazon Go’ stores, and Fortune’s Andrew Nusca and Robert Hackett are here to give their takes.

Making a large-quantity book sale (5,000 copies or more) to corporate buyers typically entails a formal presentation describing how your content can help the company in some way. You can improve your chances of making the sale with an analogy to the game of baseball. In any one game there may be several different pitchers…

Amazon quietly began selling books in its brick-and-mortar Seattle store, Amazon Books, at list price early this fall. When the store opened last November, all books were sold at Amazon.com’s prices–often significantly less than the publisher-set list prices. With Amazon’s recent phase-out of list prices site-wide, the discrepancy is likely to continue. And after years…

Companies such as Doubleday and Scribner once led the way in combining bookselling and publishing. Now, a new generation of booksellers is getting in touch with its publishing side, including such booksellers-cum-publishers as Cleveland’s Guide to Kulchur, which publishes marginalized writers, and Las Vegas’s the Writer’s Block, which is about to launch a literary journal.…