26 stores and counting

I am feeling a lot better today, as no doubt, everyone will be relieved to hear, not least of all my long suffering partner Coran. He has been very good these past few weeks, and an absolute tower of strength and I do not give him the acknowledgement that he deserves. I will say it now though, I could not have done any of this without his love and support, and my life is so much richer for the fact that he is in it.

I had a look at the Gardners website yesterday then and tapped in my ISBN and found that they had 38 copies in stock. Waterstones in Dorchester then ordered 2 copies and the figure dropped down to 36. Then this morning I noticed that the figure was down again to 34. Where have those 2 little copies gone to? Have they gone to my local independent, or perhaps to Waterstones in Cheltenham, who emailed me today to say that they had received the information that I sent? No doubt all will be revealed in due course.

I do wish that when book stores placed orders they would let me know so that I could keep an up to date inventory of who has copies, as it erally would be very useful to know this. It would also help them as I would be able to target media approaches to those areas where the books are particularly well represented and doing well. I did try to explain this to the Manager of one of the branches I spoke to, but he insisted that I did not need to know. I do find this very strange indeed, as you would have thought they would welcome the chance to work with someone like myself who wants to target their approach accordingly. It seems not though.

Still, if Gardners have ordered 115 copies to date, and I have 34 now in stock, then that means that they have sold 81 copies so far - not bad for slightly less than 3 weeks. And these do not include copies sold early on in the month before the sor announcement was made, the figure for which I happen to know was another 11 copies. Then there are the library copies sold to Bertrams, and this is another moot point also, that libraries do not bother to let me know when they have ordered copies. Perhaps I will log on to the Public Lending Rights website and see if they have any information, as short of becoming a member of every public library in the UK, I will not know who has them and where the orders have come from !

So far then, there are 26 book stores that I definately know of who have copies, these are all listed on my new and improved website, but for those of you who are too lazy to click your mouse, I will list them here as well:

Borders - Whiteleys (Bayswater), Fleet Street (London), Lakeside, Wimbledon, Kingston-upon-Thames, Newbury, Uxbridge.

Waterstones - Aviemore, Barnstaple, Barnet, Belfast, Blackpool, Bluewater, Brentwood, Brighton, Chesham, Covent Garden, Coventry (Lower Precinct), Derby, Dorchester, Dorking, Epsom, Godalming, Kingston-upon-Thames (Bentalls Centre), Redhill, Staines.

Lets hope that these copies then start to sell, as the relevant Head Offices do keep on eye on such happenings and once this starts to happen, then the books do stand a very good chance of being shipped out to all stores countrywide. Now that would be worth writing about and may even get me into the Bookseller !

Musings on the book industry in general

I have some more news to report - my book is in the local library. Having spent a good deal of time last week Emailing various library authorities across the country, quite a few of them came back to say that they have either ordered, or will be considering my book at their next acquisitions meeting. When I contacted Surrey they came back to say that they already stocked the book. I was unaware of this, as although I contacted them a few months ago, before I published the new edition, they didn't get back to me with a response, so I naturally assumed they weren't interested, hence my second approach with the new edition. Imagine my surprise to find that my book is stocked in 2 Surrey libraries - Oxted and Weybridge. I asked them if it would be possible to get the books transferred nearer home, where people know me, and I was promised a call back from the librarian who is in charge of my genre (they have filed the book on the religious shelf). The call did not materialise, so yesterday I went into town to visit the gym, and popped into the library on the way.

It was then that I discovered that the Weybridge copy is out on loan. They tried then to get through to Oxted but it was engaged. I then asked if I could donate a copy to the local library, and they said they would be delighted to have it. I was unaware that I could I do this, since last time I asked, I am sure they said no. It seems that the reason for this may have been to do with cataloguing, since books that are not already listed with them (i.e. bought direct through the library service) have to be approved as suitable (e.g. no porn, terrorism threats, racism etc) and catalogued accordingly, which is time consuming. Because my book is already stocked by Surrey libraries, all this has already been done, so I can in theory, donate as many of those unsold first editions as they can take - to all the libraries in my area. And best of all, although I am giving the books away, they are not really free, since I will get the money back through public lending rights.

On another note though, I hear that Waterstone's are changing the way that they conduct their central buying process to allow them to confirm buying decisions three months ahead of publication date. This is very helpful to self publishers when the POD process takes around three months to begin with, and you do not have a publication date until the book is in your hand! As a result Waterstones are creating a buying timetable, including a buying week for each month's new titles, and moving from six monthly highlights presentations to tri-annual presentations where publishers present the key titles for each major season: Spring, Summer and Autumn/Christmas. Waterstones are cancelling all existing appointments and six monthly highlight presentations from late August onwards and re-scheduling according to their new timetable.

Since Waterstones are running behind they are asking publishers to present both January and February titles plus January to April highlights at the same time in the first window, which will be 28th August to 7th September. Publishers are also being asked to send in the AI sheets and spreadsheet grid for the month they are presenting to the relevant buying administrators one week prior to the start of each buying week. They will be unable to buy books without a correctly formatted grid. What a way to do business!

So by reducing the amount of face time that publishers have to present their new and upcoming titles, the greater the chance becomes of them being passed over. This decision then will do serious harm to the small and independent publishers, in particularly the self published author, who already has to jump through hoops in order to get a fair chance and get through the door. Thank goodness for sites like the Nothing Binding project. Is it any wonder that more and more people are turning away from the traditional book stores and buying online.

A busy week

I got back from Lundy around 10 days ago, and despite the strange weather (I have never seen the island so wet), a wonderful time was had. The paths were littered with puddles everywhere I walked, but my new boots proved to be waterproof despite their non-leather status (a true vegetarian would never wear dead animal skins on their feet). I missed 2 days because of high winds and torrential rain, but also had some lovely warm and sunny days, and came home suitably sun tanned and relaxed.

Since then it has been work, work and more work. I have decided that I can no longer sit around and wait for people to find my book, but have to be more proactive in telling them that it is out there. This week I have emailed every single library authority in the country asking them to order my book, and today I have also contacted each and every branch of Waterstones. At least 2 libraries have replied to say that they ordered copies - Surrey (where I live) and Westminster (in London), and several others are bringing it to their next acquisitions meeting. I also rang some local branches of Borders, and the Wimbledon branch have ordered some copies to be getting on with. Both Staines and Brighton look as if they might also be interested.

So, although this is a short entry and I have been away and not keeping this blog up to date, I have been extremely busy. The reviews have helped somewhat, but it is difficult to gauge the response when you don't know how people heard of you and where the book sales were made, but only get to see how many copies have been sold each month. There has been a definate upturn in visits to my website by Australians and New Zealanders since the Nexus review came out, so one can only hope that the same thing will happen once the North American edition hits the streets later this month. Oh well, back to those mailing lists ...

The local library

This morning Coran and I went into town to pay our poll tax, and on the way decided to go and join the local library. I thought that while I was there I would speak to them about getting my book into the library. They gave me the telephone number of their stockist to ring, which I have just done. I spoke to a very nice lady who sounded interested and asked me to email her some information on the book. She said they do prefer to buy them direct from wholesalers rather than from the author, and they have accounts with the 2 distributors that I am registered with, so that should certainly help ! It is not ultimately up to her though, but the librarians themselves. The first step though is to send her the information, so I about to do that. How exciting it will be then to see my book in the local library in a few weeks or months time. I have registred for PLR (public lending rights) so it will be another small, but nevertheless significant source of income.