Wholesale Books: A Small Press Guide to Bookstores

Selling books wholesale means a bookstore buys your title at a discount off the price you printed on the jacket, on thirty-day terms, with the right to send it back if it does not sell. The discount, the terms and the returns are three separate decisions, and a small press that only thinks about the first one loses money on the other two.

This is how each of them works in the book trade specifically, what the back cover has to carry before a shop can even ring it up, and which doors are worth knocking on when the nearest bookstore already has four hundred titles it cannot fit on the front table.

The discount is the deal

Books are unusual: you print the retail price on the product. Once that number is on the jacket, everything downstream is expressed as a discount off it, which means your pricing decision happens at the printer and not at the invoice.

A bookstore buying direct from a press expects around two fifths off cover. The trade calls that a full discount, and it is the floor of normal rather than a good deal you are offering. Hand a buyer a fifth off instead — a short discount — and most will pass without arguing about it. Not because a fifth is insulting, but because the shop's rent, wages and shrink are all priced against the full discount. A short-discount title has to sell several times faster to earn the same shelf inch, and nobody takes that bet on a press they have never heard of.

So treat the discount as an entry fee, not a negotiation, and design it into the cover price before the print run rather than after.

What one title looks like on paper

Take a hardcover field guide to urban trees, ninety-six pages, full colour, cover price twenty-eight dollars. A run of two thousand copies lands at four dollars sixty a copy, including the freight from the printer to the storage unit.

A bookstore at two fifths off pays sixteen dollars eighty. A carton of sixteen copies is two hundred sixty-eight dollars eighty. Cost of goods on that carton is seventy-three dollars sixty. Shipping sixteen hardcovers two states over costs somewhere near fourteen dollars if the press pays it. That leaves roughly a hundred eighty dollars of contribution on one carton, before anyone sends anything back.

Now the same carton through a wholesaler who wants a little over half off cover, say twelve dollars sixty a copy. Sixteen copies is two hundred one dollars sixty, less the same seventy-three dollars sixty, is a hundred twenty-eight. You gave up fifty-two dollars a carton. What you bought is a shop that can order your book on the same weekly invoice as everything else it buys, which is the only reason most stores will deal with a one-title press at all.

Run that sum before the print run. If four dollars sixty had been seven — a shorter run, a heavier stock, the spot gloss you liked on the proof — the wholesaler carton earns eighty-seven dollars and the channel gets thin enough to stop being worth the packing. The general version of the arithmetic is in how to calculate a wholesale price. Books just have the answer printed on the front of the product.

Do you have to take returns?

Legally, no. Practically, mostly yes, and the honest way to think about it is that returnability is part of the rent on the shelf.

The convention exists because a bookstore carries thousands of titles and can predict almost none of them. Returns are what let a buyer take a chance on a press with no track record. Selling firm-only is asking a stranger to be certain about you, which they are not.

A small press has three workable positions:

• Returnable with conditions. Accept returns after ninety days and before twelve months, in saleable condition, with prior authorisation, for credit rather than cash. Credit against a future order keeps the account alive and keeps the bank balance out of it.
• A better discount for firm orders. Offer a few extra points off cover on a non-returnable order. Plenty of shops will take that on a title they believe in, especially one tied to an event they are hosting.
• Consignment on the first placement. Common with a local shop that likes you and wants no risk at all. It is not wholesale, and the counting and reconciling usually cost more than the revenue. The trade-offs are set out in wholesale vs consignment.

Whichever you pick, it goes in writing before the first order, not in an apologetic email after the first jacket comes back scuffed. A one-page terms sheet covering discount, returns window, condition, freight and payment does more for a young press than a redesigned catalogue. Wholesale terms and conditions covers what belongs on it.

Then build a reserve. If one copy in ten eventually comes back, the real contribution on that carton is lower than the arithmetic above, and you want that to be an accounting entry rather than a bad afternoon.

Wholesaler, distributor, or neither

Everywhere else these two words are used interchangeably. In books they are different businesses and a buyer will notice if you mix them up.

A wholesaler stocks and fulfils. Shops order from it because it is fast, consolidated and already on their account. It does not sell your book, it makes your book orderable. You ship it stock, it takes a deep discount, and it reorders when its own shelf runs down.

A distributor represents you. It carries your list in its catalogue, its reps present it to store buyers ahead of each season, it warehouses, invoices, collects and absorbs the returns process, and it takes a share of net receipts on top of the trade discount. That is a partner with opinions about your covers and your publication dates, and very few will take on a press with a single title.

The third option is neither: sell direct to shops, invoice on thirty days, pack cartons at home. Almost every press starts there and it stays respectable for a long time. If stores are asking for terms and you have never granted them, net 30 terms explains what you are actually agreeing to.

Do not run all three routes at once. A shop that can buy you three ways will buy you the cheapest way, and you will end up paying a distributor a share of an account you already had.

The back cover has to carry a barcode with the price in it

This is the part that catches self-published authors and illustrated-book makers who have only ever sold direct from their own site.

Every edition needs its own ISBN. Hardcover, paperback, audio, a second edition with a new cover — a separate number each time. That ISBN becomes an EAN-13 barcode printed on the back cover, normally bottom right, on white, large enough to scan under a tired laser at a counter.

Beside it sits a smaller five-digit add-on encoding the currency and the price. That is the piece people leave off. A shop's point-of-sale expects to read the price from the book. Ship without the add-on, or with one that states a price you have since changed, and you have created a problem at the till in every store that carries you.

Two habits worth forming early: register the ISBN to your own imprint rather than to a service that keeps ownership of it, and fill in the subject categories and metadata properly, because that record is what a buyer sees when they search their ordering system. A book filed under the wrong category is invisible to exactly the buyer who wanted it.

Cartons, not case packs

Most categories sell in a sealed case the buyer has to take whole. Books do not work that way. A shop orders three of one title and one of another, and the carton is simply how they travel.

What that means in practice:

• Know how many copies fit a carton and what it weighs. Hardcovers get heavy fast, and a forty-pound carton buys you a surcharge and a sore back.
• Set the minimum in copies or dollars, not cartons. A five-copy first order with freight paid by the press above a stated invoice value is normal and understood.
• Pack for the road. Books arrive bumped when they slide. Fill the void, use a tight carton, and put something between jacketed hardcovers.
• Include a packing slip and an invoice with the terms on it. Bookstore receiving is a real process, and being easy to receive is a reason to reorder.

Where do bookstore buyers find new presses?

Not on social media, mostly. The channels that move books are older and duller than that, and they work.

Regional independent bookseller associations run trade shows where the buyers of an entire territory sit in one room for two days. A table at one of those, with the book in hand and a reason it belongs in that region, beats a season of cold email. The national show is larger, dearer, and better suited to a press with a list rather than a title.

Commission sales reps still matter here in a way they no longer do in most categories. A rep carrying several small-press lines walks into shops that will never answer your email. They will want either a full list or an unusually strong single title, and they will want the discount structure to leave them room.

Library wholesalers are a separate world with their own paperwork and their own buying calendar, worth learning if the subject suits. So are the seasonal buying guides and catalogues that store buyers genuinely read.

And then the plain one: email the buyer by name with the cover, the ISBN, the price, the discount, the returns policy and one sentence about who in their shop buys this. Books are a trade that still answers a clear, short, correctly formatted email.

The first ten doors

If your title has a subject, and nearly every illustrated or self-published book does, the bookstore is only the first door. Ten places a small press can start, roughly in the order they say yes:

1. The independent bookstore closest to where you live, with an event attached to the ask.
2. Independent bookstores in the region that already shelve books on your subject.
3. Museum and gallery shops whose collection matches the book.
4. Botanical gardens, nature centres and park visitor centres, for anything about the outdoors.
5. Kitchen and cookware shops, for anything about food.
6. Yarn, fabric and craft shops, for anything about making.
7. Coffee shops and bakeries with a shelf by the till, which sell single copies at full price all year.
8. Children's toy shops, which buy picture books as gifts and pay on time.
9. Hotel lobby shops and inns in the place the book is about.
10. Hospital and university gift shops, which are unglamorous, well funded and steady reorderers.

The pattern is that a specialist shop sells a book on its specialty better than a general bookstore does, because the customer is already standing in front of the subject. A hundred copies through eight gift shops is a better quarter than forty copies through two bookstores, and gift shops rarely ask for returns. Many of them buy cards and notebooks from the same budget line, which is worth knowing when you extend the list, and is covered in stationery wholesale.

When you cannot picture which of those shops exist within driving distance, paste your book's page into WholesalePilot and read the preview of retailers that stock things like it. It will not write the pitch, but it stops you emailing the same twelve bookstores every other press emails.

What a first season should look like

Modest. Six to ten accounts, most of them specialist rather than bookstore, one wholesaler listing so the shops that want to reorder can do it without thinking, and a returns rate you find out in month four instead of guessing at in month one.

The presses that keep going are the ones that treated the first printing as the experiment and the second as the business: the same book, a cover price that survives the discount, a carton count that suits a shelf, and a terms sheet they stopped apologising for.