Indie Book Stores

INDIES FIRST at Small Business Saturday

Independent-Bookstore


This Saturday, on November 26,  named the “Small Business Saturday”, independent booksellers will be celebrating INDIES FIRST for the third time.

The idea behind INDIES FIRST has quickly taken hold and bookstores in this and many other countries will be participating.  They will be organizing author events, flash storytimes, discounts, and coffee or cake as a way to offer their customers a relaxed alternative to the frenzied shopping experience of Black Friday, the traditional start of the holiday countdown sales season.
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INDIES FIRST is the Brainchild of Sherman Alexie.
Alexie hired a party bus to take him and a group of authors to visit three local Seattle bookstores this year.  This year’s INDIES FIRST spokesperson, Lena Dunham, will be visiting Book Soup in Los Angeles. She touted independent bookstores as “places for learning, community-building, and falling in love with strangers.”
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Bookstore Events Planned for this Saturday:

  • Eso Won Books of Los Angeles is offering a special sale all day along with food from Marcus Samuelsson’s The Red Rooster Harlem.
  • New York City’s Books of Wonder will hold events with Caldecott medalist Jerry Pinkney and Caldecott Honor artists Melissa Sweet and Pamela Zagarenski, among others.
  • In Palmyra, N.Y., The Dog Eared Book is also participating in Candlelight Night, which will take place on the same day in its historic village. Carols and a hayride on Main Street are part of the festivities.
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To support the independent booksellers’ efforts, some of the publishers and book distributors made special offers around the INDIES FIRST day on November 26:

  • Distributor Baker & Taylor provides extra margins and faster shipping on all trade books this week and next.
  • Libro.fm, the digital audiobook provider, is working with 35 stores to give away a free audio-book on INDIES FIRST.  The goal is to drive traffic to independent bookstores.  Customers will get to select from more than nine digital audio-books, including  “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian”, the first young-adult fiction work by Sherman Alexie, a stand-up comedian, screenwriter, film producer, and songwriter who has previously written adult novels, short stories, poems, and screenplays.
  • Parnassus Books in Nashville is donating a portion of its day’s sales to two local charities: Book ‘em and Nashville Humane Association. The store is promising “a bevy” of local authors who will be hand-selling their work.
  • Get on the Indies First publicity map, which now features nearly 500 stores — with room for more!
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Why Buy Books in Your Local Independent Bookstore?

  • You’ll be shopping on your local main street
  • You’ll be helping create local jobs
  • You might just find a book you never knew existed
  • You’ll find great gifts for friends and family
  • You can talk to real people about books they know and love
  • You’ll be part of your local book-loving community
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Interesting Publishing Predictions for 2014

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Fortune-Teller

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J. A. Konrath did it again: outlook to this years’ publishing future – as he sees it. He explains what works and what not – and what could be done better. Here an excerpt from his predictions:

  • “Paper book sales will no longer be significant enough to sustain the nation’s largest bookstore chain, maybe stores closing.”
  • “Libraries will buy e-books directly from authors.”
  • “Indie bookstores will need to start selling self-pubbed books, or perish. If indie bookstores deal directly with self-pubbed authors, and print their own copies to sell in their stores, they can build inventory and cut out the share normally taken by publishers.”
  • “Big 5 mergers and layoffs and bankruptcies. As the publishing cartel loses its quasi-monopoly on paper distribution, there will be no way to support its infrastructure.”
  • “The publishing biz has become a tech biz. You don’t win at tech by playing catch-up. You win by innovating.”
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J. A. Konrath’s prediction:
“Visibility will become harder. As more e-books get published, and virtual shelf space expands, it is going to become harder to get exposure. Self-pubbed authors who don’t focus on their current, core readership will see sales diminish. The future will be about actively cultivating a readership. So far we’ve been lucky. With KDP Select Free Days, authors have been able to get visible without reconnecting with longtime readers. There have always been enough new readers to sustain sales.

Maintaining a fan base is going to become increasingly more important.
That means having an up-to-date website, making it easy to sign up for your newsletter, staying active in social media, and regenerating your brand with new titles and continued promotions.

Change is hard. It’s also inevitable.
The best thing you can do right now, as a writer, is look to the future and try to find your place in that future. That might mean you’ll need to forget the past. It also might mean you’ll have to learn to accept, and forgive.”
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Furthermore:
“It isn’t a stretch to believe tens of millions of self-published e-books are being sold annually. We don’t need Vanity publishers / called: self-publishing services. We don’t need to pay Kirkus or PW for reviews. We don’t need writing organizations (MWA, Authors Guild) who don’t look out for our interests.”  And he continues to explain what we need.  Read the whole, interesting post on J.A. Konrath’s blog.
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If you would like to get more support in all things publishing, have your book intensively promoted and learn how to navigate social media sites – or to learn how you can make yourself a name as an author through content writing: We offer all this and more for only $159 for three months! Learn more about this individual book marketing help: http://www.111Publishing.com/Seminars
Or visit http://www.e-book-pr.com/book-promo/  to advertise your new book, specials, your KDP Select Free Days or the new Kindle Countdown Deals.

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Tagged: Big 5, Future of Publishing, Indie Book Stores, J.A. Konrath, Paper Book Sales, Publishing Cartel, publishing predictions