Undaunted Bookshop, Dawson's Streak
Hey, gang! It's the first week in October...and it's...October! Here in Idaho, Halloween decorations are already in full bloom. Just think, for a few weeks you, er, I mean your kids, won't look strange for insisting on wearing princess outfits to the grocery store.
So let's dig into the happenings in the writer-sphere!
B & N Get's Daunted, James Daunted.
The new CEO of Barnes & Noble, James Daunted, officially announced that their new efforts will hinge on giving local store managers more control over creating...local...stores. Yay!
B&N might not end up feeling like your small, indie bookshop, but putting more energy into customizing each store for its customers shouldn't be a bad thing. And this move should almost certainly make it easier for all us authors to get our indie titles into our local Barnes & Noble stores.
If you haven't put any energy into print books or into getting your print books into stores, this might be a good time to give it a go. Make sure you:
use IngramSpark to distribute
allow for the retailer discount and for returns
Take a print copy to your local store, along with your business card, and get it into the hands of the store manager!
I'd be curious to hear how many of you already have your books in your local stores, and how many of you perhaps had a hard time earlier but find success moving forward.
In the rest of the article, Daunted says B&N has no plans to offload or disband the Nook or the bookstore's website at this point. Perhaps B&N will pull out of their nose-dive and become something meaningful once again!
An Online Bookshop to Compete with Amazon?
Sticking with the theme, we caught wind of an early announcement for a coming website that appears to want to create a shared, third-party, e-commerce marketplace for books. The article states that the purpose behind Bookshop is to "...launch a site that will provide websites, authors, indie stores, magazines, and bookstagrammers an easy way to promote and purchase the books they love online without driving sales to Amazon."
Does that give anyone else tingly sensations? (Oh, wait, my foot's asleep...) But seriously, if Bookshop launches as advertised, this could be pretty stinking exciting.
They also claim that book buyers will be guided by human recommendations rather than algorithms and that "10 percent of every sale on Bookshop goes to ABA member bookstores that opt-in as partners."
To be clear, this site hasn't launched yet. So, we'll have to keep our eyes open and our fingers crossed. In general, competition in our industry should be seen as a good thing!
SPS Live is...Soldout, again.
You have to scroll through the transcription of their podcast episode (or listen to the episode), but this link will take you there if you want to check it out! The Self-Publishing Show with James Blatch and Mark Dawson announced a few weeks ago that they were doing a Live event (just before the London Book Show).
Once they opened ticket sales, they sold out rather quickly and crashed the site with another 800 people trying to get tickets. So...what to do? Of course, you book a bigger venue and sell out another several hundred tickets!
So...far...away...from Idaho. Alas. I recommend for anyone who can't fly across the pond to join us at S3. Our speakers are gonna be just as cool. And the attendees are gonna be cooler!
That's it for this week's Scuttle. So here it is in my best British accent...