4 Tips on Getting Your Title into Bookstores

• Why bookstores don’t carry self-published books
You’ve just self-published your book and call up your local bookstore to see if you can bring down a few copies for them to stock and sell. Then you do a double take when the manager refuses to carry your book and quickly dismisses you.

• How to get your title into bookstores
When promoting your self-published book, you may want to get the paper versions into bookstores. Besides fulfilling the fantasy that virtually every author (including me) possesses, your book for sale on a shelf should lead to a least a few more copies moving into readers’ hands.

• Ask for title in bookstore 
Indie authors often face great difficulty getting their titles into brick-and-mortar bookstores. While mom and pop stores almost always are interested in local authors, the large chains often sell their shelf space and only want big selling books pushed by large publishing houses (as those houses offer favorable deals on returns). The solution for the indie author is to do a little grassroots work: Namely, ask readers to ask for one of your titles in bookstores.

• How to get into Barnes & Noble’s online catalog
Though getting one’s book into the nation’s largest bookstore chain – Barnes & Noble – might be extremely difficult for self-published authors, what about getting it in their online catalog? That would, after all, be the next best thing if not getting it in the chain’s brick and mortar stores.