The consignment form at Levee Street Books in St. Louis is one page long, printed on yellow paper, and kept in a folder under the register. Most weeks two or three self-published authors ask for one. Most of them never come back to fill it out.
Delia Montrose filled hers out in the parking lot. It was July, and her memoir What the River Kept had already sold through its first printing of 300 copies in and around her hometown of Alton, Illinois. She brought five copies, a one-paragraph description and a list of the book clubs that had already read it.
"I didn't pitch the book," Montrose said. "I pitched the readers. I figured a bookstore would care more about who was already asking for it than about anything I could say."
The store sold the five copies in a week. It has since sold more than 200. What the River Kept is now in its fourth printing, with more than 9,000 copies sold, and it has become a small case study in how a book with no publisher gets onto a shelf that usually belongs to books that have one.
Three Roads In
Montrose's route ran through readers first. Her hometown book club, the Third Thursday Readers, took up the memoir in June and then spread it through a regional network of other clubs. By the time she walked into a bookstore, she was carrying evidence.
Renata Solis took a stranger road. Her fantasy novel The Midnight Laundromat, about a coin laundry in Tucson where lost socks turn up in other centuries, began as a stack of copies on a folding table at the laundromat her family has run since 1994. Customers read it while their loads dried. Some took it home and brought it back with notes in the margins.
"I sold 600 copies to people waiting on the spin cycle," Solis said. "That's a very honest focus group. If the book was boring, they would have just watched the dryer."
A bookseller from a shop two blocks away, who did her own laundry there, eventually asked for a box. Solis now has the book in nine stores across southern Arizona.
Wes Harlan, a retired large animal veterinarian in western Kansas, went where his readers already were. His Western novel Gravel Roads Home, about a widowed rancher who takes in a runaway during the drought of 1956, started out on the counters of feed and farm supply stores in four counties.
"My people don't go to bookstores much," Harlan said. "But they go to the co-op every week. So I put the book next to the fly spray."
After the book sold 2,000 copies that way, a bookstore in Dodge City called him. He did not have to call anyone.
What the Booksellers Say
For the stores, the question is rarely whether a self-published book is good. It is whether anyone will come looking for it.
June Takahashi, who owns Highwater Books in Astoria, Oregon, has hosted launches for several self-published authors from the coast. She said most of the pitches she turns down are not bad books. They are books with no sign of an audience.
"I'm not a publisher. I can't build a readership from scratch," Takahashi said. "But if you can show me twenty people in this town who want your book, I can help you find the next two hundred."
"I didn't pitch the book. I pitched the readers."
Booksellers also pay close attention to the physical book. A cover that looks homemade, a spine too thin to read from across a room or a price that does not match the page count will stop a conversation early. Montrose paid a local designer to redo her cover before the second printing, and she said that decision changed how stores treated her.
"The first cover looked like a church bulletin," she said. "Nice, but you'd never pick it up off a table. The new one looks like it belongs next to everything else."
What Self-Published Authors Can Take From This
The three authors differ in genre, region and temperament, but their advice lined up closely.
Build readers before you approach stores. Every one of them had sold hundreds of copies on their own before a bookstore took notice. Book clubs, farmers markets, workplaces and community events all count.
Bring proof, not adjectives. A list of clubs that read the book or a note on how many copies sold at a local event will do more than a glowing description.
Make the book look like it belongs. Invest in a professional cover and interior. Check that the spine is readable and the price is in line with similar books.
Learn the terms before you ask. Know whether the store takes consignment, how it pays and how long it keeps unsold copies. Make the arrangement easy to say yes to.
Keep showing up. Harlan still drives to each co-op once a month to restock. Solis signs copies on Saturday mornings. Montrose visits book clubs most weeks.
"There's no one door," Solis said. "There's just a lot of small doors, and somebody has to keep knocking on them."
Montrose said she has stopped thinking of the book as self-published. "It was published by a lot of people," she said. "I just happened to pay the printer."
What the River Kept by Delia Montrose (independently published, 248 pages, $17.99) is out now.
Features writer. Marcus reports on publishing, independent bookstores and how new authors break through.
