If you’ve toiled over the writing, editing and publishing of your book, you know how sweet book sales are. The money is welcome, of course. So is the validation of you, the author, and your book. Writing is an amorphous and highly subjective endeavor until book sales hit. The fact that someone has endorsed the work you’ve done with their dollars is an objective and measurable affirmation. And every once in a while, with the right topic, relentless marketing, persistent networking, and a bit of luck, those book sales don’t just trickle in one by one. Yes, every once in a while, you can wind up with a bulk book sale.
That just happened to me, and as much as I tried to solicit a bulk book sale for my book Surviving a Stalker, it’s a first. The University of Southern California’s Safety Department wants to order 200 copies of Busting the Brass Ceiling: How a Heroic Female Cop Changed the Face of Policing for their employee organizations.
I could have directed USC to order directly from a neighborhood bookstore. If my book was selling like hotcakes or if the order had been quite a bit larger, that might have made sense. Sales of 3,000 to 5,000 in one week can land your book on a bestseller list. So, although my profit would have been substantially less since retail bookstores require a 55 percent discount from publishing houses or authors, it would have been worth it.
Unfortunately, my book isn’t flying off the shelves. So, it made sense to fulfill this bulk order using author copies that I can get at a discount.
So far, so good. But since I self-published through both KDP (Amazon) and IngramSpark, I had to figure out which I wanted to order from.
I assumed the pricing would be equivalent. I was wrong. Although IngramSpark could fulfill the order in five days as opposed to KDP’s ten-day turnaround, each book was $.63 more than the KDP author-copy price. In addition, the shipping for the 200 copies was $202 as opposed to $83 at KDP. In short, I could save $230 by going through KDP.
Of course, if these books were going to be sold in USC’s bookstore, this entire conversation would be moot. KDP’s books are not for resale, so the order would have been fulfilled through IngramSpark. But the books are being given away rather than sold. So, I get to celebrate a bulk book sale that I hope will be the first of many, and even justify extending a 10 percent discount off the book’s retail price.
Win-win!
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