Partnering With Bookstores
From Preorder Campaign to Launch Day: Tips for Partnering With Bookstores
By Julie Tollefson
The weeks and months leading up to the launch of your book — especially if it’s your debut — can be both exciting and fraught with anxiety. A solid relationship with a local bookstore and booksellers can help eliminate some of your worries. Danny Caine, co-owner of the Raven Book Store in Lawrence, Kansas, offers these five tips for working with your favorite bookstore to ensure a successful preorder campaign and smooth launch day event.
1) Build a solid foundation for Team You — Think of your local bookstore and its booksellers as part of your team. Reach out to them to plan the best possible way to get your book out into the world.
“A good book launch with the bookstore means both the author and the bookstore are doing quite a bit of work,” Danny says. “But it’s worth it. It definitely pays off.”
What if you don’t have a relationship with a bookstore? Maybe you’re a debut author and have never planned an event. Even if publication day is months away, now is the time to start building that relationship.
Spend time at the store. Get to know the booksellers. That doesn’t mean you have to spend tons of money at the store, Danny says. Just hang out and talk books with people who love to do that.
“Bookstores are loyal. Once you develop a good relationship like that, it’s for life,” Danny says.
2) Start early — “Let the store know as soon as you can about the event. Give the bookstore enough time to plan a preorder campaign and get the event on the calendar,” Danny says. “We get a lot of pitches for a month in advance, two weeks. That’s hard.”
How early? As soon as you have a cover to share or an ISBN, start planning how to work with the store to promote that book. The Raven’s event planning team is already talking with one local author about a preorder campaign and launch event for a book scheduled to be out in May 2023.
“It’s never too early to start a preorder campaign,” Danny says. “Especially these days, it’s just a lot harder to get people to come to events. It’s possible, but it takes a lot more marketing.”
3) Run your preorder campaign through one store — Working closely with one store can ease some of the challenges of crafting a successful preorder campaign and book launch, especially if the bookstore is local.
“Bookstores have a group of authors they work with really closely. I think it makes it easy to communicate with customers,” Danny says.
He points to a recent preorder campaign a Lawrence cookbook author ran through the Raven. Every time she talked about her book on social media, she noted that people could order copies anywhere books are sold, but they could only get signed copies from the Raven. Between her efforts and the bookstore’s promotion, they sold 400 preorders for the cookbook.
And, Danny says, despite misconceptions to the contrary, every one of those sales from your friendly independent bookstore counts the same as an order placed with an online giant.
“We report sales to the same place Amazon reports sales,” he says.
4) Bring a buddy — Giving a solo author talk is hard, as is reading from a mystery when you don’t want to give too much away. One way to lighten the load is to bring another author along to share the stage during your event.
A conversation partner can move things along and inject extra vitality into the event. You also increase your potential audience, drawing from a bigger pool of fans.
“Being in conversation is pretty smart for a couple of reasons,” Danny says. “Especially with debut authors, it helps with stage fright so much if you have a friend up there with you.”
If the buddy system appeals to you, help the bookstore out by having someone in mind to appear with you. If you want to share the stage but your network doesn’t include any suitable co-stars, ask the bookstore if they can pair you with another local author or a bookseller who loves your work.
Need help with questions? Danny’s got suggestions.
“There are questions that work for everybody,” he says. “People like to hear where the idea for the book came from or the story about how the book was generated. People always want to hear what’s next for the author and book recommendations from the author.”
Those three questions can take up 15 minutes or so of the available time, and you can fill in the rest with questions specific to the book.
5) Communicate, communicate, communicate — Good communication between the author and the bookstore, starting early, is essential. Go over your expectations for the format of your book launch. Some bookstores may offer online or hybrid events. Because declining attendance made online events less worthwhile for both the store and the author, the Raven is back to in-person appearances with streaming on Instagram Live for most events. Talk to the store about what you’re comfortable with and available options.
Lean on the store’s expertise. The events team at the Raven (winner of the Mystery Writers of America Raven Award in 2018) is putting together a set of documents to help authors work with the store to promote their new releases.
Social media has been abuzz recently with scary stories about book events gone wrong, but with preparation, communication, and promotion, they can go wildly right.
“They’re really joyful when they do,” Danny says.
And when you start to feel overwhelmed, remember you and the bookstore are in this together.
“We’re a team,” he says. “And everybody has the same goal — to sell a lot of books.”