Discover insider secrets to selling books to libraries, as book industry expert, Amy Collins shares her expertise on this week’s Book Marketing Mentors podcast.
Amy Collins has been a book buyer and seller for over 20 years. In that time, she’s worked with Barnes and Noble, Target, Costco, Borders, Books a Million, Walmart, and all the major chains as well as helped launch several private label publishing programs for book chains and companies, such as Pet Smart and CVS. In 2006, she started New Shelves Distribution, a book marketing company for small presses that has quickly become the fastest growing book distribution company in North America.
Excerpt from this week’s podcast “Discover Insider Secrets to Selling Books to Libraries”:”
Q: Amy, you have become a go-to person when it comes to marketing and selling books to libraries. Talk to us about this well-kept secret, I think, in the publishing environment.
A: If you had asked me five years ago if libraries were worth the time of day, if it was worth anyone’s attention, I would have laughed. I would have said, “No,” that libraries and independent bookstores were on their way out, they were slowly dying, they were a teeny part of the marketplace, they won’t worth our time, but like everything else in the publishing industry, and in the media industry, heck, in the world, things change. In the last two years, I don’t know if it’s because of the economy, the fact that the entire world has learned the benefits of exchange economics, but libraries have had an enormous resurgence. The foot traffic in North America, in all of the libraries across our continent, the foot traffic has more than doubled in the last two years.
The budgets have gone up almost 20% for materials, libraries like to call books and eBooks and audio books and DVDs. They lump them all under the phrase “materials.” Material budgets have gone up dramatically, and a number of people who visit libraries and use libraries has grown enormously. According to the Pew Foundation, fewer than 5% of American’s have even set foot in a bookstore in the last five years, but according to the American Library Association, who did an enormous material survey for 2015, so these are very new numbers, 68% of American’s have a library card. According to the ALA, and almost 50% of those people have been in a library in the last month.
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Download the transcript from this week’s podcast interview on “Insider Secrets to Selling Books to Libraries“
