It’s alive!

Many moons ago I wrote about my efforts to be listed on the Nielsen catalogue, so that my books could be ordered through – and supplied to – any bookshop in the land.  The Nielsen people were lovely and helpful but the system was convoluted, and in the faceof its ongoing silence I have never quite had faith that it is working for me – perhaps the emails are going into a spam folder.  Every couple of months I log in to check that there isn’t a queue of dozens of orders waiting for me, unloved and unfulfilled, but of course, nothing.

And then this morning – there it was!  An email from Nielsen BookNet with the subject line “New Book Order”!  With trembling fingers I opened it.  Someone wanted a single copy of “Heir Apparent” – so not exactly a bulk order, but someone out there, somewhere in this fair nation of ours, had taken the trouble to request, nay, demand that their bookshop acquire my book for them.  And which shop is it?  In which distant county does it sit, serving customers I shall never meet and of whose lives I know nothing?  Well, it’s Heffers.  Yes, the bookshop only seven minutes’ walk from my own front door.  The bookshop that already stocks my books, and has done from the very start.  It’s a mystery, but I have clicked the button that says that I shall attend to the order forthwith, and in about an hour I shall walk briskly into town and hand over the book.  I’ll save on postage and – if feedback is encouraged from the bookshops – I should get a top rating for speediest order fulfilment ever: five hours from placing the order to receiving the book.  Amazon, eat your heart out.

Ups and downs

It’s Friday, and time to take stock of the first official week of “Heir Apparent”.  It’s not an exact science (well, it probably is, but I don’t understand it) but according to Amazon/KDP/Book Report, I have now sold twenty-one copies of “Heir Apparent” (plus the previously-reported nineteen to bookshops and four direct to friends).  I’m very pleased with that, and will have a celebratory Jaffa Cake or three.  So that’s the up.

Now for the down – or maybe it’s an up, but I can’t quite tell.  Last Saturday I went to London to take part in the People’s Vote march (we’re campaigning for a vote on the Brexit deal, in case you’re wondering).  By chance, the friends I was meeting had decided to gather on Piccadilly, outside Hatchards.  Now, Hatchards is among the spiffiest of bookshops: it’s been selling books since 1797 and sitting at the heart of Piccadilly for over two centuries – and although it is now part of the giant Waterstones family, it still retains its elegant independence.  Suffice it to say that I would love to see Sam and Martha swanking about the place.  Back in my more innocent days, I breezed into Hatchards and spoke to the manager, saying that – as Sam is a local – the books definitely belonged on Hatchards’ shelves.  The manager kindly explained that he could stock them only if they were listed on the Waterstones buying system – which of course they were not.

Nothing daunted, I decided to get them on that system – how hard could it be?  Now pay attention.  In order to be listed on the Waterstones system, a book has to be available through one of the book wholesalers with which Waterstones deals, such as Gardners.  So I contacted Gardners and asked to be put on their system.  They explained that they don’t deal with authors – only publishers, and only publishers recognised by Nielsen BookNet.  So I contacted Nielsen and asked how I could be recognised as an independent publisher.  It took some time and lots of forms, but I managed it.  So now: Nielsen recognises me as an independent publisher, which means that Gardners is listed as my wholesaler, which means that the Waterstones catalogue (both internal for stores and external for customers) features my titles.  Hurrah!  And if anyone orders my book through Waterstones, the order goes from them to Nielsen, and from Nielsen to me (as an indie publisher).  I pack up the books and send them to Gardners, who deliver them to Waterstones, who get them to the customer (or put them on the shelf).  Simple.

Back to the march last Saturday.  There I am, standing outside Hatchards and gazing through their lovely window, when I spot the manager standing alone at his till.  I wander in, all casual-like, and go up to him.  “You may not remember me,” I say, “but you once said that if my books could be ordered through your system, you would give them a go”.  “Are your books marvellous?” he asked.  “They are,” I confirmed, and he went to his computer and ordered – he said – two each of “Fatal Forgery” and “The Man in the Canary Waistcoat”.  I was floating on air for most of that march – Sam and Martha, in Hatchards!  And to think, she couldn’t even read much apart from bottle labels until she met Sam.

This week, I waited patiently – hah! – for that order to come in from Nielsen.  And yesterday I contacted them, and Gardners, to check that I hadn’t misunderstood the process.  But no, no trace of any order from Hatchards or Waterstones – not a one.  After pondering what to do, I’ve gone passive-aggressive: I sent an email to the manager saying “I cannot tell you how thrilled I am that my books will be on the shelves of Hatchards – I shall tell all my London friends to come in and buy them”.  So near, and yet so far…

Making a deposit

For the most part, self-publishing is a grand adventure and to be recommended.  But there are some regions of the publishing world that are very hard to navigate solo, and one of these is legal deposit.  Back in the mists of time (OK, it was January 2017), I had a brainwave: I would get myself registered as a publisher with Nielsen.  Nielsen is the key book distributor here in the UK, and when a bookshop wants to stock a title, they generally order it through Nielsen.  Nielsen then contacts the publisher and orders the copies to be sent on.  In theory, if I was listed as a publisher, a customer desperate to get their mitts on a Sam Plank novel could go into any bookshop in the country and place an order which would make its way from bookshop to Nielsen to me.  What could go wrong?  Well, I have indeed been listed as a publisher with Nielsen for eighteen months now, and how many orders have I received?  Not a single one.  Hey ho, as they say.

But it’s worse than that, my self-publishing friends.  My books – the five Sam Plank novels and the dozens of non-fiction titles that I produce in my day-job guise as an adviser on money laundering – are all published as print-on-demand paperbacks by CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.  In South Carolina.  In America.  Not in the UK.  Here in the UK we have a regime called legal deposit.  It’s been around since 1662, and the current legislation – the Legal Deposit Libraries Act 2003 – requires that “a person who publishes in the United Kingdom a work to which this Act applies must at his own expense deliver a copy of it to an address specified by any deposit library entitled to delivery”.  Fair enough.  But a few weeks ago I received an email from the legal deposit people asking for one of my non-fiction titles – which are, as I said, published in South Carolina.  In America.  I explained all of this, but they insisted and so I sent them a copy.  A week later another demand arrived, for another book.  I bleated “South Carolina” again, and this time they said that perhaps I should have a word with Nielsen, who supply them with their data on books published in the UK.

Heavens, Alex at Nielsen is a nice chap, and I got the impression that he likes nothing more than a mystery.  The two titles in question have ISBNs which show that they are indeed American publications – South Carolina, don’t you know – but the spreadsheet showed their place of publication as UK.  Hence the legal deposit demands.  Alex was on the case, and within a day emailed me to say that they had tracked down the error, worked out had gone wrong, and rectified it.  My publications now all show – correctly – as being American in origin and therefore beyond the grasp of legal deposit.

I’m not being mean about it, and of course I support the concept of legal deposit to preserve the nation’s published output (as the British Library would have it).  But if I have to source and supply a copy of each of my books “at [my] own expense”, that’s quite an outlay: each has to be ordered from CreateSpace and shipped to me before I send them on to the five legal deposit libraries – each copy would cost me about £15 in total, and I have nearly forty titles!  (Forty titles times five libraries times £15 is a staggering £3,000.)  It’s not something that occurred to me at all when choosing my print-on-demand publisher, but I’m now thanking my lucky stars that I opted for one in South Carolina rather than Southall or Southampton.

Every bookshop in the land

I can imagine that you think I am just sitting around, gazing out of the window and eating bonbons.  Far from it.  My latest project – apart from “Plank 5”, of course – is to figure out how to get the Sam Plank books into more bookshops.  My ploy thus far has been to woo individual booksellers with silver-tongued emails and then go in person with a delivery of books.  This is (a) time-consuming, and (b) not practical on a country-wide basis, much as I would love (now here’s a retirement project) to visit every independent bookshop in the UK.  And so I have gone the traditional route.

As I understand it, the majority of booksellers – from the small to the large – buy their stock from book distributors.  King among the UK book distributors is Nielsen.  They get their stock, for selling on to the bookshops, direct from publishers.  And, through a combination of dogged determination, charm, begging and a gradual sea-change in the attitudes to indie publishing, I have managed to persuade Nielsen to recognise me as a publisher.  I have a login and everything.  And associated with me as a publisher are the four Sam Plank novels.

In theory, therefore, a book buyer can go into any bookshop in the land and, when they ask for a Sam Plank novel and find the shelves bare (apart from in Heffers and Davids in Cambridge, Toppings in Ely and Daunts in Cheapside, of course), demand that the bookseller order one for them.  Said bookseller then logs into his Nielsen account, looks up Sam Plank and voilà! there he is.  Order is placed, book arrives and reader is satisfied.

What I am a little hazy on is what precisely happens in between.  I know that when Nielsen receives an order for Sam Plank they will forward it to me – his publisher – for fulfilment.  And I know that I am responsible for pronto delivery to the bookshop that has ordered him.  However, I do not know who has to pay for postage; I am assuming that I do.  And, more critically, I do not know what royalty I get from Nielsen-generated orders.  This is uncharacteristically lax of me, I know, as I am usually pretty hot on royalty levels and all that.  But in all honesty the Nielsen website is so (whisper it) unfriendly that I simply couldn’t find definitive answers to my questions, and so I have decided to wing it: I’ll wait for my first statement from them and work it out from that.

Of course, to get a statement I will need to have an order or two.  And so far: zilch.  I am torn between wanting at least one order so that I can see how the system works, and terror that I might get dozens of orders for multiple copies that I am entirely unequipped to fulfil.  After all, in order to supply copies I need to order them from America (we’ve been through this before), and I keep only limited copies in readiness.  As ever, I’ll keep you posted.

Season’s greetings from Sam

In common with half the world, I use this rather peculiar time of year to reflect on what I have done in the last twelve months and what I hope to do in the next.  I will admit that I have been slightly cast down by the slow sales figures for the Sam Plank books; just between you and me, I am always hoping for that Big Break, for someone influential to stumble across Sam and declare, “Why – this character is magnificent!  I shall ensure that he will star in his own Sunday evening period drama series, with endless money thrown at production values!”.  It might yet happen, but we’re four books in and no-one influential is doing much stumbling.

But at this time of good cheer and so on, it is perhaps better to remind myself of how much Sam is liked by those who have discovered him.  Looking at my recent reviews on Amazon, I see that Mr L Moss was keen on “Worm in the Blossom”: “The two previous books in this series were excellent but this, the third, was even better – before I reached the end of page one I was hooked.”  Continuing the angling metaphor, someone called ‘Hooked on Books’ has been working his/her way through the series, starting with “Fatal Forgery”: “I struggled to put down my Kindle, and found myself contemplating the plot in my head whilst nodding off.  Very gripping read and now on to the next in the series.”  And on Twitter, ‘Leigh (on the left)’ thrillingly declared “Worm in the Blossom” to be his “best read of 2016”.

So what plans for 2017?  I am – as ever – thinking of new ways to promote Sam, and I’m on the trail of a couple of ideas, including giving him away on the Tube…  And on the technical side of things, I have registered with Nielsen’s as a small publisher.  Nielsen’s are the people who fulfil orders for bookshops, so once my titles are listed with them – it’s a rather Byzantine process, but we’re getting there – then any bookshop in the land will be able to order the Sam books through the Nielsen website/phone-line.  And they will send the order to me, and I will fulfil it.  Of course, if I get hundreds of orders, I’ll be in trouble – and with postage costs, mightily out of pocket – but I thought it was worth trying the system to see how it works.  As ever, I’ll keep you posted, as I know other self-published authors like to know these things.

I am taking a short break from blogging and Tweeting – but not, of course, from Sam and Martha, as we’re in the middle of researching Caribbean poisonous plants – and so may I wish you all a merry Christmas and a happy and peaceful new year.