Where Can I Buy Your Books?

The question of "where can I buy your books?" is a delicate one for an author to answer, because basically all of your vendors want you to give the same answer -- buy from them! (Imagine an author being asked that question and a silence like that in the old "E.F. Hutton" commercials ensuing, with all of the vendors listening intently to what the author recommends.)

Surely there are fewer more efficient ways for an author to piss off X minus 1 of their vendors than by specifically recommending that the buyer make all their book purchases from "X".

For authors like me, the available choices mostly fall into a four-square grid -- sex-positive vs. mainstream, brick-and-mortar vs. online. Each has its drawbacks and advantages. For example, large online vendors can offer wide variety and low price, but small, sex-positive vendors offer knowledgeable staff, plus buying from them keeps the money in the community (a not-small thing). Buying from a mainstream brick-and-mortar store encourages them to stock the books on their shelves, and this is often where a complete beginner makes their very first contact with our literature. It changes lives. OTOH, the large brick-and-mortar chains are positively massacring the independent stores, both mainstream and sex-positive, leading to customers having fewer choices as to where they can buy books.

You can often buy direct from the publisher. Doing so is very profitable in the short-term for them, but doing so decreases "downstream" demand for their books, which may decrease the publisher's profitability in the longer term.

Another issue to consider is the matter of vendor diversity. The fewer book vendors there are, the more they control the marketplace. More particularly, if a given publisher has reason to believe that the major vendors won't carry a book, that can dramatically decrease the odds that the book will be published. This leads to fewer, and typically more bland and less experimental, titles available to the consumer.

My personal recommendation: support vendor diversity. Buy some of your books from large online vendors, and some from small online vendors. Buy some from large brick-and-mortar chain stores, and some from independent stores (both vanilla and sex-positive). In the long run, everybody benefits.

Just please remember, where you buy your books _does_ matter. Therefore, whatever you do, please don't buy all of your books from just one or two sources. Spread the wealth around a bit. In the long run, _you_ benefit from having a healthy and diverse number of vendors to choose from.

Vendor diversity, it's a good thing.

Jay Wiseman -- author

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