Is it easy to convince national chains to sell books on local topics?
Luckily, yes. In the book industry, there’s been a long enough tradition of local interest … that the retailers understand that it’s an important component of their inventory. So you go into a Borders or a Barnes & Noble, and one of the more prominent sections you’ll find is local interest. Local interest sells well, and it also helps them establish their credibility with the local market. They’re a national chain, but they carry products of particular interest to us. You won’t find that in the music industry. How do you advertise your product? Book marketing is essentially generating word-of-mouth publicity. Any given book doesn’t sell enough copies or generate enough revenue to reward much market research. You just have to publish it and figure out how to make it sell. You don’t see much advertising in publishing because there’s not enough money to be made per book that you can lay out much for traditional advertising. That makes sense if you’ve got a product or a business or a sto
