The missing mobile

Last week my youngest daughter lost her mobile phone. She was distraught. I was uptight. Even though she only has a SIM contract, I found out to my cost last month that if she went over the allotted monthly time (300 minutes in her case) we got charged a hefty bill. There was me naively assuming her phone would cut off once those minutes were up.

Already I imagined someone finding her phone and calling and calling and calling. But lucky us, she had dropped it in Waterstones and someone had handed it in. Wouldn't it be nice to say that it must have fallen as she handed over the dosh for Little Women or The Phoenix and the Carpet. Alas no, dear reader, she had been buying a frightfully expenisve Gruffalo water bottle (to add to her slightly odd collection) .
To cut a long story shorter, Waterstones kindly phoned me to say it had been handed in. Poor Luisa had to extricate herself from the Argos Catalogue where she was blithely selecting her replacement model of phone.

When I went to pick up the phone, I happened to be looking at the shelf where Nod off in French lay stubbornly unbought on its side. I wondered whether it was destined for a return. After thanking the Waterstones man for the phone, I nonchalantly mentioned. 'I publish that book that is on its side. Are you planning to return it?' Anyway he kindly offered to check the system to see if any had been sold. (Sadly not). And then went on to explain how it worked. If one or two got sold from the store then this triggered the computerised system to automatically replace it. No human intervention needed.

Given that having your book selected by a central buyer is pretty much impossible, even for the big publishers, if you are confident that your book can be sold then the best approach is to make sure that you contact each Waterstone's individually and try to convince the buyer to stock it. However you probably still need to get it stocked by a wholesaler such as Gardners Books or Bertrams (even that can be quite a haul in itself). I eventually managed to get Gardners to take me on on formal trade terms (in my case 57.5% discount).

That is if you want to be in the terrestrial bookshops. Amazon, of course, have oodles of shelf space.

But just recently I have been getting the impression that ebooks are going to be the main way forward for would be authors. And even though I am usually slagging off the whole ebook thing, I fear I am going to have to eat my ewords.

So see you soon for the next instalment.