Are you an author hoping Storysmith can stock your book?
If so, we’ve put together some guidelines for you to follow to give your book the best chance of making it to our shelves and our customers. As well as these guidelines, we would very strongly recommend that you have a look at this document from The Society of Authors – it was put together by booksellers with collaboration from the SoA, and will answer a lot of questions.
Does your book fit with our selection?
For us, this is the most important thing for authors to consider, but also the hardest to explain. We spend a huge amount of our time curating our selection to our tastes and interests so that we can sell our books with passion. Basically, if you look at our recommended shelves and display tables and see countless books you know and love already, then hopefully your sensibilities chime with ours.
The visual appeal of your book isn’t everything, but it is very important to us – does your book look as beautiful as the ones we have on display? If it very obviously doesn’t, then it will need to have another very strong selling point that we, as booksellers, can convey to our customers.
How to show us your book
Please do not send us books in the post unless we’ve requested that you do so. If you’ve been in the shop you’ll know that we don’t have much space, so we can’t hold on to your book unless it’s going to be on the shelves. Unsolicited material may end up being recycled, and we can’t return copies to you.
Feel free to email us at authors@storysmithbooks.com. Please include some brief information on your book, a link to a sample, an image of the cover and the method in which we would potentially order repeat copies.
Please note that we receive dozens of submissions every week, so it is impossible for us to reply to every single one. We do try and respond to as many as we possibly can, and rest assured that we will definitely respond if we are interested in stocking your book.
A lot of authors like to visit us in the shop and hand us physical copies of their books for consideration. As a general rule, please do not do this unless we’ve specifically asked to see physical copies. We often don’t have time to give your book the consideration it deserves if you’re standing right there in front of us, and our vague assurance that ‘we’ll take a look when we can!’ isn’t really fair on you as an author. To be clear, we will not be able to consider books brought into the shop without prior arrangement.
How would we order your book?
If it’s available through suppliers like Gardners, that makes it an awful lot easier for us to reorder once we’ve sold it, but we do work directly with some authors on this. Barcodes and ISBN numbers are essential, except in very special circumstances.
Discount
Our minimum retailer discount is 40%.
Publishing through Amazon
We often receive submissions from authors who have self-published their book through Amazon’s print-on-demand platforms. Unfortunately we’re unable to accept books published in this way, regardless of content or quality.
It’s never personal
If we decide your book isn’t right for our shop, this has no bearing on our fondness for you as a person. You’ve written a book: we admire you for this achievement whether we stock your title or not.