Book Review - Selling Your Book To Libraries

The Savvy Book Marketer’s Guide To Selling Your Book To Libraries
Author: Dana Lynn Smith
Publisher: Texana Publishing Consultants (February 1, 2009)
Pages: 57 pages

Libraries purchase over a billion dollars worth of books each year. These include those in the public sector, schools, and special libraries. Since most publishers offer little support for marketing these days, many authors are busy with the daunting task of self-promoting to their primary readership and often overlook selling their books to libraries. Finding the proper contact information and learning the library industry lingo may also seem too intimidating a task for most authors as well.

With Selling Your Book to Libraries, author Dana Lynn Smith provides all the information you’ll need to successfully launch a promotional campaign targeted to those who purchase books for libraries.

Smith has a degree in marketing and fifteen years experience in the book marketing business and it shows. Unlike many marketing books that are filled mostly with cotton-candy, all fluff and sugar, Selling Your Book to Libraries delivers the meat-and-potatoes information from the very first page. Even the introduction is a short course in the business of the library industry including the proper titles of the people who buy the books and what influences their purchases. Every paragraph thereafter is also filled with the kind of information you can actually put to use.

Besides the education you’ll receive about this segment of the book business, you’ll also get page after page of direct contact information. These include 100 library systems plus industry wholesalers and distributors that also sell to libraries. The contact information alone is well worth the price of the book.

The author also includes an action plan with details about launching your library marketing campaign. She tells you how to advertise to libraries through mediums such as direct mailings and library tradeshows.

All of Smith’s books are easy reads and exhibit her ability to use creativity in a practical way in book marketing. In this book she provides examples that help widen marketing opportunities. For instance, in one section she describes approaching libraries with the angle of being a local author and using “local” as a broad term. If you were raised or went to college in that town, you may still be considered a local author. If your book references that region of the country, it could also be considered a local book.

I highly recommend Selling Your Book to Libraries as well as Smith’s other books, including her free downloads. Following her marketing advice is sure to boost your sales.