Recently I’ve been able to forward quite a few offers for signed bookplates and other things for indie bookshops through the twitter account and this is great but doesn’t reach a lot of people.
I’ve also become increasingly frustrated with some publishing houses and how their adverts for new and upcoming books only have one link to get it and that link invariably goes to Amazon. I want a way for publishers to be able to advertise their big books and include indies in this mix. It could be as simple as when a new book is announced I contact the mailing list to see if anyone is going to put it up for preorder then do a post with the book advert pic and a list of indies that it can be preordered from.
So thinking about a way to deal with both of these problems and make them more effective for publishers, authors, PR, agents to contact independent bookshops en masse, I thought a proper mailing list would be effective.
If I do it through a proper service called TinyLetter there are clear option for signing up and unsubscribing and a good way of managing newsletters and contacts.
Edit I’ll no longer be using TinyLetter for this as I can’t import HTML into it and it would take too long to learn another formatting tool. So all the newsletters are now going to be posts on the website and I’ll post links to it in my social media.
I will now be offering this as a service to publishers, agents, PR companies, and authors as a way to get information out to independent bookshops, I don’t see it being a busy newsletter to begin with but if it ever gets too busy I can always look at other ways to move forward.
Each newsletter will also have a featured independent publisher, book, or author at the end to share knowledge and interest.
This is a good idea and we would be keen to get involved, it is often ‘impossible’ to avoid Amazon in tweets, although we have not linked to them for six weeks now and don’t plan to, would love to be able to link more to book shops and have a route to get them advance copies and signed copies ahead of Amazon getting stock,
I know what you mean re. Amazon, but there has to be a start somewhere I think, if you want to get involved it’s as simple as using the contact form to let me know what I can add to the newsletter to pique the interest of indie bookshops and sellers
thanks
Stephen