You’ve done the hard work and are now a published author!! Yay, well done. That is no mean feat…but your work is not yet done.

Marketing your book and getting it sold is a task in itself and although Compass-Publishing doesn’t get involved in that side of things (it’s why you retain 100% of your sales) there are a few things you need to know in terms of where your book is listed – and how people can get hold of your book.

Registering your book on Nielsen’s

Once your book is printed and you’ve published through Compass-Publishing, as long as you’ve got in touch with me to register your details, your book will automatically be listed on Nielsen’s database. (Follow this link if you’ve yet to contact me about your printed book.) This is the UK’s national database of all books with a registered ISBN and it is how book shops order your book to any customer who comes in to request it. If your book is NOT registered, this won’t happen.

However, simply registering your book with Nielsen’s doesn’t mean that book shops will automatically stock your book – you need to be selling large quantities – over 60 books a month – for that to happen. (If you reach that level of sales get in touch and we will organise for Gardner’s – the UK’s largest book wholesalers – to stock your book).

Book shop orders and how it works

For those who are selling under that amount here’s how it works; when someone goes into a bookshop to buy your book, they will have to order it over the counter. The book shop will then contact their wholesalers, (usually Gardeners) who then get in touch with me. I then email you. You then send Gardeners the book, they then supply the bookshop.

However, there’s one catch. And that’s Waterstones!

They require you to fill out an additional form – and you can download that here.

Once you’ve filled out the form, you then need to send it to me Compass-Publishing, so I can fill out the publisher’s section. I then send it on. This will then allow the above to happen, if someone goes into Waterstones to order your book.

You may find this webpage useful too – this explains the process and you can get the form from there too.

But what about Amazon?

Okay, so most people want to have their book listed on Amazon. Here’s a quick recap of how that works.

When you register your book on Nielsen’s, an automatic listing is made on your behalf to Amazon (this isn’t something that can be opted out of either!). Once done it will show ‘out of stock’ until you decide to either open a reseller account – where you sell the book independently of Amazon – or you decide to get your book printed and sold through Amazon KDP. This is by far the easiest and although it means Amazon PRINT your book – you won’t have as many options as you can with print on demand – it does mean you can sell your book without much involvement from you. Someone orders the book, Amazon print and supply the customer.

Be aware though Amazon will take a whopping 60% of your cover price for the privilege.

If you’d like to know more about uploading your book to KDP, get in touch as I have an upload service. Remember, you need to make sure your book PDF files are set up for KDP print specifications. Their sizing is very specific and if your files aren’t set up correctly, they’ll be rejected and you’ll find yourself shouting at the computer screen in frustration!

Using my KDP upload service takes away all of that stress and frustration as we also create your KDP account together and I make sure all of your files are KDP ready. Easy as!

Simply drop me an email and I can explain how the KDP upload service works.

Selling your books in bookshops including Waterstones – How it works.