Reading · Haunting the Author Trenches

I sent 1600 emails to various different booksellers around the world.

And what did I learn?

There are a lot of shops that do not have working emails or have gone out of business. Which is pretty common for the indie industry, although still just as heartbreaking. Also meant my 6 week old list was already outdated…

It is hard being indie no matter what side of the coin you are on.

But I also learned that some people really are very open to new options for their shop!

So far I have had 5 shops indicate interest for either immediate ordering or for their next order.

One of those shops is in Budapest ! and another in Amsterdam!

As a Canadian who loves travel, I think its so neat and I have now added new goals to my travel bucket list to visit these places that are stocking my books.

So on to the how…

This was and still is a massive undertaking. There is no quick way around it unless you have the money to pay for such services.

And over here, we do not have the money for that.

I spent HOURS combing the internet… like so many I lost count to be honest. This was the hardest part, and I tried to utilize everything I could think of.

I was googling horror stores in X area, I was using maps to go to cities and find their book stores, I was using blog lists and I even found some bookseller contact lists through various indie platforms.

By far the best method was just googling stores and navigating to their websites then determining if they had an available email or contact form I could send them information via.

This was not glamorous and at times I wanted to give up.

At first I dumped them all into an excel sheet. Then I took on the task of sorting into send out lists.

This was a bit of trial and error.

Originally I was just going to use mail merge via gmail. However it was capped at 100 emails per DAY. and that seemed exhausting to have to log in each day and send out mass emails.

So I pivoted to Microsoft word Mail merge and connected it with my websites hosted email address. This allowed me to send 200 emails per HOUR. which seemed much more doable.

With my method finalized I reformatted my excel sheet to have 198 emails per column. Just under my max limit for some emergency room.

Then I created various tables in a clean Access database that each housed one of the short lists.

If you have not heard of Mail Merge before then you are in for a treat my friend.

What it does, is it takes a word document that has your email body text all formatted and then sends it as an individual email to each of your contacts.

To access the settings it is under the mailings ribbon in Word. There are so many tutorials online about this! and so many more features than I even went in to.

Now, could I have CCd everyone on an email? Yup, sure could have.

But it would have felt cold and although tons of people do things that way, I just don’t think it feels very professional.

I went the most simple route possible, I only dumped email addresses into my database. But I could have gone further and added names and more personalization. Word allows you to add column information to your draft email so you could even say hello to each of your recipients personally.

At the end of the day I was looking for quantity with a small personal touch. So I was fine not adding in extra information. Plus searching all those 1600 shops information would have been hell to have to redo.

That’s right, I had tons of emails bounce back.

And I looked at every single one of them and then removed the emails from my list.

I have gone from a list of 1600 to 1400.

I removed dead emails, shops that emailed me back expressing they can’t order indie, shops that don’t stock my genre and anything else along these lines that seemed right to remove for when I need this list again for next books.

I had a lot of Canadian shops message me that they will not order from Ingram.

Now, having dealt with them myself I am not really shocked, but it does limit my capabilities to get my books in store. I just don’t have the ability to mail everyone their purchases for free. Although I wish I could.

Why won’t they shop with Ingram? well, some its because they are an American company. And others its just pure math; ordering a book in USD and then trying to make profit on top of a high shipping cost is very difficult for indie business.

I do have a Canadian printed which will allow me to sell the copies cheaper and in CAD to those shops but they were not interested since I would still need to charge them shipping.

But that is fine, I will be working with the stores very closely that are in my province! That isn’t a right now plan, I need to get through some more hoops but more to come on that.

All in all I would say I am due a break soon.

My books launch tomorrow and next Tuesday so I think after that I will be taking a little “vacation” from my writing responsibilities and just focusing on gearing up to go back to my day job post mat leave.

But for now, the quest never ends. So let me know your favourite book shop to visit in person and I will see if I already contacted them or add them to my round two send outs!

I sent 1600 emails...

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