I am selling my book myself but would like to know what other distribution options are open to me?

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There are 3 ways of distributing a book; self distribution, online distribution & bookstore distribution. The time goes down but the risk goes up in that same order. What you are currently doing is self distribution meaning selling your book yourself (eg. direct to customer) which uses the largest amount of your time but has the smallest amount of risk involved.

As such the next logical step is to progress into online distribution as that will use less of your time to get the same results. What I mean by that is self distribution is exchanging your time for money eg. you speak about your book and sell copies afterwards. Now it might be a good exchange of time for money (eg. if you speak for 10 mins and sell 10 books at $20 each it's not a bad hourly rate) but it is still an active distribution method. Online distribution is popular because it is passive (eg. sell the same 10 books but do it without needing to talk as the content on your website provides them with the same information they heard to encourage them to buy your book after the talk you didn't do). The advantage of this is you can film yourself talking, have an audio file or even just plain text but once created the information is readily available meaning instead of getting paid per talk you do you make sales on a daily basis and you only needed to provide the information once.

If you want to go to the step beyond that look at bookstore distribution. This will increase the risk as of course you need to supply books to the stores before they have sold (whereas with online distribution you make the sale before you provide the book) but it will once again less of your time as the books sell regardless of whether you talk or not. I do recommend talking though to increase the number of sales every opportunity you get and the best kind of talking is talking to the media. Bookstore distribution will never be successful without a good PR campaign behind it so make sure you are sending press releases to the appropriate media contacts and following up to get the results. Once again why give a talk multiple times when you can do an interview once and let the media coverage as a result of that sell your books in stores time and time again.

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