Nope. It is not. I would love for it to be in stores, but alas, that is WAY more complicated than it seems. Might I remind you that my original tongue-in-cheek goal for publishing was to see the hardcover book on the shelf (okay, actually for sale) at Target. In a nutshell… my book is on Amazon, which in terms of online retailers is by far, the biggest. To make it available to brick and mortar retailers, there are a couple of key points.
First, I would have to buy another ISBN and publish on Ingram Spark, or potentially some other publisher that offers expanded marketing, like Barnes and Noble. You see, bookstores generally don’t buy books from their competition (Amazon), and instead buy from retailers (Which is where Ingram, which is also one of the largest book distributors) gets their books.
But wait… It’s not that simple! As an unknown author (Okay, I’m quite famous in a VERY small group) why should they take a chance on me? After all, I don’t have 20,000 Twitter followers. To make that a winning proposition for the bookstore, I’d need to make my books returnable. If the bookstore returns the books, the return cost is borne by the publisher. Cool!
Except… I’m the publisher in this case. Typically, publishers can expect about a third of their books to be returned, generally because they aren’t selling like hotcakes. Well that’s not so bad. What’s the big deal if a bookstore returns a couple of books?
Well, what if two hundred bookstores return a couple of books? Big money, that’s what! So for now, I will continue my life of obscurity. I do have another free download day next Tuesday, and I keep pushing it out there… Maybe with book two, I’ll decide to be famous. For now… I’m sticking with Amazon.
To those of you out there who have already purchased UNDERCURRENT, thank you. If you have written a review on Goodreads or Amazon, thank you. To those of you who have downloaded the free book, thank you. And for those who have not… there’s the 26 March free download coming, AND, the paperback is still out there. It’d be cool if you connected with my author pages, and asked me questions and stuff too, if you like. I’d love to know what you think!
Michael Crowl - Author 
Being an indie gives me full control over my product. I also prefer to work with localized POD (print on demand) outlets, instead of allowing corporate “trad” publishers to print my books in China.
Going indie is not the easy way, but it’s the way I can feel good about.
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Going indie is a crap-ton of work. For me, it was the pressure of the high standard, because I didn’t want my book to suck. Doing so takes a lot of time in the writing and editing stage of course, but the book cover and book design is a major undertaking, and an entirely separate work role.
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Dream big dad, we’ll get you in the bookstores. You did a LOT of hard work, and I’m immensely proud to have your book on my shelf.
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