Dropship, Online Sales, and Bookstore Sales
Selling books is complicated and Bookmobile is doing our best to make it easier for authors and publishers. We’ve rolled out a new price sheet for our fulfillment and book distribution services and you can request pricing here, and a helpful checklist of what services are offered with each level of service is also included!
Independently owned and based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Bookmobile began as a design and typesetting production house in 1982. We started offering print services in 1996 and book distribution services in 2004. When your books come to us, they get the benefit of forty-one years of know-how.
Bookmobile offers three levels of fulfillment services, as well as eBook services.
Dropship + Online Sales + Bookstore Sales
The full package of book distribution services, we fulfill your website orders, list your titles on Amazon, and handle distribution to the trade. That means your books are available through as many channels as possible, including physical bookstores, libraries, wholesalers, and more.
Distribution to the trade via Itasca Books
A distributor acts as a publisher’s exclusive agent and sole source of books to the book trade. The book trade includes bookstores, book chains, online booksellers, and book wholesalers. Itasca Books will disseminate your title’s metadata to book trade databases, including Amazon, Ingram, Bowker, Baker & Taylor, and more. Bookstores like Bookshop.org and Barnes & Noble retrieve your title’s data, and order books, from Ingram (a wholesaler).
Why Itasca Books? Most bookstores, including Internet retailers, prefer to obtain stock from a wholesaler or distributor. This relieves the retailer from the burden of dealing with hundreds or thousands of individual authors and small- to medium-sized publishers. Because Itasca Books is well connected within the book trade, contracting with us for distribution makes it possible for retailers to easily order and carry your book.
While Itasca Books provides sale, distribution, and fulfillment venues through traditional book distribution channels, most sales to major wholesalers are not cost-effective or efficient, and may only provide a cash return over a period of years. If you intend your sales to be a profit-making venture, the focus must be on direct sales of the title, with you playing the key role in developing channels for sales and follow through.
When you work with Itasca Books, you also get dropship and online sales services to support those direct-to-consumer sales, read on!
Dropship + Online Sales
We sell on ItascaBooks.com (online sales) and you receive a bigger cut of the sale. We list your book on Amazon and you control the pricing. If you’re not selling books on your website or author’s website, send readers to the Itasca website (rather than Amazon), so you get a bigger piece of the transaction.
You’ll also be able to opt in to selling on Itasca’s Amazon Seller account. With our Seller account, Amazon does not warehouse the book, we do. You control the selling price (not Amazon), and you make more money for each sale: we pay you 57% of the list price instead of 45% minus our fees, for example.
Dropship
We fulfill your website orders, or mail out your advanced reader copies, or send new or backlist issues of your journal. You upload orders from your website to our Stacks portal and we take care of fulfilling them. You can upload manually, via spreadsheet, or with an API feed.
This is a great fit for sending out bound galleys, or for authors or publishers with their own websites: orders are funneled to us and we fulfill them.
And don’t forget eBooks
Bookmobile provides eBook distribution services to the main eBook resellers for publishers and individual authors. We save time and effort for our clients by managing the details of distributing eBooks to multiple vendors. Bookmobile sets up a clear distribution path so our clients’ eBooks are ready for sale on the main reseller sites. Plus, we’re available at every point along the way for a personalized and transparent eBook distribution process.