Question
What does it cost to place a book at the front of Barnes & Noble?
Answer
Unless your name is "Malcolm Gladwell" or something, what you are asking is basically not possible. But a more limited thing is possible.
First you need to get distribution via a channel that Barnes and Noble will buy from. If you are self-publishing, Ingram Lightning Source is your best option.
After that, you can go to individual stores in your area and try to talk the manager into a) stocking your book and b) putting you in the "local authors" shelf. That's really the only area where individual store managers have a lot of discretion at the title level. Otherwise, the decisions about what to stock and how much to promote them are made much centrally, based on which titles the big publishers are betting their marketing dollars on, and which bestselling authors have books coming out.
There is a fair amount of regional variation, but that's at the level of which categories to strengthen (eg. business vs. home and garden), not individual titles.
If you REALLY want to get on shelves prominently, there's no way to pay your way there quickly. You have to do what other authors do: start with small independent bookstores, market your book like crazy, do events, get yourself PR/reviews etc. And hope to get noticed by a big publisher who will buy up reprint rights and put you on their "let's make this guy a big star" list.
Big publishers work like VCs in that sense. They offer growth funding for successful seed-stage books that could do well in bigger markets. Most of the time, they are spending 90% of their clout on proven names (= serial entrepreneurs), but they reserve a small fraction of their reach for launching new authors.
But though this can happen (especially if you can sneak through Oprah Winfrey's defenses somehow), in general, this whole path is simply not worth the effort any more. The reason is one word: Amazon.
Most books do NOT have this big market potential, and it makes no sense to seek this kind of path. You're much better off ignoring retail book sales altogether and focusing exclusively on online sales and marketing via blogging, and specifically optimizing for Amazon. The retail trade is in bad trouble in paper book sales, and getting completely killed by Amazon in the ebook market, which is now bigger (on Amazon) than either paperback or hardcover.
I strongly recommend the book "Aiming at Amazon" by Aaron Shepherd: http://www.amazon.com/Aiming-Ama...
The book talks about the new realities of book publishing. The model promoted by people like Dan Poynter is getting obsolete.
First you need to get distribution via a channel that Barnes and Noble will buy from. If you are self-publishing, Ingram Lightning Source is your best option.
After that, you can go to individual stores in your area and try to talk the manager into a) stocking your book and b) putting you in the "local authors" shelf. That's really the only area where individual store managers have a lot of discretion at the title level. Otherwise, the decisions about what to stock and how much to promote them are made much centrally, based on which titles the big publishers are betting their marketing dollars on, and which bestselling authors have books coming out.
There is a fair amount of regional variation, but that's at the level of which categories to strengthen (eg. business vs. home and garden), not individual titles.
If you REALLY want to get on shelves prominently, there's no way to pay your way there quickly. You have to do what other authors do: start with small independent bookstores, market your book like crazy, do events, get yourself PR/reviews etc. And hope to get noticed by a big publisher who will buy up reprint rights and put you on their "let's make this guy a big star" list.
Big publishers work like VCs in that sense. They offer growth funding for successful seed-stage books that could do well in bigger markets. Most of the time, they are spending 90% of their clout on proven names (= serial entrepreneurs), but they reserve a small fraction of their reach for launching new authors.
But though this can happen (especially if you can sneak through Oprah Winfrey's defenses somehow), in general, this whole path is simply not worth the effort any more. The reason is one word: Amazon.
Most books do NOT have this big market potential, and it makes no sense to seek this kind of path. You're much better off ignoring retail book sales altogether and focusing exclusively on online sales and marketing via blogging, and specifically optimizing for Amazon. The retail trade is in bad trouble in paper book sales, and getting completely killed by Amazon in the ebook market, which is now bigger (on Amazon) than either paperback or hardcover.
I strongly recommend the book "Aiming at Amazon" by Aaron Shepherd: http://www.amazon.com/Aiming-Ama...
The book talks about the new realities of book publishing. The model promoted by people like Dan Poynter is getting obsolete.