Fakta Livet som egenföretagare Senast Sökmotoroptimering- hur når din sajt ut till din målgrupp och dina blivande kunder?…

As Spencer mentions above, indie bookstores and booksellers need to be creating online presences and selling books online. The independent bookseller is, in the final analysis, a tastemaker, unbiased advocate (in the sense that they don’t work for publishers, so there’s no publisher-specific sales agenda), and highly specialised, human recommendation engine, if you will. The more savvy booksellers are on blogs and on Twitter, literally hand-selling books over the internet. The problem then becomes fulfillment: if, for example, the bookseller that knows me best lives and works in a small bookstore on the other end of the continent, and that shop isn’t set up for cross-country orders, or I just want an ebook, or otherwise want the instant-ish gratification associated with online purchases (impulse-buying books is another topic for another time, actually. But I digress), how does the shop get compensated for his work, if the recommendation takes me to Amazon?

Aside from the excellent concept of an Indiebound iPhone app, the answer may lie with the publishers’ direct-to-consumer sales model itself. As a publisher, why can’t I give independent booksellers a cut of our direct sales, through some sort of affiliate program, so that if they send a sale to a publisher’s site instead of to Amazon, they get a cut?

If you’d like to know when the app is released, be sure to sign up for email updates from IndieBound.org (in the upper-right corner of the site).

I think that’s my concern with the industry. Damn how blue sky such ideas might be and do it. Make the changes necessary to be competitive and drive the new digital initiatives, instead of, as we have seen in SXSW, asking everyone else what should be done. Are you listening IndieBound?