The event with no books
Your author has a talk at a bookshop in a market town, then a festival slot the following weekend. The publicist booked both. The bookshop said it would order stock. The festival bookseller, a different shop, is ordering for thirty events and asked for the ISBNs in a spreadsheet.
On the evening of the talk, forty people come, and the shop has twelve copies of the hardback because the order went in late and only part of it arrived. The author signs the twelve and a pile of bookplates. At the festival, the bookseller ordered the paperback, which is not published yet, because the ISBN on the spreadsheet was wrong.
Why events and stock do not meet
Event bookings live with publicity. Stock orders live with the bookseller and your distributor. The two are joined only by emails, and nobody's job is to check the join.
- Booksellers order through wholesalers or your distributor, which you may not see until it ships.
- Festival booksellers order for many events and work from lists you send.
- Format and edition (hardback, paperback, special edition) is easy to get wrong.
- Late bookings leave too little time for normal delivery.
- Returns after the event arrive later and are not tied back to it.
What a stock gap at an event costs
| Gap | Result |
|---|---|
| Too few copies | Sales lost on the one night the audience is keen to buy |
| Wrong format | The audience cannot buy the book the author came to talk about |
| Order never placed | An embarrassed author and a frustrated bookseller |
| Too many copies | A large return a few weeks later |
| No record of results | No way to judge which events are worth the author's time |
The events log we build
- An event record created when publicity books it: date, venue, bookseller, author, title and format, expected audience.
- A stock plan per event, with a suggested order sent to the bookseller along with the correct ISBNs from your title records.
- Order checks against your distributor's order and dispatch reports, so you can see whether the bookseller's order exists and has shipped.
- Reminders to the publicist when an event is a set time away and no order has shown up, and to the author with the final details.
- A festival pack: one list of all your authors' events at that festival with titles, formats and ISBNs, for the festival bookseller.
- After the event, a quick record of copies sold and any returns, linked to the event.
If you already manage events in a shared calendar, the log can read from it rather than asking publicity to enter things twice.
Event season, with the log running
A week before the bookshop talk, the publicist gets a note: no order from this bookshop has appeared at the distributor yet. One phone call later it is placed, with time for delivery. The festival bookseller receives a single, correct list for all your events there. The author gets confirmation of the venue, time and the fact that stock is there.
After the season, you can see which events sold well and which did not, which booksellers order reliably, and whether the festival returns were large. That helps publicity decide where to send authors next year, and helps sales know which shops to support.
Take a book with a paperback due in the spring and a hardback still selling. Every event record carries the format the author will be talking about, and the festival list shows the ISBN of the edition actually available on the day, pulled from your title records. If an event falls in the week the paperback publishes, the log flags it so publicity and the bookseller can agree which edition to stock, instead of discovering the answer on the night.
Does this sound like your events calendar?
- An author has arrived at an event with too few books.
- Festival booksellers have ordered the wrong format.
- Nobody checks that event stock has shipped.
- Event sales and returns are never recorded against the event.
- Publicity and sales keep separate lists of events.