In order to sell a book, it has to stand out. In order for it to stand out, the author has to stand out. First books are rarely bought because the story catches on. They are bought because there is something about the author that fascinates the buyer. That is why the first people who will buy a book are the author's family and friends. To them, the author is already special. The real challenge, however, is to become also special to people who don't know the author yet.

Why is that such a challenge? Here are a few illustrative numbers. Since 1776, approximately 22 million books have been published in America. The good news is that 20.5 million of those are now out of print and therefore out of contention. The bad news is that 1.5 million titles are still in print. Each year, almost 150.000 new titles are added. Now sit down for five minutes or so and make a list of how many of their authors you know the names of.

Are you back? How many are they, 10? 20? Or are you very knowledgeable, and did you come up with a hundred authors? That's fantastic, but still no more than a drop in the bucket of 1.5 million book titles. Do you get the point?

More numbers: in 1947, America counted 357 publishers. Back then, if you worked hard at getting your name out, you might have had a shot at it, although you didn't have TV, the internet, or modern transportation means to help you. In 1973, the number of publishers had mushroomed tenfold to 3,000. Seven years later, in 1980, there were 12,000. Fourteen years later, in 1994, there were 52,847. Today, it's about 56,000. All have new books to sell, all have invested, all want a return on that investment. Does that make for a competition hell, or what?

Now let's step into the bookstore. There are 15,000 such stores in America. Here's your first disappointment: 70 percent of all Americans have not visited a bookstore in the last five years. Your bookstore audience is a meagre 30 percent of every breathing body from sea to shining sea. Of these folks, 60 percent come in knowing exactly what they want. Only 40 percent are open to making impulse purchases. How do they choose?

They spend 8 seconds at looking at your front cover, so, yeah, the design should be appealing alright. But they spend twice as long studying the back cover, 15 seconds, therefore your back cover information puts a lot more weight on the scale. What's on that back cover? A brief book description, and information about you, the author. If those two ingredients don't manage to catch the customer, forget about all the rest.

And here's the next disappointment. The bookstore is reluctant to stock your book, and for a very good reason. With almost 150,000 new titles coming out each year, the bookstore would have to add more than one mile of additional shelf space if they were to stock just one single copy of each new title, one mile this year, one mile the next, and so on. They won't do that. They will only stock a book that they believe will sell. And even then they are wrong 80 pct of the time, because that is how many books they are stuck with, unsold.

So much for wishing that the publisher would dump stacks of books in the store. It is something that the publisher cannot do, because it is not his decision to make. The bookstore determines which books they will carry, and to add insult to injury, it is often not even the local manager who makes these determinations. In most bookstore chains, it is a higher-up "buyer" who decides what the local stores are allowed to carry.

Thank goodness for a little degree of lawlessness here, though. Many local managers are willing to defy their headquarters every now and then, and stock a book that the guy above their pay grade has overlooked. That is where the author's legwork comes in. Stop being a writer, and become a salesman. There are thousands of bookstores that are carrying books because the author made an effort to sell himself to the store manager.

And after you have exhausted all you can do to work the bookstore? Think limitless opportunities. Chain bookstores account for only 25 percent of all book sales. Almost 18 percent of all books are sold through book clubs, 15 percent go through the (often much more agreeable) independent bookstores, six percent through online stores such as Amazon (they already carry your book, so don't worry about them), and the remaining 35 or so percent are sold through, well, through anywhere your fantasy will guide you.