FAQ
Given that a large percentage of Dostoyevsky Wannabe books have been print on demand, there has often been confusion over how physical, brick and mortar bookshops might be able to stock them.
Isabel Waidner's DW books on the shelves in Brick Lane bookshop, London. Image credit: Kaye Mitchell.
See below for the answers to some frequently asked questions on this subject.
We want to stock your books in our bookshop but you're not on our database? How do we get them?
From 2020 some of the books on our tailored publishing model will be published through both Amazon and Ingram Spark and so will be more likely to be available on various retail databases but they still won't returnable as we can't afford to offer returns but you will be able to get the usual retailer discount. If they're not labelled as being on our tailored model on the book page on our site then it means they are only available via Amazon and therefore you are unlikely to be able to stock them (although many independent bookshops have in the past).
Do you not care about bookshops?
We're massive bookshop fans and we want them all to stay open and to sell loads of independent literature and for everyone to be happy and it's not by our design that print-runs and distribution and sale or return are too expensive for and that all of the structures cost more money upfront than we are able to risk (or that we have).
We are trying to work with the tailored model to allow this all to happen a bit more easily in future.
Do you do book returns?
We're aware that firm sales are often a problem for book shops so our only advice would be not to order hundreds, order a few perhaps.
But we've seen your books in some shops so why not provide them to my shop?
Happily for us, there are lots of examples of books that we've been involved in publishing that have hit physical book shops in good numbers but these are either the result of an author-collaborator being proactive enough/having resources enough to sell them into shops or of the bookshop owner being happy to buy some in from Amazon and to sell them that way.
More Info:
Here is an article from The Bookseller which talks about Dostoyevsky Wannabe's innovative/problematic (delete as you see fit) and particularly our print on demand publishing model. The article is written by Terry Craven of Desperate Literature (an amazing independent bookshop based in Madrid). Terry makes a decent stab at outlining the idiosyncratic way in which we run at least one of our publishing models.
Although the tailored model will start to change this slightly.