Stocking a Book or Booking an Event at Sunrise Books

Congratulations on your new book! And thank you for your interest in having Sunrise Books carry it or host a reading. Please understand we evaluate thousands of new books every year and field dozens of event requests. Here are the guidelines we use when evaluating all books:

Requirements

• The content must be pertinent to our community.
• It must be newly published. Ideally, we should learn about it two to four months before publication.
• It must be packaged properly. We look at price, writing and editing quality, cover design, binding, and the general quality of the production.

Purchasing Terms, If Your Book is Approved

• If your book’s publisher is someone we do not regularly deal with, we will take the book on consignment.
• We do not stock or sell books available exclusively through Amazon or CreateSpace. We recommend IngramSpark as a print-on-demand publisher that treat independent bookstores fairly.
• If the book is available through Ingram or your publisher, it must be offered at our regular discount, be returnable, and be stocked with reasonable inventory on hand.

Consignment Terms

• 60/40 split, no shipping & handling paid and fully returnable. Consignment payments are made quarterly, although we monitor sales daily and will contact you if we sell out. We will pay for the books sold before taking new stock.

If you feel your book fits these requirements…

Send an email to angel@sunrisebookshp.com. Include in the email either a link to or attachments with information on the book, author, and publisher. It’s important we receive the request via email and can evaluate the book on our own schedule. We will accept review copies by mail, but please know that they may not be returned. We want to give your request our full attention without neglecting our customers, so no drop-in visits for this purpose, please!

Events

If we decide to stock your book, we will be happy to arrange a signing and promote it on our social media. We hold signings during regular business days. We provide light refreshments, but you are welcome to bring your own food or soft drinks. (We are not licensed to serve alcohol.) If you would like to arrange an event on a day we are not normally open, there will be a fee for staffing.

A word about attendance: No one knows who you are (yet!), so this can be tricky. Even with plenty of social media on our end, we occasionally host an event that is sparsely attended. Local and, especially, first-time authors are not much of a draw without a lot of work. And, since no one knows your book better than you, it’s going to be up to you to bring out a crowd. Even if your friends and family already own your book, have them come and listen to you read. It’s good practice, even if it’s not terribly lucrative. And, for heaven's sake, don't encourage your friends to buy the book from another vendor if you hope to have a signing with us. We want you to do well, but we have to pay the rent!

Bonus! Tips for Selling Your Book to an Independent Bookstore

• Shop at the store where you hope to place your book. Look around! You wouldn’t pitch your adult Sci-Fi book to a children’s bookstore, or a blood-spattered horror novel to a store that doesn’t have anything similar on the shelves. Make sure the store is the right place for your book.
• Your book should be professionally edited. You will be sharing shelf space with professional authors published by media experts and marketed by the best PR people in the world. This is what we read and sell every day, so our standards are pretty high. And, of course, booksellers are grammar nerds! 
• Your book’s cover, layout, and typesetting should be beautifully designed. Anything that looks amateurish is going to be a hard sell, both to us and our customers.