(2009-03-05) Doctorow Book Salesforce

Cory Doctorow thinks that any Route Around the Book Publishing industry needs a Sales Force to get your book into Book Store-s. When I worked in bookstores, we had exceptional local reps, like Eric, the Bantam guy who knew that I was exactly the right clerk to give an advance copy of SnowCrash to if he wanted to ensure a big order and lots of hand-selling when the book came in... Here, then, is the major challenge and opportunity of networked, author-driven, revolutionary publishing for this century: how do you turn the Internet into a machine for introducing books to physical, real-world stores? How do you use the Internet to introduce books to online stores that don't specialize in books, like Think Geek? Commenters question how many authors are being served that way these days...