Something for Your Counter That Customers Can’t Buy Online

The hardest thing about a counter product now is that your customer has a phone.

They pick something up, they like it, and then they check whether it’s cheaper elsewhere. Half the time it is, and your shop has done the selling for a warehouse. That’s the quiet problem with stocking anything a distributor supplies to a thousand other shops.

We publish books you can’t find on Amazon, because they aren’t on Amazon. There is no online price to check. The decision happens at your counter or it doesn’t happen.

We’re probably not looking for a bookshop

Most suppliers won’t say this, so let’s get it out of the way early.

We deliberately place our titles in shops that don’t sell books. Cafés, salons, yarn shops, tattoo studios, garden centres, gift counters, farm shops, hotel lobbies.

The reason is simple. In a bookshop our titles are shelved among thousands of others, spine-out, in a section organised by category rather than by who made it. Independent work doesn’t get highlighted there, it gets filed. An artist we’ve spent months producing for becomes three centimetres of spine in a back aisle.

On a salon counter, the same book is the only book in the room. It gets picked up.

If you do run a bookshop and you keep a genuine local or independent section, somewhere our titles would be presented rather than absorbed, then you qualify, and we’d like to hear from you. It’s the presentation that matters, not the trade you’re in.

And we do vet

Not many suppliers admit to choosing. We do, because a shop carrying our titles is representing artists we work with, and a tired display or staff who can’t say what the book is reflects on us as much as on you.

So this isn’t a catalogue you order from. It’s a conversation, and occasionally the answer is that we’re not a fit. That cuts both ways, because it also means the shops we do work with aren’t competing with twelve others down the road carrying identical stock. Scarcity is the product, and it starts with who we say yes to.

The thing nobody mentions: you’re allowed to set the price

This one is worth understanding properly, because if you’ve ever stocked Dutch-language books you’ll have run into the opposite.

The Netherlands operates a fixed book price law, the wet op de vaste boekenprijs. Where it applies, the publisher sets the retail price and the shop is not permitted to deviate from it. Not down, and not up either. No premium in a tourist location, no repricing for a gift market, no bundling at a figure that suits your trade. The price on the book is the price, by law. Germany’s Buchpreisbindung does the same for German-language titles.

What decides it is language. The Dutch law binds books containing Dutch or Frisian text. Books written entirely in another language fall outside it, and the law is explicit that where the book was published makes no difference either way.

Our titles are published in English. That is the whole reason they sit outside the regime. Our ISBNs are US-registered through Bowker, which is tidy registry housekeeping and nothing more, a book with no ISBN at all would still be caught if it were in Dutch.

Two details worth knowing, because they catch people out. A book that is partly Dutch is caught, so a bilingual edition or English pages with Dutch captions would be in scope. And there is a second exemption on top of language: a book with little or no text falls outside the law regardless, which is why colouring books sit doubly clear of it.

What that means for you in practice:

• Each title carries a floor price set by the artist. You may sell at it or anywhere above it

• A hotel gift counter, an airport-adjacent shop or a tourist-district salon can charge what the location actually supports

• You can bundle, gift-wrap, add a premium at Christmas, or price a signed copy where a signed copy belongs

• Nothing you make above the floor is shared. It’s yours

And because the titles aren’t on Amazon and aren’t sold into discount chains, nobody undercuts your price from outside. Under a fixed-price regime your price is protected but frozen. Here it’s protected and movable.

If a Dutch publisher has offered you something comparable in Dutch, ask them whether you can run a promotion on it or charge more in a premium location. The answer will be no, and it isn’t their choice.

Why books work at a counter specifically

They keep. No expiry, no sizing, no seasonal write-off. A book that doesn’t sell in March is perfectly saleable in November.

They sit at an impulse price, most of ours land between €17 and €30, which is where someone waiting for a coffee or a colour treatment buys on a whim.

And they suit the places where people are already waiting with nothing to do. A phone is the current default for that ten minutes. A book on the counter is a better one, and your customer will notice you thought about it.

What you pay and what you keep

You buy stock at unit cost plus 60%. Everything the customer pays at your till is yours.

Floor price	€18.45
You pay	€14.51
You keep per copy	€3.94
Three copies	€43.53 outlay

Minimum order is one copy per title. Three is what we recommend. Three copies of two titles is under €90, that’s the whole risk, and it doesn’t spoil if you’re wrong.

No account to settle later, no reporting, no percentage to work out at month end. You bought the books; the takings are yours. You pay us again when you restock.

If you’d rather not buy stock at all

Consignment is available: nothing paid upfront, the same €3.94 a copy, settle weekly for whatever sold.

It asks more of you. You’re responsible for the stock, so anything missing is charged at unit cost plus 60%. You settle weekly rather than monthly. You keep to a display arrangement we agree with you, and your staff know the products. We visit unannounced. You co-host a colouring session or similar event once a quarter. And you need to be an approved outlet for postage stamps, we’re expanding into postcards, and stamp approval also means standards we’d otherwise have to check have already been assessed. Consignment runs in the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany. The rules are not identical in each, Belgium’s Gereglementeerde Boekenprijs and Germany’s Buchpreisbindung work differently from the Dutch law, and none of them touches English-language titles. If you trade across a border, or sell into more than one of those markets, tell us and we’ll talk it through properly rather than leave you guessing.

If that sounds like more than you want, take the standard terms. Same money per copy, no obligations, nobody turning up unannounced.

One thing that works in your favour legally

A book sold over the counter at your premises is an on-premises sale. It carries no statutory 14-day cancellation right. Your own returns policy governs, and that’s yours to set.

Distance selling, doorstep and mail order all trigger the cancellation regime. A customer buying from your counter does not. If returns exposure has put you off carrying products before, this category doesn’t have it.

We’ll pick the shelf with you

A yarn shop, a tattoo studio, a garden centre and a hair salon serve different people, and the shelf should say so. A generic assortment sells like a generic assortment.

Tell us who comes through your door and we’ll suggest six or eight titles that fit them, not the same six we sent the last shop. That’s the part a distributor can’t do.

Worth saying plainly: our titles are for adults. The humour is adult, the language is adult, and several are pointedly sarcastic. They are not children’s books and we don’t market them as such. If your trade is mainly families with young children, we’re probably not the right supplier, and we’d rather say so now than have you hear it from a customer.

The card in every book is free advertising, for you

Every book carries a card insert naming the artist and pointing the reader to their other work.

There’s room on that card for a QR code to your own site, a discount on the customer’s next visit, or a line saying where the book was bought. A book someone bought from you and has on their coffee table for a fortnight is a standing reminder of your shop.

Costs you nothing. Just ask.

Two things that make them sell

Keep one copy open. Nobody opens shrink-wrap in a shop. An open browsing copy does more work than five sealed ones, and left-handed customers spot the top-bound binding immediately, which is worth pointing out, because almost nothing else on the market accommodates it.

Say who made it. “It’s by an independent artist and most of what you pay goes to her” isn’t a sales line, it’s the arithmetic, around forty-three cents in every euro reaches the artist. Customers respond to that, and it’s the thing a chain can’t say.

Getting started

Tell us what kind of shop you run and roughly who comes in. We’ll come back with a suggested shelf, send one to three copies of each title, and check in after a month.

Interested? Get in touch and tell us about your shop. We’ll reply with a suggested shelf, not a catalogue.

[Talk to us about stocking]

Also worth reading: a book branded to your own shop and what our artists earn.