Only customers with bowler hats will buy my books

or How to sell a book (in one lesson)

I write this article for kids over 20, so, alas, I am obliged to do it in English, which is far easier than in Dutch, because no native spaker will be able to distinguish how poor my English is. So in English it will be!

Have you ever sold a book? I mean, a book you wrote yourself and did you ever try (in your naivety) to enter a bookshop and offer it for sale there, that is: did you ask them to sell it for you?
If they are very professional and live in a town not too far off the map, they will tell you (even without taking a look at the thing in your hand) that they have no place for it in their bookshop. Far too many books are being published each year and (14.000 in the Netherlands and Belgium)! Well, in short: I think they just want to tell you: enough is enough. You are at the end of the line. Someone must be. Fire regulations.

Makes sense. By why your book or better: not your book? There is no time or even an opportunity to discuss that, although you may try it, because they (those guardian angels of their books) want you to get out as quickly as possible, as if you were a stray dog that could make stains on their precious prize-winning books, sealed in sterile plastic. If there is a customer standing behind you with one of those prize-winning books in his hand from their bookshop that he wants to buy and you keep obstructing him by talking to the owner(s), you may strain their nerves even too much, especially if a second or a third customer joins the waiting-line. They (the shop owners) will not take you by the throat with their hands but their eyes will strangle you.

So it is wiser to choose a bookshop in a town somewhere off the map at a quiet hour, so that no buyer behind you can spoil the feast of presenting your book (as an uninvited guest, however, still).
Generally, they (the bookshop owner or his representative) will tell you that they are surprised that you came out of the blue, (although you took the front entrance) but if they are nice people, I mean really nice people, they will try to find a way out to refuse your book without being too rude.
First they will repeat that they are taken by surprise , but immediately recovered, they will tell you the story of the 14.000 titles that are being published in the Dutch language area each year, a number that they will occasionally blow up to 28.000 titles (I guess that includes the papier bank notes that are still being printed).
If you dispute that, especially with a woman, she will finally admit that it is generally 14.000, but, still, that last year it was unexpectedly high: almost 28.000 titles. Well, never argue with a woman, that's the first lesson my sweet mother taught me.

And then comes the main argument: they will explain to you that it has to take the place of another book. If they put your book for sale in their shop, they cannot sell another book (at the given place). True. It is like telling a newborn (if he or she could grasp it) that it is going to take somebody else's place in time, which is a Vérité de la Palisse, as the French put it so gently, don't you agree, my English-loving friends?
Then they will start to criticize the book: why does it have so many (weird, they think weird) pictures, why are you printing your text in two columns and not in a single broad one? Why does the paper feel so rude (some rare female book shopkeepers like to touch the paper of the book)?

In the end, when you can convince them to take a closer look at the text of your book, perhaps during the day, and come back, later on, they will tell you that it is hard to put it anywhere in their shop. Is it fiction? Non fiction? Photography? On what shelf does one put a mixture of the 3? Has there ever been a bookshelf designed for that?
Well, I guess they make it too difficult to sell your book, perhaps they think that only customers with bowler hats will buy your book, and they expect none of them for the first 3 years to enter their shop. Got it? An image can tell more than a 1000 words.
In the end you give up. You have to give up sooner or later, better the shorter pain, it's a lost case anyway.
If you are clever, I mean as a writer, then you buy a strong elastic cord for bungee jumping, a very large one and you jump from the Eiffeltower. Or from Nelson's Column. It might be surprisingly succesful.

There is a big chance that you may be the talk of the town, or even of the Benelux (if that sill exists); after your exploit and in the end you (your heirs) will sell a lot, probably all your books. In the end, a book stands and falls with a good plot. And that is for most writers the perfect plot: their tragic ending.

PS: On the way home from the last blooming bookshop, I took this blooming picture and I thought: 'Well, life without a single blooming book, isn’t that blooming something!’