Jason's Books & Coffee welcomes works from small presses, independent literary journals, and self-published authors. We are pleased to report the sale of new books for inclusion in bestseller-list math.

In general, we sell new books and magazines from:

Small Presses and Lit Journals (with Distributor)

We're keen to highlight great works from very small presses that otherwise find it difficult to get traction in any bricks-and-mortar sales venue. We are especially interested in tiny presses from the Great Lakes region, or in specific titles from small presses from elsewhere featuring authors from our core West Michigan retail market.

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Great Lakes Region: Any U.S. state bordering the Great Lakes — Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York — or the Canadian province of Ontario.

West Michigan: Loosely, Kent County, Michigan, and its immediate neighboring counties of Allegan, Barry, Ionia, Montcalm, Muskegon, Newaygo, and Ottawa.

Both authors and publishers are welcome to recommend specific titles to us.

Let us know which titles you think might catch our fancy and we'll place a standard distribution order if we're suitably charmed. We've partnered with Ingram Content Group as our primary wholesale supplier. Clue us in by sending the relevant marketing information to our hello@ email address or by USPS. We will actually peruse your catalogs!

Small Presses and Lit Journals (without Distributor)

Some small presses or lit journals do not sell through a distributor. That's not a problem! We will work with you in either of two different ways.

First, we can purchase the books from you, directly, at the standard wholesale discount of 55 percent off list price. For example, a book priced at $21.95 would be sold to us for $9.88. We would not return them, and since we purchased them, there wouldn't be any quarterly statements. Just a one-and-done transaction. This discount, by the way, puts non-distributor titles on the exact same playing field as distributed titles — you're getting the same rate as most other small press. (Sad, isn't it?)

Second, we accept titles by consignment. See the "Consignment" section, below, for more information.

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Only the publisher can request a consignment agreement or arrange for a direct-from-publisher purchase; authors published by small presses cannot, for contractual reasons.

Self-Published Authors and Single-Author Presses

We welcome books — including story and poetry collections — from self-published authors, and from authors who self-publish through a publishing company they own.

Self-published titles must demonstrate literary merit and market appeal to our satisfaction. We therefore ask to inspect the book before we will agree to shelve it. We typically only work with self-published authors in the West Michigan market, although a really great book will find a home here even if it's from, say, Lansing or Kalamazoo or Cadillac.

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Literary Merit: A book evidences literary merit if it presents with a clean and well-designed cover, a standard trim size and binding, consistent internal organization and typography, few grammatical or typographic errors, and broad conformance to commercial storytelling conventions. Book should conform to the Industry Standards Checklist for a Professionally Published Book as released by the Independent Book Publisher's Association.

Market Appeal: A book that is reasonably expected to be of interest to a general retail market. Books that are hyper-niche (e.g., a biography of an obscure family member or the history of a tiny church community) are unlikely to enjoy broad market appeal.

We accept well-done fusion titles, but we will group all fusion in the same "fusion" category rather than place it elsewhere. This approach helps us promote interesting but hard-to-classify works in a consistent, coherent manner.

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Fusion: A fiction book that blends genres in a non-standard way. For example, history and romance are genres, and historical romance is a standard sub-genre. But a novel about a gay vampire romance set in Steampunk ancient Egypt defies standard genre classification, hence it's considered a fusion novel.

Although some self-published material can be ordered through Ingram, and we're happy to place an order for your books, most self-published titles are managed on consignment. This approach includes books that are self-published through sites like Amazon, which either do not provide ISBNs or issue ISBNs that are locked to their online marketplace.

Consignment

Books that are consigned are delivered to us by the author or publisher. We do not pay shipping to get them to us, nor do we buy the books directly. Instead, we keep them in our inventory system but you still own each copy. When a book is sold, we'll pay you 80 percent of the list price. When you wish to withdraw the books from our store, or if we no longer choose to carry them, we will send them to you at our cost.

To get started with consignments, send an email to our hello@ address introducing yourself and your book(s) or lit journal. We want to know:

  • Who are you? How long have you been doing this? Offer a brief summary of each title you want us to carry – name, page count, trim size, genre, author name(s), brief synopsis. Links are welcome. No need to over-think it; this message is just the beginning of the conversation, not the end of it.
  • Does the book or journal present a unique identifier like an ISBN barcode or a UPC on the front or back cover? If it does, and if the barcode or UPC displays or embeds pricing information, we will use that barcode for our point-of-sale system. Books or journals that do not offer a barcode with a unique identifier and pricing information will "get stickered" with one of our SKU numbers. This sticker may or may not come off cleanly if we ship the books back to you for any reason.
  • We ask for photos of the cover (front/back/spine) and of several random interior pages, including the copyright and table-of-contents pages, for self-published works. We ask for these images so we can assess the literary merit of the book.
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Book barcodes are just the 13-digit ISBN with a smaller barcode that's the pricing extension. If there's no smaller barcode, or if the last four digits above the barcode are zeros, then the pricing extension was not activated and the book will require a sticker.

If we agree to engage in a consignment relationship with you:

  • You must ship five to 10 copies of each title, at your expense.
  • We send quarterly statements and pay with those statements regardless of the amount due. No withholds! Transactions are electronic only (ACH transfers).
  • We sell the books or literary journals at the normal list price at an 80/20 split (we keep 20% to offset handling, labeling, and shipping).
  • When you're done with us, we'll ship back unsold copies at our expense.
  • For literary journals, we will either return back issues or set them aside for a "literary mystery box" subscription program planned for early 2024, at the publisher's preference. Mystery-box titles earn 60% of list, with 20% remaining with the bookstore for S&H and 20% channeling as a donation to the Lakeshore Literary Foundation's general fund.
  • No convoluted contracts or exclusivity requirements.
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Jason's Books & Coffee is part of an interconnected ecosystem of literary stakeholders in the West Michigan market. As such, we can offer these rates because the bookstore's expenses are negligible and we don't need to turn a profit to continue operating.