I’ve recently seen a new kind of notification on the royalty statements I get through Lulu — sales through “Ingram”.
What that means is that my books have started appearing in the catalogues of Ingram, one of the two big distributors of books to bookshops. And that at least some sales are happening that way.
Given this, I have a request. If you want to buy *physical copies* of my books, please order them from your local bookshop.
I’m not asking this for the money — I get *far* less money from bookshop (or Amazon) sales than from sales direct from Lulu, and less money from physical books than from ebooks.
I’m asking for two reasons, one selfish and one not.
The selfish one is that by ordering my books through a bookshop, you are letting the bookshop know my books exist and that someone wants to buy them. That might lead to them ordering further copies and putting them on display, and other people discovering my books, and so on.
More importantly, though, I think having bookshops exist is a good thing, and the more people buy from bookshops, the more of them will stay open.

Of course, I’m not going to complain however you choose to buy my stuff. But if you can cope with the couple of days’ wait while a brick-and-mortar store fulfills the order, it’d be nice if you did.