What Indie Authors Can Learn from Big Retail

As a relative Twitter newbie, I have been burning up my Kindle Unlimited downloads this month on social media guides for authors. How much to tweet? What to say? How to say it? It all felt so confusing to me. Then I had a retail experience yesterday which opened my eyes a little. When I came home and told the Beloved what happened, he smirked and said ‘it’s just like Twitter, in a way. Are you going to write about this?’

Let me back up and tell you the whole story. I bought a wedding dress yesterday! Yes, yes, I know, very exciting. The thing is, I was dreading it. I never have been the kind of girl who fantasized about my wedding. I wanted to be married, sure. But little child me was supremely disinterested in the dress and the party. Any fantasies I did have about being a married grown-up were about decorating a house with someone, eating breakfast with him at the table and things like this. The dress? Meh.

But my mother was super-excited about this. So I went along, because I suppose I do have to wear something to the wedding, right? So we went to two stores, and had two very different experiences.

Store 1: The Small Indie Store. We found a great dress right away. The sweet older lady helping us was perhaps not as slick and polished as the girl we saw at Store #2. But she took us by the hand, sat us down and began with ‘okay, let’s see what we can do for you.’ A short time later, her boss came over to check on us. The checking on us was framed as ‘I am so excited for you, I just wanted to come over and see how lovely you look in the dress.’

Store 2: The Big Name Store. Although we had already found a dress we liked, my mother wanted to make sure we ‘saw what was out there’ so we went to this store. There were some fixings they didn’t have at the other place, such as private consultation rooms. The helper was young and obnoxious. The first words out of her mouth were ‘before we start, I’ll just tell you that you are looking right off the bat at a $200 rush delivery charge because you left it so long, and the alterations will also be $400-500 just so you know.’ The dress we found there was lovely, but it was double the price. Even my die-hard romantic mother admitted that it was not double the lovely 🙂

So, let’s bring the analogy back to the book stuff now. You see the parallel to indie pub vs big pub, right? The bigger store with the more expensive product, fancier trimmings but overall focus on money, not service? What prompted the Beloved’s Twitter comment was when I mentioned about the bosses checking up on them. It’s the hard sell vs the soft sell. My sister actually worked in that big shop for a time, and she said that when we don’t return to buy the dress, that clerk will be grilled on what she did wrong to lose the sale. ‘Are you ready to buy it now?’ vs ‘I just wanted to see how lovely you look in the dress’ is the Twitterverse equivalent to the indie authors who post relentless ‘BUY MY BOOK!’ retweets vs the ones who actually trt to build relationships.

So, we went back to the little store and had a second look, and then we bought the dress. And as we left, they gently called out to us ‘hey, leave us a good review, will you?’ Again, the soft sell vs the hard sell. Yes, this purchase was partly about the price (and, as in the book world, the ‘indie’ side does indeed offer clunkers but also quality finds, and the ‘big retail’ side offers higher prices but not necessarily better product). But it was also about creating a relationship. If I had wanted the more expensive one, my mother would have sprung for it. But price alone was not the only reason they lost that sale.