SALES & Marketing INQUIRies
If you're interested in stocking your books and relevant gift products at Postmark, this is the place to start! Please read the guidelines carefully — we don't have too many of them so Step One is to make sure they're followed.
GENERAL GUIDELINES
​
1. We do not accept sales inquiries over the phone or in-person while we are helping customers. The answer to these will always be "no." We are a very busy and very small shop so our in-store time is 100% devoted to getting our customers what they need.
​
2. We cannot receive product samples via the US Postal Service (regular mail), but we can receive shipments via UPS and FedEx. Packages or envelopes sent via USPS will be returned.
​
3. All products should fit the general vibe of our store; if you're unsure of what that is we highly recommend visiting us next time you're in town! We have a very specific customer base and we know exactly what they like; that is our first and sometimes only criteria for product selection.
​
4. The only way to reach us for sales inquiries is via email here. Emails are in our normal daily workflow. Any messages outside of this workflow (Instagram DMs, messages in a bottle, singing telegrams) will not reach us for several months, if ever. If something isn't a good fit for our space we may not respond and there is no need to follow up on your part. Rest assured that if your product is a good fit we will reach out to enthusiastically place an order on our own.
​
5. When reaching out we require your order terms, a sample or detailed photos of the products, and your marketing and publicity plans, including any notable successes or press clips to date. It always helps to see how they are being displayed in other stores.
​
BOOK-SPECIFIC GUIDELINES
​
1. We do not stock self-published books or recovery memoirs.
​
2. We do not stock books that are published via CreateSpace or any other Amazon subsidiary. We also do not stock books by authors who primarily drive sales through Amazon or any other single retailer at the expense of others (using Amazon links in bios, email signatures, social media posts, etc.). This is because you have already driven your existing demand elsewhere and there's no remaining business opportunity. For more information on Amazon's particularly outsized negative impact, we recommend reading about fellow bookseller Danny Caine's activism here and his book on the subject here!
​
3. If you work for an established publisher with multiple titles and authors, we just need to see your catalog or Edelweiss/website links. We can take it from there! If you've been in the store (see point #3 in general guidelines above!) it helps to get your opinion on what might work especially well for us. This is extra helpful if you have a ton of books to sift through.
​
4. If you are an author published by a larger house, all we ask for is a link to your book on the publisher's website or Edelweiss — that will have everything we need to consider the book so no further work is needed on your part. There's no need to send us a sample copy, either, as we can request these from the publisher if needed.
​
5. If you are an author published by a smaller house, we still need the above info, which is usually on the publisher's web page for your book. If not, we will need to see the publisher's ordering terms, their marketing and publicity plan for your book, and any successes or notable achievements so far (award nominations, major reviews, etc.). If you don't have this information at-hand we ask that you organize all of that before asking us to consider it. Please note that this is all the same info we require for every book we stock in the store, not just books from small presses. This is simply our process for getting that info from you if you haven't taken advantage of the existing retail marketing ecosystem other publishers use.
​
6. For further advice on how to sell books as an author, here are some tips from our book buyer!​​