Book Consignment

Are you interested in selling your book at South Main Book Company? We cherish our local writing community, and we are committed to providing opportunities for local authors to make their work available to our customers, to the extent that our resources allow. Please read all the material below carefully. If you believe your book is a good fit for South Main Book Company, please fill out this form, and we will contact you if we'd like to carry your book.

We have limited space and resources and make hard choices every day about which books command shelf space and staff time. We give special consideration to authors with a strong Salisbury or regional connection that's likely to lead to sales. We are much more likely to work with authors who refer customers to bookstores (not Amazon) to purchase their books.

Please be aware that we get a lot of consignment requests, and they are time-consuming and expensive for us to process. Many books left on consignment do not sell, and most of those that do, sell one or two copies. We cannot respond to those whose work we choose not to stock. If we would like to have your book on our shelves, we will do our best to get back to you within a couple of weeks. Please do not call to follow up on your request, and DO NOT drop off samples or stock at the shop unless we contact you to request that you do. DROP-IN REQUESTS FOR CONSIGNMENT WILL NOT BE ACCEPTED. We cannot accept any new consignments between November 15th and December 31st.

We look to get a standard publishing discount of 40% on books we carry on consignment. We take between 1 and 5 copies of a book. We can pay for only what sells and we are not responsible for lost, damaged, or stolen merchandise. We usually keep books for three months and will email or call you if we need more. We generally pay after all books are sold or at the end of the consignment period. Please plan to pick up any unsold books in a timely manner, or they will be donated. We cannot ship unsold books back to you.