Bulk and corporate sales
A retail sale is one copy to one stranger who found you somehow. A bulk sale is three hundred copies to one buyer who has already decided, pays against an invoice, and is never sending them back.
For a working nonfiction author it is usually the highest-value channel available, and it is the one almost nobody pursues, because it does not look like publishing. It looks like sales. There is no listing to optimize and no algorithm to please. Someone has to ask, and the someone is you.
Who buys hundreds of copies
Companies. For staff or for clients. A book for everyone on a training course, a copy handed to each new hire, a gift to customers at the end of the year. The budget it comes out of is not a book budget — it is training, marketing or client relations, which is why the price rarely becomes the sticking point.
Conference and event organizers. A copy for every attendee, often folded into the ticket price and announced as part of the package.
Associations and professional bodies. For members, for an annual meeting, for a regional chapter running a reading program.
Churches, charities and nonprofits. For a study group, a congregation, a campaign, or a fundraiser where they buy at a discount and resell at cover price.
Schools and districts, though they buy through their own purchasing systems and on their own calendar — Selling to schools and libraries covers that route separately.
Why they buy
There are two reasons, and only two.
The first is that the book solves a problem the organization already has. Not a problem you think they should have — one they are already spending money on. A book about difficult conversations sells to a company already running communication training. The book is cheaper than the consultant and easier to hand out than a slide deck.
The second is that you are speaking at their event. This is the one worth building on. An organizer who has booked you has already decided you are worth an hour of their attendees' time; adding a copy of the book for every seat is a small extra decision, and it is often easier to sell than the talk was. Speaking and bulk sales are not two businesses. They are the same business, approached from either end, and Teaching, speaking and workshops is the other half of this page.
What a bulk buyer needs that a reader does not
An invoice. A real one, with your name or imprint, an address, an invoice number, a date, the quantity, the unit price, the total and payment details. Organizations pay invoices. Many of them cannot pay any other way.
A purchase order. Larger buyers raise a PO before they can commit, and their finance office will want your details on file as a supplier first. None of this is a bad sign. It is the sale proceeding normally.
A delivery date. They are buying for an event on a specific day. Your answer has to include the print time, the shipping time and a margin for both, and you have to be right.
Customization, sometimes. A foreword addressed to their people, their logo on the back cover, a printed insert, a signed bookplate tipped in. Each of these is a different book file and often a separate edition, so agree what is being changed before you quote, and price the work as work.
One person who answers email. You. Same day if you can. A buyer comparing you with a publisher's sales department is comparing response times, and that is the one contest you can win outright.
In the tools. A bulk edition with a client foreword or a logo on the back is a second version of a book you have already built here — duplicate it, change what the buyer asked for, and the spine recomputes from the real page count so the wrap still fits. Start your book → · about the tools
How the pricing works
Bulk pricing is tiered by quantity: a modest discount off cover price at the low end, deeper as the order grows, with the tiers published on your sell sheet so the buyer can see where the next break falls. Set the tiers yourself and hold to them.
The arithmetic that decides whether any of it works is not the cover price. It is your own per-copy cost against the discount you are offering. Print-on-demand author copies make small and mid-size orders perfectly workable — you order them, they arrive, you invoice above what you paid. Genuinely large orders are where the per-copy cost of an offset run starts to justify paying for the whole run up front, and Print on demand or a print run? is the guide that decides that.
Quote shipping separately rather than burying it, say whether the price includes it, and get advice on the tax position for your country before you invoice across a border.
Have a sell sheet before you need it
One page, as a PDF, ready to send the hour someone asks. Cover image, title and subtitle, ISBN, format, page count, publication date, two sentences on what the book does for their audience, the quantity tiers, what customization is available, lead time, how to order, and your email and phone number. The press kit nobody asks for until they do covers the assets that go into it.
The sheet exists because bulk conversations move fast and then stall. Something you send the same afternoon is still live. Something you write next week is not.
Then it has to physically arrive
Either you ship it or the printer ships it. Shipping direct from the printer to the buyer's address is simpler and cheaper and means you never touch the boxes; shipping yourself is what signed copies and inserts require.
Remember what several hundred books actually are. A pallet is heavy, needs a delivery address that can receive one, and needs a person there to sign for it. Confirm all three before the truck leaves.
Make your book
The tools are free to use: name your book, bring your manuscript or your artwork, and work as long as you like. You only pay when you want the files without the preview watermark.
Next: Special sales: the places books sell that are not bookshops · More: Print on demand or a print run? · Teaching, speaking and workshops · Selling books directly to readers