It's good that you explained all that, many people don't know that it can be very time consuming and costly to be in a physical store and they make less money per book sold too. Being in a local store is great, but other than that, it's a risk if you make your books returnable.
i think bookstores are way over-rated, but so is writing. example: in Ithaca NY a university town with 2 colleges and a community college there are exactly 2 long term bookstores. oh, another half dozen have come and gone over the years. they couldn't sell enough books to stay in business. both of the surviving bookstores sell coffee and cakes and have reading areas. lots of books in bookstores don't get sold, get returned to the author and/or "rendered" i.e. pulped. i'm not saying don't try to consignment a few of your books especially if you know book sellers. i'm not saying distribute through ingram to have at least a chance of getting your book into a b.s. or get an agent. haha. get an agent lol.
how do you get money as a self-publisher at age 13 cuz me and my friend are trying to publish books and we're both 13 years old do you have any tips for us
Yes, I was ( and still am with one book) in amazon's distribution program and through that your book will automatically show up in many online stores. Just don't expect many sales, but if they do come, it's free money, unless you specifically send people to that particular store to order from. However, I'm not really sure to which stores amazon distributes. So the customer browsing an online catalogue of a store may buy your book and then the bookstore will order a pod copy of it from amazon and ship it to that customer. Not a bad model. As you've heard amazon makes the books non-returnable which is good, I think as it protects you. I think now draft2digital can also be used for that purpose, but IngramSpark will probably have a broader reach, so for now I only plan to go with IS.
