are the chainstores all that important to book sales?

It seems that Whitcoulls has declined to stock the Rugby World Cup official souvenir book (see earlier post), and have decided to publish their own. It raises the question - if a chain like this doesn't stock your book, does it matter in the scheme of things?

The answer is yes and no.  It matters to the extent that the more outlets that stock your book, the faster it will sell, but publicity including word of mouth mean that a book will find its customers anyway, it will just take longer.  In this case customers will just go instead to the shops that have the book, and in every town there will be at least one.  The only people who lose out in this case is Whitcoulls, not just on the initial sales, but also in reputation.  And in general the more often that people get told by a shop that it doesn't have the book in stock that they want (and in this case won't have it), the less people will feel like bothering with them again.