Not So Many Happy Returns
The Unpleasant Business of Returns in the Book Biz
This is kind of a weird topic. It’s one I’m sure readers never give a moment of thought to, nor most authors. Authors who publish their books with trad houses may notice a line item on their royalty statement informing them about reserves against returns. I’ve worked for companies that issue those royalty statements so I know about them, but I’ve never published so I couldn’t say from an author’s perspective if this is something they take notice of. It turns out, a lot of self-published authors, or authors aspiring to self-publish, don’t give any thought to book returns either. But if you’re going into business publishing your own book, you definitely need to understand returns.
To clarify, I’m not talking about consumer returns. If I buy a book from Amazon, for instance, I can return that for any reason—or no reason—within a certain amount of time and get a refund. If I buy a Kindle book from Amazon and download it and read it, and I don’t like how it ends, I can return it and get my money back as long as I’m requesting the refund within seven days of my purchase. Unethical, but allowed. Barnes and Noble will let you bring a book back for a refund (though they won’t refund electronic Nook content). Most bookstores allow you to return a book for a refund, just as long as it’s in its original condition.
On a related note, I once worked as a manager in a video rental store (a thing that existed in the 80s and 90s but, alas, no longer) and a customer requested a refund for her rental of Memento because she “didn’t understand it.” Ma’am, some things simply cannot be understood by the human mind. When I declined to refund her money, she doubled down: “My husband didn’t understand it either!” She did not get her money back.
The customer is not always right.
As an author, it’s possible that someone will read your book and dislike the ending, I suppose, and request their money back. I don’t see how someone could dislike your book’s ending, personally I found it very compelling, but maybe someone out there didn’t understand it and wants their money back. Who knows. The way that affects you, as an author, depends upon a number of factors including whether the book being returned is a physical copy (which can be sold again to another customer if in its original condition) and whether you self-published (in which case you may have already received money for the sale) or released your book through a publishing company (in which case you won’t notice because the publisher holds a royalty reserve against returns).
Anyway, this kind of return can be a problem for you if you’re a self-published author. If you’ve published with Amazon through KDP, you’re fairly indemnified against this type of problem. If a customer returns a paperback copy of your book, Amazon will not take your royalty back from you. You’re protected because you’re working through Amazon.
I hear a lot of prospective authors say, “I don’t want to publish through KDP. I want to make my book available on many platforms, not just Amazon—I want to see my book in a brick-and-mortar bookstore. Therefore, I’m going to go another self-publishing route.” If that’s you, if you’re the author who has said this, you need to make sure you understand what it takes to get your book into a brick-and-mortar bookstore and the financial risk you take in doing so.
There are a number of other self-publishing platforms out there that offer brick-and-mortar distribution for self-published books. The one most authors seem to have heard of is IngramSpark, but there are other players as well (such as BookBaby). These platforms offer to make your book available not only to online retailers like Amazon but also to physical book sources in the US and around the world—big box bookstores, like B&N, Powell’s, and BAM; indie bookshops; other bookselling retailers (Walmart, Target, grocery stores, etc); and libraries.
This sounds like exactly what most authors think they are looking for. Better than KDP in every way—your book won’t just be available through Amazon, it will be available through every channel including Amazon.
Except it won’t be.
Bookstores aren’t the Library of Congress. They don’t have a copy of every book. (The big Library building on Independence Ave doesn’t even have every book but that’s a whole other thing.) Making your book available for distribution is only that—available. It does not mean that Barnes and Noble is going to stock your book and put it on their shelves. It only means that when Barnes and Noble’s book purchaser sits down at their computer to purchase books for Barnes and Noble, your book is one of the ones they could potentially find, if they looked for it.
The main thing for an author to understand about how bookstores work is that when they order a quantity of a book to sell in their store, that is not a finished sale of the book. The publisher and the bookstore have both agreed ahead of time that any books that do not get purchased by an end user can be “returned” to the publisher for a full refund. Moreover, it’s standard industry practice that the physical book block is not actually returned. Traditionally, the cover is torn off and returned to the publisher to indicate that the unsold book has been destroyed and now cannot be sold.
The self-publishing author may then think, “I won’t make any such agreement with the bookstore, then. They could just buy dozens of my book, make no effort to sell them, and then destroy my beautiful books and get a full refund, I won’t participate in that!” That’s your prerogative but bookstores do not purchase non-returnable titles.
When I say bookstores don’t purchase non-returnable titles, I don’t mean that the purchaser is browsing through the available titles and sees yours and says “Oh shoot, I’d love to stock that but it’s non-returnable and our rules don’t allow me to purchase it.” What I mean is they don’t even see non-returnable titles. They screen those right out of what they’re considering. No matter how good you think your self-published title is, no matter how well you marked it, and even though IngramSpark or BookBaby told you that your title would be available to brick-and-mortar bookstores—which it is!—no human being at those brick-and-mortar bookstores is ever going to see your title and make a decision to stock it or not.
There are probably some independently owned bookstores out there that could be persuaded to stock your book even if it isn’t returnable. If you can meet the owner and really make a good sales pitch, they might consider it. Then your book might be available in one brick and mortar store. There are a couple thousand independent bookstores in the United States. How much time do you have on your hands to make sales pitches?
Making your book returnable doesn’t guarantee that bookstores will pick your book up and stock it, either. It just means that your book is now in the pool of books that they consider stockable. There also has to be demand for your book in order for a bookstore to stock it. When a title is returnable, you may think the bookstore isn’t risking anything to stock a few copies of your book and put it on their shelf to see if it sells. Again, this isn’t true. Shelf space is money. Shelf space generates revenue for the bookstore when the titles they place on the shelves move, but publishers also pay bookstores an annual placement allowance that determines whose books show up in the windows, on the end caps, and on those tables that are right in your way when you come in the door. More of a single title on the shelf also means a title is more likely to be shelved with the cover facing out than with the spine facing out, to save valuable space—and books with more sales potential will have more copies out on the shelf.
So if your dream is to see your self-published book on the shelf at a major book retailer, you need to do two things:
Make your book returnable, so that bookstores can find it to stock it.
Generate enough demand for your book that bookstores are willing to stock it.
If you’re considering making your self-published book returnable so that bookstores have the option to stock it if you do a good job of promoting it, then you should give some thought to what the resulting costs could look like.
If you’re working with IngramSpark, you have two options for making your book returnable: You can request that the book be returned to you personally (at your home or business address) or that it be destroyed (standard procedure for returning books from a trad publisher). What Ingram will not do is hang onto that copy in their warehouse so that it may be sold again to another customer.
A returned book is a loss for you, whether it comes back to you or gets destroyed. Ingram isn’t going to distribute that same copy again to another bookstore. If you elected to have the book returned to you, then you’re going to have to pay the shipping and handling costs for getting it to the final destination plus the cost of the book itself. If you are fine with the book being destroyed, then you will only be on the hook for the cost of the book.
What that means is, print copies of your book are created through a print-on-demand process. There isn’t a large print run generated up front and sold over time. Instead, copies of your book are printed and shipped out to customers and retailers as they are ordered. So if I order a copy of your book for $9.99 (which I definitely will), IngramSpark will print up one copy, pack it, and mail it to me in exchange for my $9.99. That $9.99 is passed along to you, less IngramSpark’s agreed-upon percent to cover their printing, binding, materials, shipping, distribution, and whatever other services they are providing you.
If that book is returned, you have to give that customer their $9.99 back, which means you have to give back your share. But Ingram fulfilled their end of the deal—they don’t get their time and materials back—so you have to pay back their share to the customer as well. So say, for example, I bought your book for $9.99, of which Ingram got $3.33 and you got $6.66. If I return my copy, you have to pay me back $9.99—Ingram isn’t kicking in $3.33 of it. (None of this applies if Ingram was somehow at fault for the return, eg, if the printing was faulty.) And if you want the book shipped back to you instead of destroyed, you’re paying out even more.
Now let’s say a bookstore took a bet on you and bought 100 copies of your book for $999 (I’m not even factoring in the large discount a retailer is likely to have received). And let’s say that, unfortunately, they didn’t sell a single copy. And they return $999 worth of books to Ingram. Not a great financial situation for an independent author to be in.
Listen, please don’t think I am picking on Ingram. I actually love those guys—I’ve been down to visit them at their HQ in La Vergne!—and I think IngramSpark is probably the best self-publishing platform out there. They’re the only self-publishing platform I’ve seen that is completely transparent with their customers about what the returns process means and how it works. I’m just using them as an example because they are the platform that most indie authors will turn to when they turn away from Amazon. Nothing about this process is unique to IngramSpark.
This is how returns work in the book industry. If you want your book to be stocked in physical bookstores, the book has to be returnable. If you make your book returnable, you take on a financial risk. As I’ve discussed before, traditional publishers exist to assume the risk of publishing and, in turn, share in the rewards with the author. If an author cuts the publisher out, they have the potential to receive all of the rewards—but in return, they assume all the risk themself.
A lot of writers and prospective authors say—and several have told me, personally—their dream is to walk into a bookstore, or a library, and find their book on the shelf. It’s not impossible to achieve this goal if you start out self publishing. Hugh Howey and EL James can throw a dart blindfolded at a list of bookstores and whatever bookstore they hit, they’ll find their books in it. But they’re the one in several million, not the average Joe.
Make sure you understand your real reasons for publishing a book before you choose your preferred publishing path. If you want to make your book available for people to read, then self-publishing is a great way to do that. If you want to be able to stroll into a Hudson News at the airport and autograph a copy of your own book, it’s highly unlikely that you can make that a reality on your own. If that’s you, keep looking for that agent or editor to champion your project and help you meet your goal. No one is an island, except Krakoa in the X-Men comics.
Which just goes to show, there’s an exception to every rule.
Oh and also the weird island organism from Life of Pi that tried to digest Richard Parker, that one too.
And I guess also Bob the Sentient Trash Island, listen, it was a bad analogy, please forget I said anything.
Thanks for tuning in to listen to me ramble a bit about a subject that I can’t really say is near and dear to my heart, but that I think is important information for writers who are weighing the self-publishing route for their project. If your book is your baby, don’t shackle it with the weight of all your hopes and dreams before it even leaves the nest. Let your book find its own brand of success. Maybe your book wants to take a gap year; it’s fine. I think we can all agree that if your book isn’t living in a van down by the river and trading friendship bracelets for sustenance, then you can call this a triumph.
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