Book Royalties
I read this article by way of Brandon Sanderson mentioning it in a Twitter post. It’s all about how royalties and advances work in the publishing industry, put together by an editorial assistant.
The most interesting part for me was the section on returns:
Reserve against returns: This is the reason you won’t have gotten every royalty dollar you were due during a period. Your publisher has a right to retain up to a certain percentage of your royalties–the actual percentage varies on your contract and on the situation–against future returns from booksellers. Returns are pretty complicated; we’ve talked about them before, but they’re always hard to wrap our heads around. These are big, corporate returns, not the kind of customer-by-customer returns (“My Aunt Wanda bought this cookbook for me but I don’t like Russian casseroles” etc). Basically, there are scenarios wherein a publisher may print and sell 10,000 requested copies of a book to book sellers, and, if expectation was wrong, receive all 10,000 copies back, for which they’d have to relinquish the entire dollar amount they originally earned for those books. Alas for returnable industries.
I just can’t understand how you can have a functioning business model where any day a product you thought was sold comes flying back into your warehouse, possibly in terrible condition (if my days in publishing are remembered correctly), and the “buyer” expects all their money back.
I’m with him, alas for returnable industries. One day we’ll have to dialog a little bit about various ways of getting content to readers without going through traditional bookstores — not that I want to cut them out. There just seems to be a multitude of opportunities to think differently about selling books with technology advancing the way it is.
Dude. E-books. Sure once you sell one it’ll be on limewire, but a lot of people still buy content that they can download for free. An E-reader like Microsoft Reader is free, and then you can read it on your puter, send it to a printer if you want, etc. Or yknow, there’s the webcomic approach when they compile the online strips into books. Just sell them in an online store on your website. That you happen to run. Beauties.
Do you think? I just can’t bring myself to read that much on-line. I’ve tried, but it just isn’t doing it for me. I guess maybe I’d have to try the Kindle before I could authoritatively say, but I’m not sure if I’d ever make the switch.