Everyone has a best, most honest critic. For me, it’s my wife. She’s seldom wrong either. When she came to me Wednesday evening and said, “I have no idea what you meant in your blog post today,” I went, “oh darn.”

So, I’m going to take another stab at it. Most likely, if you read the post it pointed to, you already figured this out, but just in case… here goes.

Basically, every time a publisher prints a book, they take a couple of things into account.

First of all, the more copies they print, the less they pay per copy. So, the economy of scale comes into play.

Secondly, they take an estimate of the demand for the book. This part, I gather, is mostly guess work. They wouldn’t be doing it if they didn’t think it’d sell. But, a lot of books don’t sell.

Lastly, I’m sure the break even point is involved somewhere in the calculations… “Okay, as long as we sell 4,506 copies of the 8,000 we print, everything will be covered.”

So, they print the book. They undertake a marketing push, they hope that Barnes and Nobles, Borders, and Amazon all care.

Suppose they do? They each order 2,500 copies of our hypothetical 8,000. The other 500 are spread amongst some independents. The publisher invoices for the books. The invoices get paid.

Everybody is happy, right?

Then, the book doesn’t sell. Now, if I’m the widget store selling widgets, I sell all the widgets I bought. Maybe I sell some at a loss, but it doesn’t matter because I own all those widgets — I bought them and paid for them and I’ve got to get my money out of them.

Not so in the book industry. The bookseller either packages them up and ships them back or, in some cases, tears off the covers and sends just the covers back. The publisher counts them and refunds the cost of all the returned books.

Wait… you mean, the copy of The War of 1812 I thumbed through at Borders might get returned to “Poor Man Publishing, LTD”? Indeed. And the publisher will send back the money for it. Of course, it’s not likely that they still have the money they were paid. It’s far more likely that they’re sending you back money from the orders on the next book they’ve done, likely shipping at that time.

Oh yeah, the book(s) that are sent back? They get destroyed. Believe you me, if you’ve ever spent an afternoon tearing covers off books and throwing them into a gigantic box to be shredded — well, if you liked the book when you started, you won’t by the time you’re done.

So, the point of the original post was that there’s some validity to the estimate that, on average, 40% of the books printed by publishers end up getting destroyed. It’s a crazy business model. It presupposes that at some point, a book will sell all of its copies, creating actual cash flow. As long as that continues to happens at a certain frequency, the publisher will stay open.

I wonder if that made any more sense. Probably not… but darn it, it was worth a shot.