AtlasBooks Distribution Blog

Returns. This is an ugly word in publishing, almost like a four-letter word, but it has seven letters.

For decades, booksellers have been able to return unsold stock to the publisher. In many cases, this gets to be time consuming and expensive. There is labor sending the book out and receiving it in. Trucks waste gas on the extra transit. Publishers sometimes don’t know the actual sell through of a book until months after copies were initially shipped. Books are often returned only to be reordered by the same outlet that just made the return. This can be an inefficient system.

This all dates back to the Great Depression. The initial intentions were good. Publishers wanted to encourage booksellers to try new books, those books that they might not otherwise have taken a chance on. Publishers offered bookstores the ability to return unsold books for credit. And so this system of returns developed and has been operating for years, and no one has been able to successfully break from it, yet. If you make your books nonreturnable, then stores just won’t buy them in the first place.

Here at AtlasBooks we sometimes hear from publishers that are not satisfied because of their returns. Because our contract has fees associated with returns, AtlasBooks has even been accused of overselling so that we may make a profit from returns. This is just not true. Returns are a part of the book business that we must work with, and so by extension you, our publishing partners, must work with. Our fees enable us to manage the labor to process books going out and coming in, and to cover the fees we must pay our partners.

Recently I read a post by Josie Leavitt on Shelftalker (which is highlighted in Publishers Weekly’s PW Daily). Josie, and her co-worker Elizabeth Bluemle work at The Flying Pig Bookstore, and they blog about their experiences.

In this particuar post, Josie gives her take on returns. Here is a piece that stuck out to me:

I look at each book that’s on the return bubble and I play this game: would I miss it if it weren’t here? Conversely, am I sick of looking at it? If I answer these questions with no or yes, then in the return tub it goes…

Doing returns in January and February can help close the cash flow gap of the slower seasons. Of course, publishers hate returns, and in a perfect world, every book I buy would be a winner, but that’s just not the case. Mistakes abound: hardcover picture books with adorable bears just don’t sell at the rate I buy them, too many 100th day of school books (does that day really get celebrated?), and one too many young adult hardcovers about the girl with challenges triumphing against the odds of the drunken mom, the absent father, and her eating disorder. These books have to go. Not just because they’re not good books, but because they are money sitting on the shelf and often it’s money bookstores don’t have in January or February.

The other thing that returns do is it readies the store for the new spring books. It’s a sort of out with old, in the new scenario. There is something wonderfully satisfying about knowing that your shelves truly reflect what you want to sell, not just what you happen to have on hand. Inventory control is a fun balancing act, and doing returns allows me to correct the wrongs.

It helps me to consider returns from the bookseller’s point of view. They have a business to operate, and they must be shrewd.

Predicting sales is more of an art than a science. And sometimes, the bookseller guesses wrong. And in this economy, shelf space is in great demand. If a book isn’t selling, it needs to make way for one that will.

So returns aren’t orchestrated by some malevolent returns-villan. No one writes an order for a book, laughing (I’m imagining an ominous witch cackle) about how the books will eventually come back as returns.

The best scenario for everyone would be for the bookseller to order the exact number of books that will sell in the store. The publisher and distributor don’t have to worry about shipping and processing, the buyer doesn’t have to worry about a bad rating (buyers in bigger operations are graded and budgets adjusted by the sell-through of the books they order), and the bookstore doesn’t have to worry about labor, costs, and time associated with returns.

Bur returns still stink. No doubt about it. Lots more could be said about it (and I’m sure will be said from time to time on this blog…post your questions in the comments if you want to know more about something specific). But look at it this way, the books had their run. They didn’t sit in storage, and maybe some copies did sell, and those never would have sold had they not been ordered.

Photos: jez.atkinson, Creative Commons; Pasukaru76, Creative Commons