A friend (Kathleen Long, author of the very excellent Get Bunny Love I am currently reading) sent a link to this article today.
It was very timely because we are in the middle of Kensington royalty statement arrivals, and inevtiably the subject of returns and what it means has come up.
If you read the article you will get a lovely introduction to returns. As a writer here’s how it appears to you. Let’s say 20,000 copies of your book were printed. You get a royalty statement showing where those copies were “sold”. I put that in quotes because it doesn’t necessarily mean into the hands of a reader. It means the books can still be sitting on a store shelf somewhere - or a warehouse (where my son believes werewolves live by the way, maybe he is right. They stay employeed stripping books.). These sales are broken down into a number of categories like: retail (bookstores), direct to consumer (reader orders from publisher), book club/subscription, and foreign. For each of these you see the number “sold”, the number actually returned (meaning their little tender covers were ripped from their spines and callously with no love shipped back to the publisher), and then the net number still sitting out there. This is all converted from units to dollars owed you based on the book’s sales price and the percentage you are being paid.
But wait, there’s more. Back to (cue evil music) returns. Now we get to the fun part (in a Carl Hiaasen kind of way, not a Jennifer Crusie kind of way). The publisher estimates how many of those books in that number are actually not in the hands of readers and will never be in the hands of readers but will instead at some point follow their fallen brethern in the removal of their covers.
It is an ugly number.
Does this seem archaic to anyone but me? In a world of computers, ISBN numbers and scanners, doesn’t it seem like we should KNOW exactly how many books are really sold - as in by readers? I’m not saying the royalty amount would be any better, but wouldn’t it be more accurate?
The whole thing boggles the mind - or at least my mind.
FYI because my book was a May release, I will not see a royalty statement for quite sometime so this is all based upon the goodness of others in sharing their information. Thank you, Deep Throat.
