Chapter Fourteen: The Weirdness of Bookselling

Hello!

The way books are sold is different from the way other products are sold, and it makes life hard for small companies.

Something that’s been challenging us recently: returns. We take a look at that below.

Also, various Homeward members and authors are appearing at a ton of events over the next couple of months—including a reading (tonight!) by Lara in Brooklyn.

Warmly, but not too warmly (unless you’re in the southern hemisphere),

Rachel, Rebekah, Lara & Huw

The strange case of book returns

The way this whole business works is: bookstores buy a bunch of books and try to sell them. Sometimes they don’t sell them. In most industries, if a shop over-buys an item, they’re stuck with it and they’ve got to find a way to sell it. In bookstore-land, they can send it right back to the distributor!

Meanwhile, the publisher, very excited about selling hundreds of books, has suddenly actually only sold a few dozen. Instead of making money, the publisher might actually owe the distributor for the cost of the books, as well as shipping and warehousing them.

And so publishers face a delay of two to six months while they wait to see if a book has made any money, or if a tidal wave of returns is on its way.

That messes things up for authors, too. Most author contracts have a clause allowing the publisher to hold back royalties in case of returns. The contract doesn’t usually specify how much they’re allowed to withhold, and how long they can hold it for.

“I’ve read about authors who have royalties held back for years,” says Lara. “I personally have had royalties held back—until my agent did some digging and found out my publisher was holding back almost double the industry-standard amount.”

Homeward’s distributor doesn’t allow returns—unusual in the business, but crucial for the small presses it distributes. This is great for us—if we sell a book through our distributor, we get paid for it immediately, as opposed to months later.

But it also affects us in surprising ways. Recently we learned that not operating on the returns model disqualifies us from entering some literary prizes, such as our local Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association awards. Who knew that being returnable was an important quality of a book?

We have so many cool events coming up!

Find us at:

• Lara (as in, Nebula-nominated author Lara Elena Donnelly!) is giving a reading at Brooklyn Books & Booze on July 21—that’s tonight!

• The Perilous Life of Jade Yeo author Zen Cho is reading at Elliott Bay Book Company on August 5—at the early hour of 5pm

• Also at Elliott Bay: Homeward’s own Rachel Sobel is interviewing Téa Obreht about her new book Sunrise on August 19

• Lara is tabling at the Brooklyn Books & Booze Author Book Fair on September 19…

• …and at the Brooklyn Book Festival, with special guest authors from our friends at Small Beer Press, on September 27!

Things we looked at on the internet instead of doing anything useful

Can you terraform Mars? Can you get a higher score for terraforming Mars than Huw? Try this choose-your-own-adventure game from Nature magazine…

On reading poems that you don’t really get.

Author (and Homeward fave) Helen DeWitt turned down a $175,000 prize because she didn’t want to do the associated promo. (Don’t worry. She wins in the end.)

P.S.

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