Someone, somewhere, in the 19th Century Ivory Tower that is the publishing industry has realized that allowing bookstores to strip unsold mass-market paperbacks and “return” them (i.e. tear the cover off for credit from the publisher and giving the naked book to cousin Billy.) is not a viable business model. According to Reuters, Borders is going to stop this asinine practice for books by HarperStudio, an experimental Harper Collins imprint that is trying to shift from an author advance model to a profit-sharing one.
The good news is not just this particular story, but just in the fact that there are people in the major houses that are at least trying to fix a severely broken business model.
(via Smart Bitches.)
4 Comments
S Andrew Swann · December 17, 2008 at 9:06 am
It occurs to me that something all the publishers might to to ease into a post-returns economy is to make a deal with the distributors and offer two flavors of mass-market paperback, a discounted non-returnable book, and a premium returnable one (whose prices average out to the current price for the single title, natch.) The difference can just be the addition of a glyph printed next to the publisher’s imprint on the cover. Covers returned without that mark, no credits for you. The bookstores are in enough trouble that the discount would be attractive. (I don’t think Borders is agreeing to this because they’re doing well.)
steve buchheit · December 17, 2008 at 1:47 pm
That’s kind of interesting considering that practice of returns was started in a previous severe economic downturn. However, for the full model to work I think publishers and distributors will have to become more transparent with their accounting. After all, if you’re going to go base your income on future profits (instead of advances), I’m sure that you’d want to be able to figure out what those should be in an easier fashion than hiring accountants that have minors in alchemy. It would also change the fundamental business relationship between publisher and author (putting even more marketing onto the author who now doesn’t have the advance money). That change, IMHO, would be the larger of the two.
I don’t think there’s much argument that the current business model is broken, but I’m not sure this is the change that will make the difference. From what all I’ve heard, it’s the distribution chain (which this will affect, but on the back end) which needs to be revamped and expanded.
It is nice to see them doing something, though.
S Andrew Swann · December 17, 2008 at 2:49 pm
I think what this particular model entails is not an elimination of the advance, but a re-weighting of advance vs. royalties. The current system is geared to ideally (for the author) get an advance just large enough that the profits on the book just justify the publisher to buy the next one. Seeing any royalties under this system means the advance was too low. When it works, everyone’s happy, but it is vulnerable to massive failure that can both put the publisher in a hole and kill an authors career. The risk increases with the size of the advance.
I write I’m sorry but my letter keeps coming back « Genre Bender · December 18, 2008 at 12:11 am
[…] 18, 2008 by Stephen Buchheit S. Andrew Swann points us (through his blog post which has a really good LOLcat) to a new publishing group at HarperCollins that’s trying […]
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