Things That Make Authors Cry

Lower-than-expected lifetime sales, returns, and negative balances are the shits, and there's more to being an author than the numbers

It’s royalty season, which a mixed bag for publishers. Some authors get big checks and are thrilled, while others despair over their returns, or the lower-than-expected lifetime sales, or even the negative balance they’re carrying.

Today’s post is inspired by a conversation with one of my authors because she was upset by how much inventory she has four years after the publication of her book, and suggested that I encouraged her to print too many books. Sitting on a lot of inventory doesn’t feel good, and she’s carrying a negative balance, which is stressful. I decided to go back to look at her presales to see if we were too ambitious.

Here's what I found.

Our sales team projected they would “sell in” about 650 books out the gate. “Sell in” numbers are presales, but they’re presales to a retailer, not to consumers. And retailers can and do return books at any time for any reason. In some cases, we start to see books getting returned within the first few months of publication, though that’s not common. Most returns come in about 9-16 months post-publication.

For this author’s book, I suggested we print 1000 copies, knowing that the 650 were accounted for. That ratio is fairly typical—so that you’re holding onto some inventory in the warehouse for the sake of fulfilling future orders.

This particular book reached a point at about the one-year mark where 800 copies were out in the marketplace, which is a pretty nice sell-in. The problem is, after one year, and between year 1 and 2, 379 of those books got returned.

Publishers can’t stem the tide of returns. You want for your books never to be returned, of course, but they do come back. They get returned because a retailer takes too many, or can’t sell them, or has to make room for new stock.

Returns are heart-troubling to authors. Authors will look at their sales for the first initial quarters and make determinations that they’ve sold whatever quantity—800, 2000, 5000. But they’re not hard sales. And when they come back, publishers take the hit financially, while authors tend to take it emotionally.

It doesn’t feel good to have books returned, but it’s also the case that it’s not an indictment on a given book. Sometimes retailers order more than they can sell. Certain categories are oversaturated, and even if an author gets a lot of publicity, that doesn’t necessarily result in what we call “sell through,” the step subsequent to “sell in” when the books actually sell “through the register” to consumers.

To the author who told me we likely printed too many books, I told her I’d make the same decision today. First off, we must publish enough books to cover presales, or we risk running out of inventory (because the books are all locked up at retailers and not available to fulfill when new orders come in). Another author with her same level of presales might have been going back to reprint after a few months. When it comes to setting print runs, we’ve got some facts (an author’s publicity campaign, presales, and sales data from similar books on the publisher’s list), but it’s one solid part gazing into a crystal ball. And I tend toward conservative print runs specifically because I try to prevent authors from reaching a point of having excess inventory (a number that’s determined based on how many copies a distributor is willing to keep on hand in their warehouse given the velocity of sales).

Disappointment is perhaps par for the course for authors, but the silver lining here is that disappointment and discontent are never the full picture. Authors who hoped they’d sell more are also proud of their books. Books can surprise us with their longevity, opening up doors and possibilities many years after they come out. I went to an event this weekend where one of the participants had brought with her a copy of my book, Write On, Sisters! (published six years ago), and asked me to sign it. She told me it had been her creative inspiration last year. Unexpected and so gratifying!

Your publisher will always do everything in its power to push your books out the door, to get the most possible exposure, the most possible buys. In other words, play big or go home. So keep that in mind next time you look at a royalty report. Take it all in, beyond the returns and the lifetime sales. Consider all the places your book may have reached (readers, libraries, online marketplaces, bookstores) and take heart.

Being an author is not for the faint of heart, and being an author will also be one of the greatest honors and achievements of a person’s life. So when you feel disappointment creep in, remember that you’re in a rarefied cohort of humans who write and publish books; you have readers; your book matters; and you are fricking awesome for having done it in the first place. No numbers can diminish that truth.