Book Publishers Vexed By Returns Flood Of Rejects Spells Trouble For Nation’s Publishing Industry
It’s the time of the year to nestle in a beach chair with the sun, a tan and the great American novel of the nanosecond. But the problem with that old-fashioned rite of summer is that books by the thousands are instead washing back to publishers in a mighty tide of rejected literature known wearily in the trade as returns.
For some titles, discarded books are spewing back to publishers at rates as high as 40 percent of gross sales, a sobering trend that comes during a sluggish summer season when certain titles have piled up in bookstore aisles in untouched stacks the size of large dogs.
“This is one of the slowest periods in a long time in terms of sales activities,” said Alberto Vitale, the chief executive of the Random House unit of Advance Publications. He speculated that the soft market might be a result, in part, of “titles that have not been as exciting as possible.”
The issue of boomerang books is a sensitive topic for top publishing executives, who are loath to discuss losses publicly. Privately, however, they concede that returns are mounting.
Long an occupational hazard of publishing, the rejects have increased in the last five years as the landscape of the publishing industry has been reshaped with the growth of superbookstore chains and mass-market outlets like Price/Costco’s warehouse clubs.
To stock the vast stores, publishers are producing more titles, shipping out more books and thus - when their business bets lose - facing a higher volume of returns of new front-list titles. These are the offerings that are not literary hits, the titles that fail to ascend to the upper tier of national best-seller lists.
“The issue has become like the emperor’s new clothes,” said a publishing executive who insisted on anonymity. “No one wants to talk about what everyone knows in the privacy of their own offices. It’s not been a good year.”
Another high-ranking executive was even more blunt about the summer season, which traditionally is a time of voracious demand for books. “This is the worst sales summer anyone can remember,” he said. “People are nervous, very nervous. If this continues, there’s going to be a lot of publishers trying to get their hermetically sealed windows to open.”
As in the movie business, there is an internal industry debate about the growth of the trade: Is there a glut with too many titles and too many copies, both of which have multiplied to justify sizable author advances and industry egos?
Publishers are well aware that even a best seller can turn into a financial dud with an overpaid author and a big print run. Over the last five years, print runs for best-seller candidates have been inflated from an average minimum of 50,000 copies to at least 100,000, and the shelf life of some other books has been compressed from four months to as little as four weeks.
“At times, it’s like a big pyramid scheme where we keep shipping out the books and trying to hide the fact that there’s a lot of dead titles,” said Irwyn Applebaum, the president of Bantam Doubleday Dell, which is owned by Bertelsmann AG.
“Everybody is on such overdrive to make do and grow and expand that they don’t stop and study this. I think that an adjustment is going to have to come. But it’s a lot like nuclear disarmament. Just because you reduce your books doesn’t mean that the other publishers are going to reduce their copies.”
Returns are the most significant barometer of the financial success of a book, a measurement more critical than a ranking on a best-seller list because rejects cut directly into profits. Historically, publishers have agreed to take back returns and absorb the loss to entice bookstores to stock their titles.
Many of the major publishing houses report that their companies have managed to escape the phenomenon relatively unscathed, with returns - as a percentage of gross sales - that are either flat, declining or slightly above average.
Figures from their own trade group, the American Association of Publishers, however, indicate that in the last five years the losses from returns have expanded far faster than gross sales, which are essentially the books that are shipped to bookstores. From 1990 to 1995, the industry’s losses for rejected hardback books increased by 60 percent, to $531 million, while gross sales increased by 47 percent, to $1.64 billion.
Bernie Rath, the executive director of the American Booksellers Association, said of the problem of returns: “I call it expensive wallpaper. The fact is, I think we’re creating a lot more books than there are consumers. It’s filling up the stores. It’s decorating the walls.”
xxxx UNSOLD BOOKS FACE HARSH FATE The last chapter for literary rejects is pointed and sharp: finis comes with the hiss of a band saw. The wholesale destruction of books is not a particularly happy topic for publishers, but it has become part of the life cycle of unsold books, which make their debuts on the prominent shelves of bookstores, then shift to the discount remainder bins and then finally go back to publishers as “returns.” Some publishers take care of the destruction themselves and others ship the discards directly to recycling mills. Several large publishers have created their own elaborate in-house systems to destroy books because they are leery of trusting contractors to carry out the destruction. Essentially, discarded hardback books are taken to warehouses where a band-saw assembly line is used to separate book covers from paper. The paper is then bundled into bails and sold to paper recycling mills. -New York Times News Service