Entry tags:
P&Ls and how books make (or don't) money
Profit & Loss/Profitability & Liability: How Books Make (or Don't Make!) Money
A basic outline of what happens when an editor buys a book and wants to publish it. This is very much a basic look at publishing and publishing finance, with some explanation of terms commonly used by the marketing and sales departments.
A basic outline of what happens when an editor buys a book and wants to publish it. This is very much a basic look at publishing and publishing finance, with some explanation of terms commonly used by the marketing and sales departments.
Re: Returns - always bad?
Well, no. Because not only do we have access to Bookscan, we also have access to buyers for major chains and big wholesalers who remember all too well the extent to which the previous publisher pushed too many copies onto them.
It seems like authors (or agents, at least) should push for bigger print runs, hoping that the extra copies will result in better merchandising
Ah yes, the old "Push them into over-distributing it, then they'll have no choice but to spend lots of money marketing it" argument. There are many reasons this doesn't actually work, but the biggest is that "marketing" and "merchandising" dollars spent after an act of gross overdistribution are a lot less effective than you might think.
and get sales in the bank (bookscan) and let the publisher worry about the returns.
I'm having trouble making sense of this. Bookscan records cash-register sales, not the number of copies distributed. I.e., Bookscan sales are all copies that aren't going to be returned.
Re: Returns - always bad?
(Anonymous) 2006-04-23 05:52 am (UTC)(link)Right - but no one tracks the print runs, except the publisher. The only thing that sticks with the author is register sales. \
Re: Returns - always bad?
No. If I'm considering buying a novel from Calvin Aargh (winner of the Huge and Nobbly awards, but not previously published by Tor), and I can see that Bookscan reports 16,000 sales on his last paperback, it's trivially easy for me to find out whether that was 16,000 copies out of 22,000 distributed (very nice!) or out of 50,000 gross (oh dear).
For one thing, it's entirely possible I can pick up the phone and call his editor at his last house. Or someone else who works at his last house and has access to their figures. Or someone else who works for some other house or imprint or distributed line that shares the same sales organization as his last house and thus has access to their figures.
Then there's talking with the buyers for the major chains, who will certainly remember if Mr. Aargh's sell-through for them was good or terrible. And we haven't even gotten into the the world of agents, people who work for agents, former editorial assistants, etc etc...
It's a small industry. The idea that "the only thing that sticks with the author is register sales" is flatly false. Now, of course, it's another question whether an author is responsible for a former publisher overdistributing them relative to demand. There are all kinds of reasons to take on an author whose former books had lousy sell-throughs. But the idea that a disastrous sell-through can be hidden because Bookscan only tracks point-of-sale? No.