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Originally Posted by murg
Has anyone seen the remainder table at B&N recently? These prices may not be that far off those for pBooks.
And they are in line with used book prices, especially older books.
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Remainder books are failed books getting a last chance to move before getting sent back to the publisher for pulping. As a rule, remainders generate zero or next to zero income to authors under deep-discount clauses in contracts, unlike similarly priced ebooks.
Remainders are a side effect of the "produce model" of distribution that traditional publishing developed for B&M distribution.
From THE BUSINESS RUSCH blog:
http://kriswrites.com/2011/04/06/the....YcYqOUt4.dpbs
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Traditional publishing only has six months in order to sell a book. That book has to earn back a publisher’s mid-six-figure investment in half a year. Most publishers would prefer to earn back that investment in the first month, and then realize a profit on the book after that. This goes for every book published traditionally from bestsellers to the midlist book to the bottom of the list. (If you don’t understand lists, see this post of mine from the publishing series.
Every traditionally published book has to earn back its investment within six months or be considered a failure.
I’ve used this example before, but it’s instructive: Traditional publishers would rather have a book that sells 100,000 copies in its first month and then sells no more copies than a book that sells 15,000 copies per month for one year. Why? Because the second book will not earn back its investment by the six-month window even though that book will outsell the other book in the course of a year. (And the second book will probably continue selling for years—except the traditional publisher might just take it out of print because of its “poor performance.”)
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Tradpub books at B&M are managed exactly like produce at an organic food supermarket. Priced high early, dropped in price dramatically as its selling life nears its end, and then disposed of to make room for fresher produce. With organic veggies the sale window is about a week or so, with pbooks it is three months, typically. And just as with veggies, if a supplier's produce proves a slightly slow mover, the supplier gets dropped to make room for somebody else's organic output, hoping it proves more popular.
The retail term that applies is "velocity"; it is a measure of the profitability of a book based on the time it spends on sale, taking up fixed-cost shelf space. Bestseller fad titles are preferred because they sell a lot in a short time and nobody even asks for them once the fad is over. Kinda like pet rocks.
Bookselling has been that way since the Great Depression of the 1930's (not to be confused with the current, endless "Great Recession") when book return policies were first instituted and along with front table payola returns is what keeps most B&M bookstores afloat.
Amazon and the other online retailers of both pbooks and ebooks do not suffer the limitations of shelf space that requires the produce model and so they treat books like what they really are, dry goods. Unperishable merchandise thaf can be stocked indefinitely and generates revenue years and decades after release.
Which a lot of old-timey authors and publishers don't quite understand because their entire mindset was formed in an age of scarcity of shelf space totally unlike the age of on-demand abundance we live in.
See this:
http://kriswrites.com/2012/03/14/the....nHSutGE6.dpbs
And this:
http://kriswrites.com/2014/04/16/the....azxgH3Ak.dpbs