I thought we’d tear into a meaty topic for the new year, and talk about book distribution. Like most aspects of publishing, this is something that has been changing in recent years, and – like most aspects of publishing – the impetus for change is the internet.
But let’s start at the beginning.
Once upon a time, book distribution was comparatively simple. Publishers acquired books to publish them. They presented their lists of upcoming titles to booksellers at regular book fairs – the booksellers saw the packages and heard the patter and decided at the fair how many copies of a particular title to order. It was common, for example, for fall and winter lists to be presented at book fairs in late May or early June. The booksellers would travel to some major centre for this book fair – in Canada, it was often held in Toronto; in the U.S., the book fairs were held in New York City. The publishers would then tally up the orders, set the print run, print the books and ship them to the bookstores.
Several things fall out of this history:
• the establishment of annual or semi-annual book fairs, intending to promote books and authors.
• the practice of advance ordering of titles, and print runs being derived from those orders.
• the practice of the publisher paying for the shipping to the bookstore of the stock. Since the bookstore chose how many titles to order, presumably based upon sales history in the individual store, the bookstore paid for the shipping back to the publisher of any unsold stock.
All of this may or may not have existed in the 1930’s when booksellers were hit hard by the economic slump. The fallout from diminished sales was a reluctance on the part of booksellers to stock very many copies of a title, and perhaps some hesitation in stocking the work of new, thus unestablished, authors. Several things changed during the Depression:
• the establishment of a return policy. Bookstores could return unsold stock for full credit, independent of how much time had passed since the books had been received. One hears of a one-year limit on this policy, but in actuality, a bookstore can return stock anytime to the house.
• the creation of the mass market format. Because people had very little money to spend during this period, the mass market format offered a cheaper alternative to a hard cover book. The first mass market titles were reprints of classic volumes – which were out of copyright – and the idea was to make literature accessible.
Another change that occurred as a result of the mass market format – this may have occurred immediately or evolved over time – was a difference in how books were returned to the publisher. Hard cover books are always returned in their entirety, just as they were initially shipped. This is because the book is expensive to produce and remains a marketable asset, even if this particular store couldn’t sell all of its copies. (Returned hard cover books are “remaindered” after a period of time. This means that they are discounted, often to cost, because it’s perceived to be unlikely that they will sell at the full price. They can be sold by title once remained, or (brace yourself) by the pound. Remaindered hard covers often have a black marker mark on the bottom of the pages, near the spine, indicating their status. Don’t ever buy a book marked like this for the full retail price!)
Mass market paperbacks, however, were perceived to be comparatively disposable – because the cost of returning stock was borne by the bookstore, a more economical model was developed for returning paperbacks. Mass market paperbacks are routinely “stripped”, which means that the front cover is torn from the book. The covers alone are returned to the publishing house for credit, while the rest of the book goes into the trash. Several things fall out of this practice:
• cover flats of mass market books given out for promotional purposes will often be hole-punched in the top right corner. This indicates that it was a cover flat, never an entire book, and thus cannot be returned by anyone for credit.
• mass market Advance Reading Copies, which closely resemble actual mass market books, will often have a banner or a blaze on the front cover, indicating that they are A.R.C.s, for exactly the same reason.
• once you surrender something to the trash, in many places, it ceases legally to be your property. There has been a mini-industry of people who went dumpster diving to retrieve these stripped books, then sold them at flea markets or junk sales. When you buy these books, no one but the dealer makes any money.
Over time, distributors were established, who acted as middle parties between publishers and booksellers. These distributors would stock certain levels of certain titles, or certain kinds of books, so booksellers could restock locally and quickly. It was simpler for booksellers to deal with a few large distributors than with many small booksellers, and one big practice developed out of this:
• in order to ensure that everyone made money on the distribution process, discounting procedures were developed. Each book has a retail price. Distributors would buy at some fraction of the retail price – maybe 60% of it – then booksellers would buy from the distributor at a different fraction of the retail price – maybe 80% of it.
So, there’s our snapshot of book distribution, sometime around 1990. Tomorrow, we’ll start to examine changes in distribution over the past two decades, what has carried forward and what changed.
Deborah Cooke: Author 