New HarperCollins imprint

It was announced in the New York Times on April 4th this year that
HarperCollins is forming a new publishing group that will substitute profit-sharing with authors for cash advances and will try to eliminate the costly practice of allowing booksellers to return unsold copies.

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I rather like their idea of profit-sharing, giving a better share of sales to writers instead of advances.

I'm not sure advances are really a good idea or have a good effect on the industry as a whole, frankly. One huge advance to a Monica Lewinski or Princess Di biographer wipes out a lot of money for publishing marginal new authors.

This is similar to film writers or actors "taking points" on a film instead of money up front. Sharing the risk with the producers, in other words.

Their attempts to eliminate returns is insane and will come back and bite them on the ass. If you owned a bookstore, how would you react to that. It's often stated as one of the reasons stores won't stock POD books (though most of those publishers are started to allow returns)

Returns are such a blight on the industry and need to be stopped. It doesn't happen in any other industry, so why with books?

Returns do happen in different industries and it's a drag but a fact of life at the moment. I do really like the profit sharing idea; makes a lot of sense if it also encourages them to carry greater range of books.
For me I am not sure what would be harder to take...my book being returned to the publisher, or getting picked over in the "prices slashed" bin...all the more reason to market my socks off and have all copies snapped up the minute they hit the shelves.

Returns are not uncommon (consider the phrase "restocking charge")

And it's hard to see why they are a "blight". If stores have to take a risk on titles they carry, they are going to order more conservatively. Which means that their motivation to carry new or less widely popular authors will be greatly diminished.

The main thing I can see wrong with returns and with large advances is that they drive up the cost you and I have to pay for a book, without giving the author any more money.

I'd really like to see the huge advances given to celebrities, most of whom are even going to write their own book, be done away with.

You might find this interesting: Book Advances, Royalty Checks and Making a Living as a writer by Adriann Ranta

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I'm a writer and part owner of a bookstore (and have, in the past, worked for publishing companies too), so I've been all the way around the returns issue for many years.

It is an antiquated, inefficient system. We've probably all gone into superstores and seen displays made with 300 copies of some new hardcover. Maybe they'll sell half of those, then return the other half. Now multiply that by all the B&Ns and Borders stores in the U.S. Having a large portion of the initial print run sitting around unsold, then returned, does indeed raise the price of the book for every consumer. Higher prices on new books tie up inventory dollars, especially for smaller and independent bookstores that don't have the sales terms the big ones do, making them less able to invest in new and untried authors.

On the other hand, without the returnability option, as Lin points out, a lot of booksellers aren't going to take a chance on new and unknown authors anyway. That fully returnable thing makes it much, much easier to try riskier books that may or may not sell.

There's an environmental cost to returns, too, especially on mass market paperbacks, of which only the cover is sent back and the rest of the book is destroyed. In some cases, that happens to a LOT of books, which goes through a lot of trees. This is, as far as I'm concerned, the single best argument in favor of digital books.

Freight costs are going up all the time, too, as the price of fuel rises. Booksellers pay to get books shipped to them in the first place, then if they return them, pay to ship them back. Books are heavy, and freight bills can be crushing.

So there are up and down sides to the returns policies of traditional publishers. I haven't seen how the new imprint hopes to deal with this, but Bob Miller, who started the imprint, is one of the smartest guys in publishing, and I'm very curious to see what he comes up with. One of the possibilities is some sort of "remaindering-in-place" policy, in which the bookstore reports how many copies it has left and marks them down in the store, rather than returning them to the publisher, who will probably eventually remainder them anyway (which will require yet more shipping). This way a store might get a little credit for unsold copies, and then can make up the rest of their investment by selling those copies at a steep discount after a certain period of time.

As for the no-advance aspect of this new imprint, there are other publishers, such as CDS/Vanguard, that have been experimenting with the same model. I have some friends who have been published by them. It works great if you're a big bestseller, because you are paid more frequently than under the old system and you will make good money with a higher percentage. For writers at my level, though, it's still all about the advance, so profit-sharing would be great for the publisher, not so great for me.

Jeff

There's an environmental cost to returns, too...the rest of the book is destroyed.
I always that was nuts. (Even though I was raiding a distributor's dumpster near my house for coverless books to read)

This is, as far as I'm concerned, the single best argument in favor of digital books.

Or POD. Especially the "point of purchase" POD discussed in other threads here.

The new breed of small presses, while allowing returnability if they want books in "live" stores, are generally insisting on a "return if in salable condition" process, which diminishes the waste.

With everyone gettting so environmentally conscious, I should think POD and E-books would be much more popular than they are. Just think of all the trees that would be saved.

Perhaps the entire face of the publishing world will change in the near future. Even moreso than it has already.

Call me old-fashioned (or just old) but, to paraphrase Charlton Heston, I'll give up paper books when they pry my cold, dead hands off the covers. I'm a reader but also a collector (as are my wife and son), with thousands of books in the house, most in signed first editions. It's a little harder to do that with e-books. We consider ourselves environmentalists, we recycle, we try to leave a small footprint, etc.--but we also work in the book business and collect these objects made of paper.

There's a good chance that many of here are collectors, and I am also one of those who love the feel and smell of a new book. Actually, of an old one either. I don't know how many I have currently, because we lost a lot of stuff in a storage building disaster a few years ago, and to be honest I don't have a lot of first editions or signed books. And I read a lot of books that some people don't like. I think maybe the best series of fantasy/sci fi I've ever read is Farmer's World Of Tiers series, and I still love Burroughs Tarzan and John Carter and pretty much anything by Robert E. Howard.

As for advances, I can see how they could be very important to the majority of writers. The biggest don't need them, and the smallest seldom get them, but they are what keeps food on the table for a lot of the rest. That's how it should be, I think, and from my years in music I know about draws and advances.

Returns are still necessary for bookstores, but I do see a time when there will be fewer and smaller print runs, as more and more publishers adapt the new technology and go with POD. I don't know that it will ever replace the current system, but I do think it will gain more and more ground as time goes by.

Sorry to hear about your storage disaster, Don. A friend of mine just suffered a house fire, and he--like you and me--is a big Howard/Burroughs fan with a huge collection of books, pulps, and comics. He lost it all, a real tragedy.

I got to write three novels set in the world of Howard's Conan a couple of years ago--a real thrill to put some tiny footprints in that beloved sandbox.

Jeff