Barnes and Noble wants to host a book signing for me…but they insist my books be returnable. What can I do?

A. Bookstore returns were instituted during the depression to help bookstores stay in business. Interestingly, however, the practice never died, despite the end of the depression. According to Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg of The Wall Street Journal, “The book industry, by contrast, has been saddled with (returns) since the Depression, when publishers told struggling bookstores they could return unwanted books as long as they kept ordering new titles.” The article is quite disturbing, sharing the dollar figures for returned books (estimated at $800M -yes MILLION - last year alone), how authors aren’t paid for returns, even if the books are then sold to discount warehouses, and other inner-workings of a system few authors really know anything about. An average of 35%-40% of books are returned by bookstores each year. That means they routinely over-budget their needs by 35%-40%! If the rest of the world did business that way, the economy would be in shambles. Booklocker.com books are printed ...  more