And one wonders why small publishers don't make it.

More fodder for my book on publishing.

Click here to read excerpt in its entirety.

Consider the advance system, whereby a publisher pays an author a nonreturnable up-front fee for a book. If the book doesn't "earn out," in the industry parlance, the publisher simply eats the cost.

In my case, as in many cases, my book never "earned out." The slim advance was all I ever got. Royalties don't come until a book "earns out."

Another example: publishers sell books to bookstores on a consignment system, which means the stores can return unsold books to publishers for a full refund. Publishers suck up the shipping costs both ways, plus the expense of printing and then pulping the merchandise. "They print way more than they know they can sell, to kind of create a buzz, and then they end up taking half those books back," says Sara Nelson, editor in chief of PW. These systems were created to shift risk away from authors and bookstores and onto publishers. But risk is something the publishing industry is less and less able to bear.

The reality is that publishers don't sell books to bookstores, bookstores buy from wholesalers. Publishers sell to wholesalers or distributors. Small pubs use distributors mostly because it's all they can afford. The relationship with wholesalers and bookstores goes back to that "depression" model when wholesalers (or at that time publishers I guess) allowed bookstores to return unsold books whenever they wanted to-however they wanted to so that bookstores could survive.

Also, the only ones printing way more than they can sell, to create a buzz as with Meyer, Rowling, King and sooooo many others, are your tried and true mainstream publishers who can certainly afford to do this and survive the insane return policy started in the depression by (wait for it) THEM!!

If the return policy is in such need of change so that the thousands upon thousands of small publishers can survive then why isn't it "fixed" to address the small publisher?

If you were one of those large publishers and the competition was nipping at your heels, producing quality fiction beyond even their wildest dreams, would you push for wholesalers to change things? And just because one wholesaler changes the way they supply books to bookstores, there's no guarantee the others will follow suit, or in this instance Ingram or Baker & Taylor. Bookstores sure as hell aren't going to change things, the larger ones are living la vida loco.

Okay that's enough until the book which will only happen if enough of you tell me you're interested. ;)

See, I'm that little guy. If I put something out there, I do so knowing that it doesn't stand a chance of getting in front of anyone other than those five or six who follow my blog. So few books that I actually lose money I never had attempting to sell it because that's how the industry operates right now. So yes, an interest expressed will help me decide whether I go any further with this book idea surrounding the publishing industry-past and present: from a small publishers POV.