In: Root » Speaking and writing » Book writing and marketing » What happens when a book stops selling
Most publishing contracts permit the publisher to remainder unsold books if they deem it necessary, usually not less than two years after the date of publication. They will only do this if they consider your book to be no longer commercially viable. Sales will have dropped to about zero (or may even be negative due to returns) and the cost of storing the books will outweigh the income from them. Remainder dealers buy this kind of ‘dead’ stock at knock-down prices, often just token amounts of money, and sell the books in discount book stores. When this happens, authors are normally entitled to purchase as many copies as they want at the discounted remainder price. If no buyer can be found for the stock then the publisher will offer it to the author for free. If the author is not excited at the prospect of clogging up their house with dusty boxes of unsaleable books then the publisher will arrange for them to be pulped. In the past, the sale of stock to a remainder dealer or the pulping of every last copy meant the end of the life of the book. But new technology has created other options for books at this stage of their life. Print-on-demand means that a book is officially available as far as Amazon and high street bookshops are concerned, but the publisher holds no stock at all. When an order arrives it is automatically diverted to a specialist printer who holds digital files for that book, from which they can print and despatch one copy direct to the bookshop. This sounds so simple that you’d expect publishers to do that automatically so that they can do away with their warehousing expenses, but unfortunately the cost of printing a single copy of a book is many times more than the unit cost of a print run of several thousand. The other ways in which a book can continue to live beyond its physical print run are as an eBook, an audio book, or as an edition published in another country.
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