Day Thirty Two

I’ve been wondering for th last few days how this liquidation is affecting authors whose books are on the shelves, but are in no position to do anything. We had a local author come in an buy her own books, but she’s “traditionally” published and I can’t help wonder what’s happening to those whose books we have from local or self published authors.

This is exactly why the Borders policy of only taking books that are commercially distributed by places like Baker & Taylor and Ingram is actually a good thing, no matter what the authors I’ve heard throwing fits about it think.

When we went into liquidation the liquidators became the new owners of everything in the stores (save fixtures and equipment which are leases, such as our WiFi equipment and Paperchase fixtures.) At that point also I believe the way it works is Borders declares all that stock loss and if you (as a company) want to be paid for it you have to join the debtors list.

I could be wrong but I’m almost positive that authors will not see a cent of the money for their books currently on the shelves or that have been sold from liquidating Borders in the last month without action on their behalf by their publisher in the legal proceedings.

For those of you not in the other side of publishing here’s a fast and dirty description of what happens: You sell a book and the publisher gives you an advance, that is a lump sum (usually divided into three or four payments paid out at certain key moments, like the signing of the contract and the acceptance of the final version of the manuscript) that is supposed to represent the amount of money they expect to pay you in royalties over your book’s publication life. There’s a lot of debate over advances these days since this front-heavy method of payment is often inaccurate and yet authors traditionally want a big sale up front rather than a bigger percentage from each sale. But that’s a debate for another time.

Publishers then pay all the other costs, like cover art, editing, formating, distribution and printing. They ship the book out through places like Ingram. Ingram takes orders from bookstores who are supposed to guess how many copies of each book they think they’ll sell and order appropriately. (Supposed to is a key term, the truth is stores don’t, and Borders has been known to over order, then return a bunch of books they over ordered to get credit to order more, which has caused some huge problems with smaller presses who simply cannot absorb those kinds of costs.) At this point the only money the author has seen is the advance.

Then the books get put on the shelves. They sell. Or they don’t sell. They are reordered or not. Eventually there is a time to pay up and the bookstore pays for all copies they have actually sold and either keeps the rest on the shelves or sends the extras back–get this–at the publisher’s expense. Sometimes the whole book is sent back. Sometime only the cover. Sometimes those returned books get remainered and sold as bargain. Sometimes they get pulped and go nowhere. But authors do not get paid for books ordered, they get paid for books sold.

(There are a few people at my store who don’t know this, who think that authors have already been paid for all the books when they get to stores. That’s not true.)

Publishers keep a tally of the author’s cut of the sales. They usually keep a portion of this royalty due back to cover the cost of returns (so they aren’t paying out for books that eventually get returned to them). Authors do not see a dime of royalties until the books has “sold through” or earned as much money as they were given in advance. If you get an advance of $5000 you don’t see anything until you earn $5001.

I want to think that publishers understand and at the very least won’t drop an author for low sales if those sales were impacted by 200 bookstores going into liquidation and not paying up monies due. But I’m not that naive. And they certainly aren’t going to pay the authors if they themselves aren’t getting paid.

By declaring bankruptcy Borders has told publishers, landlords and everyone else that they have no intention of paying their bills unless you take legal action against them. Now consider that once you involve courts, mediators and lawyers you immediately start to cut into what a creditor can actually get (IF, and that’s a big if, the corporation is even in a position to pay at all. It’s completely likely that creditors will get a judgment against Borders but never get an actual payment. If publisher don’t get payment they’re not handing anything over to authors.

Now, it could be worse. Self publishing has become really popular, and while it’s a fight it’s also completely possible for you to self publish your book, get an account with a distributor, call up your local Borders sales manager and get you book in the store. Well, I mean, it was possible. Not so much anymore. But we do have a number of local authors who have self published or small press published books that we have orders and had on our shelves (the Haunted Louisville books have been pretty popular).

There’s been the ongoing question in a world where JA Konrath and so many others can make a better living self publishing whybother with commercial publishers. Well this is exactly why. For a “traditional” author the publisher automatically goes to court (and keeps the records to prove debt, pays the lawyers to prepare the documents, and pays legal fees, not to mention travel fees, etc) on behalf of their authors because their authors’ owed money is their owed money. So a “traditionally” published author doesn’t have to do anything, like learn which papers to fill out or find a lawyer that is on their side, or try to get sales records, etc to have someone fighting in all this murkiness for them.

A self published author might have the distributor fighting on their behalf. They might also not even find out that they have five or ten books on the shelves of a closing store until they walk in and see them pawed over with the other books. There’s a big delay in most things in publishing, so it might take you six months to see that Borders had ordered your book (honestly I’m not sure because I haven’t ever been in the publisher position with direct dealings with Ingram or any other distributor. If anyone else has better information I would love to hear it.)

Of course most people out there having this crazy success with publishing are doing so through Amazon and B&N (which is another reason Borders is falling behind, but that’s besides the point). However B&N isn’t doing as well as a lot of people think. Publishers Lunch reported today that what little interest there was in B&N after it put itself up for sale has waned. And Publishers Weekly has reported that Books-A-Millions’ sales dropped last year. (Not surprising, but it should go to show that the whole spectrum of book sales is changing, not just Borders.) And if you think going through this kind of thing as an author is bad imagine if Borders was the only place to ever carry your books (which is what Amazon is becoming).

What authors have to hold onto right now is the same thing we employees do, that life doesn’t end after this because there are other bookstores, other opportunities out there. And hopefully we can also remind ourselves that we’re not alone in being affected by this.

If you are an author and have ever had a reading or event at a Borders I’d love to hear about your experiences, good or bad.