The Bookseller.com

13th October 2008

Susan Hill is the author of a number of books, including I'm the King of the Castle, Mrs de Winter, The Woman in Black, The Battle For Gullywith, and of the Simon Serrailler series of crime novels - the latest being The Vows of Silence. She is also the founder and publisher of Long Barn Books. She blogs at blog.susan-hill.com

Nowhere to hide

07.06.08

This is the way it works. A publisher announces a forthcoming title in their catalogue and they present it, via advance information and a picture of the cover, to the various buyers of the major chain booksellers and to the large book wholesalers. Reps exist still but the days are long gone when they tramped from small shop to small shop, offering their wares. They rarely visit independent bookshops at all. When the orders are all in and the books are in too, those books go out to the shops. BUT, they are not 'sold'. They are in the shops temporarily on a sale or return basis and if they have not sold within a set period, the shops return them. They are given a certain 'window' in which to do so but they often break the window, as it were, and go on returning copies a year later - and of course those are always shop-soiled and unsaleable. But especially in the chains, the books are being returned earlier and earlier. A new title has a bare couple of months to get going, or that`s it, boomerang time. On the whole, the cost of all this is born by the publisher and it can mean what seemed like a profit turns into a nasty loss 6 months on. Hence the perfectly fair practice of witholding a chunk of an author`s advance 'against returns.'  You don`t get the chunk if the returns are high. I do it as a publisher and it is done to me in my turn as an author.

Now here comes the tricky bit. What figure do you, as publisher or indeed, as author, claim as your sales? The number of books sold into the shops on sale or return, or the number actually sold out through the tills to buyers for real money. Nobody else knows the former figures bar the publisher and the booksellers, but anyone who subscribes to Nielsen Bookscan can find out the actual sales out of the shops of any title at all, not just their own.  As an author, though it is nice to be told a book of mine has sold, say, 30,000, my immediate response is 'into or out of?'  Because the former figure is meaningless to me. It means there are 30,000 books out there on offer, that`s all. I like to see the real sales figures, even if they cut me down to size a bit.

A lot of authors do not want to know, they want the 'on offer' figure. A lot of publishers do not want to tell their authors the truth. But this is silly. It will all come out in the end, other people can easily find out if you are lying or not, and how nice to discover that a book really HAS sold 30,000 copies.

I say all this because a friend has recently been at the Hay Festival and she has been boasted to by other authors who want to swagger and look big. Men, generally. It seems to matter to them and there is nowhere quite like the Writers' Room of a major litfest to hear the crackling of male ego. My friend was boasted to by several authors who wanted to show off and make her look small and she lamented to me how many they were selling, as against what she knew she sold. So I asked for names and addresses and I looked them up. Ha. I felt like another friend did when her neighbour boasted of how much he had bought his house for but it seemed an awfully high price to her so she looked it up, as you can now, and of course discovered he had exagerrated by 100K or so. My friend is feeling a bit better when I told her that Author A, who had boasted hardback sales of 30,000 has actually sold not quite 14,000 through the tills, and another who said he had sold 6,000 in a week turns out to have  sold a little over 400.  The silly thing is that the more they go about talking themselves up like this the sillier they will look to those who know, and not only now but far into the future. I can look at the man who boasted of 30,000 sales next time I catch up with him and smile to myself. It won't be a very nice smile and I shouldn't be smiling it but I will all the same. Publishers don't bother to lie and boast to one another about sales figures any longer because they know they can be found out at the click of a mouse. Truth is best.

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