A Publisher's Conversation with Authors: Help! I'm Not Getting Paid for All My Book Sales!

 

It is Tuesday. Time to tall turkey. Monday's madness is over, and Wednesday will take us over the hump, so Tuesday it is--for some serious discussion with authors. Tuesday talks mean to address authors in waiting and self-published authors who would like to go a more traditional route or who would at least like to take their steps with a publisher by their side.

Today's topic is a real conversation that I had this morning with one of our authors, but I have changed the numbers and other information to keep identities private. It is not unusual; I have this discussion often with new authors, concerned with low volume of sales who are certain that the distributor's numbers are not right. The discussion in this case is about paperback book sales. E-book sales would take a separate column.

Author: I asked you for my sales stats for the year, and you told me that I had sold no books last week, but my friend bought a book and sent me a copy of the Amazon packaging. 

• A book purchased by a customer from Amazon today may well have been paid for by Amazon last week, last month, or last year. Amazon, bookstores, and other booksellers purchase inventory in advance, based on how many books they think they will be able to sell in a specific period of time. They pay for those books at the point of purchase. They sell the books later when they can. They do not pay the publisher or self-published author for the later sale because the publisher/author has already been paid -- and does not get to be paid twice for the same book. It is like a farmer who sells ten pounds of potatoes to the market and is paid at the time that he sells the potatoes. When the market then sells those same potatoes to customers over the next few weeks, the farmer is not paid again. Same for bookselling.
• There is also a catch in this inventory system with booksellers. Bookstores will estimate need for a specific number of books for a specific period of time, typically 6 months or a year, order/pay for the books at that point and then return the books if not sold. So, though there was originally a sale, that sale is negated -- at some considerable cost, actually -- and when the total for the year, past 6 months, etc. is calculated, the returned books are subtracted from the total sales figure since the book did not sell all the way through to a reader who kept it.

Author: You gave me quarterly sales figures of 32 books, but every member of my family and friends bought a copy in the last three months. There are 50 of them. What happened to the other 18 books?

• First, many people who say they will or did buy your book never did. That is a sad fact. Going by what someone said is misleading.
• Let's say all 50 did buy a copy. Their copies would come from a combination of books in inventory (already purchased and now on bookshelves for selling to readers) and new purchases (from the publisher). If there were 18 books in inventory, that's what happened to the 18 books. (There could have been 20 books in inventory, but the bookstore did not want to be out of inventory so they may have purchased new books to replace behind books sold. The number of books in inventory is nearly impossible to track.)
• It you want to track the accuracy of the sales being reported, then you have to go back to the release date of the book, track how many have been printed, and how many have sold. That tells you how many may still be in inventory. Because of the lag in sales and the lag in reporting sales, tracking is very, very difficult.

Author: Book Scan shows I have sold 262 books, including 20 a week for the last 6 weeks, but your figures from the distributor say that only 20 books all told sold this quarter. I think the distributor -- or Amazon -- is cheating me.

• Book Scan figures are notoriously inaccurate. They do not have access to all venues of sales and typically do not show the complete number of sales. (Now, if Book Scan stats are higher than sales reports, that would bear looking into because authors and publishers have found "phantom sales" in Book Scan figures, i.e. sales recorded that never took place.)
• Again, it goes back to selling from inventory. The last 6 weeks do not count. How many books have you sold since the book's release? If you have sold 400 books, and book scan says you have sold 262, then chances are your sales figures are accurate, and Book Scan, as always, has an approximate but incomplete number. The 120 books Book Scan notes as being sold over the past 6 weeks, however, versus the total 20 books that the distributor says it has sold does not mean there is any inaccuracy. Assuming no phantom sales, then, this, again, is the inventory system at work -- just like the farmer and the market. The sales by the sellers, which are then noted by Book Scan, come later than the purchase by the seller from the distributor.
• Another phenomenon is at work as well for authors traditionally (or hybrid) published. Book Scan often includes sales that publishers purchase for marketing and promotional purposes (e.g., book reviews). These are generally not sales that would be paid to the author since they are simply books being printed by the publisher to promote sales; therefore, the publisher does not receive any revenue and, by extension, neither does the author on a net-revenue contract; an author on a list or retail price contract would also not receive royalty on those books either -- most contracts exclude payments for books not actually sold (such as complimentary or promotional copies printed and given away).

Author: Hah! Gotcha! I bought 15 books last week, and the stats you have given me show no sales last week and only 15 this week. Where are the other sales, and where are my sales from last week?

• As shared already, there is almost always a delay in reporting sales. It can take a few days or a week or two. One thing is certain: it will not be instantaneous. That is why there is a report of no sales last week.
• The 15 books purchased this week are not separate from the ones you purchased last week. They are the ones you purchased last week, just now being reported.
• If only 15 sales are reported and you purchased 15 copies, then you are the only one who purchased any books, frustrating as that might be.

The bottom line is that Amazon (often used by authors to mean all sales sources), distributors, wholesalers, and other booksellers have nothing to gain and a whole lot to lose by cheating. Especially when it comes to small publishers and self-publishing authors, the overall numbers are not there logically to make it worth the investment of time to "cook the books." Further, printers know how many books they have printed; it provides a ready check. Finally, in our 18 years of publishing experience, we have not found any evidence of fraud or attempted fraud on the part of Amazon, Ingram, or their competitors. Neither has there been reported on the Internet, anyway, any such fraud though, of course, one can find many complaints from authors who do not understand how bookselling works. For a similar experience/view by other authors/publishers, this article on Amazon reports and Book Scan sales figures from a credible source might be helpful.

Lesson for today's Tuesday talk: Trying to delve deeply into the one book sold here and two sold there details eats up much time and emotional energy better spent on more productive activities. Rest assured, the big booksellers are, indeed, honest to the best of my knowledge; I have seen no evidence to the contrary.

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