Postscripts

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Book Returns on the Rise

Should authors really worry if publishers are reporting a rise in the number of unsold books being returned to them from bookstores? The Association of American Publishers reports that the number of trade adult hardcover books returned from bookstores in the first four months of this year is up 11% from last year (the rise in returns of adult trade paperbacks is 13%). When a bookstore sets up an account with a publisher, the contract typically allows the bookstore to return the publisher's unsold titles for a complete refund. (The industry standard is that 25% of new titles will be returned.) More returns means that fewer people are buying books, obviously, and that's depressing enough. When sales are sluggish, bookstores don't order as many books from publishers; publishers, who already have to pay the expense of destroying returned stock, scale back their print runs, which affects printers, and it seems reasonable to think that that would be the limit of the economic damage. But when the book industry experiences a downturn such as this -- the last widely reported one was in 1996, when the chains were expanding too quickly and corporations like Wal-Mart were beginning to sell books -- authors and their agents may feel the pinch, too. In a July 2 article in The New York Times, David Kirkpatrick quotes from a letter that Peter Olsen, chief executive of Random House, wrote to employees congratulating them on good sales in 2000. "In a book marketplace facing flat or negative sales growth," Olsen wrote, "the only way we can hope to achieve our goals is also to focus relentlessly on containing our operating expenses."… If you want to see how the Supreme Court decision dictating that publishers can't automatically reprint freelancers' work in electronic databases is playing out, here's how to access some of the major coverage: www.usatoday.com/news/court/june01/2001-06-25-writers.htm/; www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A42816-2001Jun25.html; www.nytimes.com/2001/06/26/technology/26BIZC.html ; www.nytimes.com/2001/06/26/technology/26COPY.html … Book Woman is celebrating the paperback release of Austin writer Karen Stolz's A World of Pies on Friday, July 6, at 7:30pm, with a reading and signing and a chance to win a $30 gift certificate to the store by entering your homemade pie. Call 472-2785 for more information… Richard Wertime, author of Citadel on the Mountain: A Memoir of Father and Son (2000, FSG) is the third winner of the James A. Michener Memorial Prize, and the first time a nonfiction book has won the prize (the two previous winners are Tom McNeal, for Goodnight, Nebraska and William Gay, author of The Long Home). The prize is given by Random House in memory of James Michener -- who was a longtime Random House author -- and administered by UT's Michener Center; judges included Michener Center director James Magnuson and Random House Executive Editor Kate Medina, who was Michener's editor. The prize is given to a writer who, like Michener, published his or her first book at the age of 40 or over, and it's intended to reward the quality and artistic integrity of the first book, and to foster the promise of the writer's career, including "the risk-taking necessary to go on and write the next book." The prize, which carries a stipend of $10,000, was first awarded in 1999 and will be given annually for five years.