Julie Broad from Book Launchers says book return insurance is a scam. Bookstores typically get a 55% wholesale discount and can return unsold copies, but paying hundreds of dollars for returnability programs wastes money. Focus on promotion instead and manage your return settings carefully on IngramSpark.
Questions this video answers
May 3, 2024.
Approximately 55%.
26 books per case.
About $1,200.
About $2,000 total returns over more than a decade.
Chapters
In my book Self Promote and Succeed, I talk about how expensive bookstore distribution, physical bookstore distribution can be for a self published author. Essentially the math goes like sell a book to the store for $10, you get paid 5 after print costs. Store doesn't sell books, book gets returned, you get charged $10. Yeah, your bookstore listing if the book is unsold, costs you twice what you make. Knowing this math stick sucks. And there are companies that sell you book return insurance. So if you're wondering if you should buck up for that insurance, well, this video is for you. Hey there. I'm Julie the book broad. I'm founder of Book Launchers, a full service self publishing company that helps you write, publish and promote top quality nonfiction book that will grow your brand and your business. One of the things that makes me pretty mad in this business is that we have to compete with unscrupulous companies that sell the moon and the stars and capitalize on author's hopes, dreams and fears. What we offer at Book Launchers, a book that is traditional publishing quality, positioned and supported for marketing and promotion while you, the author, keep the rights control and all the money. It's not as sexy to some authors as the allure of guarantees which are delivered usually with gimmicks, or the appeal of being chosen by a publisher, even if that publisher is a hybrid with no intention of really doing what is right by you. Here's the real advice. If a company offers you book return insurance, run and I mean run from that company. I am told such a thing doesn't even exist. But let me back up and give you an explanation. This is not an issue for you for ebooks or audiobooks. This is an issue for print books and mostly print books, if you are wanting to or you already are selling them with retailers and they're carrying them in a physical location. If you want that, you have to check the box to make your book returnable. And by the way, you want to return and destroy, not return and ship, because shipping back to you is even more expensive. But essentially what we're talking about is within the IngramSpark space or dashboard when you upload your book. If you're trying to get bookstore distribution, you're setting the wholesale discount to be 55% and you're making your book returnable. This is because bookstores have required for a long, long time, I think since the Depression, that to order a book into their bookstore, they must be able to return it if it does not sell and they can return them to the publisher for a full credit or refund. Of course, making a book returnable does not guarantee that any bookstore will order it, and getting your book into a store also does not mean it's going to sell or sell volumes. It might help with discoverability, but as I have said over and over, you have to be pushing your book no matter how you publish and no matter where it's sold. If you're not promoting your book, it's not likely to be selling no matter where you get it listed or where it's available for sale. I can shout this from the rooftops, but many authors still believe bookstore distribution is the key to the success I have an old video where I Talked about the $1,200 return bill that I got hit with for return books. It was something around $1,200, but it's been 10 years since that happened and that might scare you and make you think $600 insurance is a good buy, but let me recap a couple details so you don't have to go looking for all of these videos that I've done on this. I had done a huge push to get bookstore distribution in Chapters Indigo stores across Canada. I did events at bookstores in locations all over trying to get that distribution and sell through the stores. Often ordered a case of books which was 26 books and selling through 26 books at a signing at a store isn't as easy as you might think sometimes. Plus then other stores listed it where I didn't have events. My book was selling well, but not in the thousands a day kind of way. I also made the mistake of having them ship the books back to me when they returned them, which made the return cost even more expensive. I'm sharing all those details to let you know that there was a massive effort to get this book into the stores on my part and some mistakes were made that made the returns even more expensive. I haven't done the exact math on this, but I would say over the more than decade of the book being sold in stores in Canada and it's still listed in some stores, people have told me I've only ever had about $2,000 total in returns. I just had that one really ugly return bill knowing that even knowing I had $2,000 in returns, I still wouldn't pay for this insurance if it was a real thing because I can tell you the other three books would have never needed it. The return insurance is pure profit for the companies that offer it and it doesn't protect you. Check out this article on Writers Beware blog where I got some pricing on some of these offers for you as well. For example, Zebra Zebras. I think it's how you say it. Zebras charges $699 for its bookstore returnability program. So does Freeze Impress? At I Universe, the bookseller's return program is identical to Z Librist offering, although it costs $50 more. Why? I don't know. By the way, those are companies that are on every watchdog list that I've ever seen. They are not known for putting their authors interests first. I'll put the link to the Writers Beware post below because Victoria shares so many crazy examples of the offers that have been made and the companies that have made them. I don't need to recap them here. My only goal with this video is to educate you that book return insurance isn't a thing. And even if it was, you don't need it. When I had my $1,200 return bill, it sucked. But the reality was for me to have that many returns, I'd experienced that many more book sales. At that time, I'd made more than five figures and a high five figures in book sale payments and I was well on my way to six figures. Don't get me wrong, $1200 bill was not fun and it stung, and knowing I'd made it worse by getting the book sent back to me made it sting even more. But it really wasn't out of the realm of being able to afford it given the volume of books that I had sold. What I'm trying to say is there are a lot of scam authors out there preying on your desire to be in a bookstore, and then they prey on the counterpoint fears that you have around anything that can happen or not happen when you publish a book. I'm so glad One of my YouTube besties asked me about book return insurance so I could investigate and share it with you. Who are my YouTube besties? Well, you know cool folks like Bill Miller, Alan West, Damian Andrews, Efren Delgado, Joyce Robinson. They're folks that always comment, share and support me and authors all around us. So if you ever have a question or a concern, post it in the comment on a video and I'll respond. And sometimes I shoot a video to answer the question too. After watching this video, YouTube recommends you watch this video right here or this video on book distribution will be useful for so you're informed and less likely to fall for a scam around bookstores. Both are going to be great and I can't wait to see you there?
