Well, our books are definitely not bestsellers (except for THE COLORADO
KID by Stephen King, which was, but that was 4 years ago). But the
presence of copies in remainder shops like Dollar stores is really just
a reflection of the publisher having printed more than got ordered and
wanting to clear out some warehouse space for newer titles. This is
orthogonal from the question of how many copies got sold. So, for
instance, if you only sold 1,000 copies of a title but only printed
1,001, you won't have a bunch left in your warehouse to remainder; if
you sold a million copies but printed two million, you will have a big
pile left and will have to do something about it. Of course, you
wouldn't have printed so many copies if you didn't think additional
orders were likely to come in, so there's some correlation between
whether a book has "legs" and continues to sell after its initial time
in stores and whether you've got copies to remainder later...but even
that's not a perfect correlation, because a book could sell quite nicely
on an ongoing basis and you could still have printed even more, thinking
it might do even better. So really the presence of remainder copies is
a reflection not of how well the book is selling, but of how bad a job
the publisher did of PREDICTING how well the book would sell. And there
are some titles we did a lousy job of predicting.
Just to give one example, GRAVE DESCEND by John Lange wound up selling
perfectly well -- slightly above average for us, I believe -- but
booksellers thought it would sell much better than that, and we
accordingly set the print run at a much higher level. The result: more
than the normal number of leftover copies. And some of our our
weaker-selling books (including our worst seller of all time) happened
to be by some of our better-known authors -- not what you might predict
when the time comes to set print runs.
Anyway, that's why there are now some titles available cheap.
--Charles
--- In rara-avis-l@yahoogroups.com, mhall@... wrote:
> I've been grabbing books from the Hard Case Crime series over the last
few
> years whenever I find them in used book stores. I got a pleasant
surprise
> when I went into my local Dollar store and found four of them! A few
days
> later I hit another dollar store and found four completely different
ones.
> I am very happy to pick all these up so cheap but I'm also concerned
that
> perhaps Hard Case isn't doing so well? You don't tend to see
bestselling
> books in the dollar stores.
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