I was listening to NPR today and they were talking about the LA Book Expo. In the report, they talked about the problems publishers are having these days. There two main problems: book returns and new technology.

During the depression, publishers encouraged book stores to take their books by offering them a return policy. Book stores have the right to return any unsold books. Once this practice was in place, there was no turning back, even after the economy improved. Great for book stores, bad for publishers and authors.

The report mentioned a cookbook author who has waited 18 months for her first royalty check. Today, the practice is getting worse. To compete with Amazon and other online retailers, book stores now order more books than they need to ensure they don’t have to tell customers they are out of stock. Book stores do not want customers leaving their store and going to Amazon. So now, publishers must print larger quantities of books and have larger quantities returned to them.

Book stores have 90 days to return books. So now they are returning book just before their 90 days are up and then reordering to give themselves another 90 days. It’s a racket that hurts publishers and authors.

The other problem is the emergence of better ebook readers like Amazon’s Kindle. However, I do not see this as a problem for publishers. Publishers are good at finding books that will sell, editing books and marketing books. Publishers, in my opinion, should embrace ebooks because the whole book return policy goes away. But changing technology does force companies to reinvent themselves.

After listening to this report, I became more encouraged about the future of self-publishing, or more importantly, the future of self-promotion. This is the reason we started Authors On The Net and why we produced the Self-Publishing in a Box kit. But it’s good to get these reality checks from time-to-time.