This week, we welcome back Jane Friedman of The Bottom Line to mediate an ongoing dispute between our two co-hosts, which is, are book returns good or evil?

it can only be one it dates back to the great depression when publishers were trying to encourage bookstores to stock books and so they said well if you take them and they don't sell you can return them and even after the depression ended that custom has stuck and yeah no no one seems to have the wherewithal to to change it at this point um no one's known anything different i don't think there are any 150 year olds working in publishing um interestingly though i don't know if this will affect our conversation um the returns rate has greatly diminished since i got into the business so when i in the late 90s you know the returns rate was really high probably north of 30 percent if we're talking about commercial publishing and these days it's more like around 10 to 15 percent

sharper at what they do i

think the argument slightly favors joe just because of industry norms that's the only reason why because i think there's this like if you were to stop returns tomorrow let's say there's going to be this incredible knee-jerk reaction from some number of your retailers who are like all right i'm not taking their books anymore i

But it's still like a pretty small percentage, right? Can you just give some sense of how likely it is that for any individual author, these kinds of opportunities are going to come along? Yeah.

Well, I think it's fair to say it's more likely that they're coming along now than ever before.

But if you look at the entire field of people who are self-publishing, of course, it's like a percent of a percent.

So I think what's interesting to me is a lot of these deals are happening with authors who you have not heard of.

And sometimes, at least as I see it, these authors are fairly early career.

So if a traditional publisher sees someone who is kind of starting to charge up the bestseller lists or they're getting a lot of traction on BookTok, you know, there are all these signs that the author is going to do very well if they have more institutional support or retail support, whatever the case might be.

I find that they're jumping in more quickly than they were in the past.

Do you just want to give a

Can you share a few of the most significant insights? Talk about a little bit what you highlighted in that piece, if you will.

So it probably wasn't the things that at least my close readership expected because I started by saying, I don't know that things have changed that much in the last 10 years.

At least if I compare it to like 2005 to 2015, which there was incredible transformation.

You know, that's when Amazon started to become enormous and they launched the Kindle and eBooks.

So it almost felt like what I wrote was, I don't know, just an ordinary trend article rather than outlining something monumental that had occurred.

But that said, the last decade has seen the growing importance of audio as a format and Since I'm not an audiobook listener myself, and I don't really listen to podcasts, I really thought it was a fad, but it is not a fad.

It just keeps growing and growing and growing.

and production.

Would it surprise you to learn? Just imagine a very dramatic moment.

Would it surprise you to learn of the 58,000 books published every year, half sell fewer than 12 copies? But people were, of course, live tweeting it or just reporting on what happened that day in summary.

And so that statistic obviously got repeated.

But there wasn't any evidence provided for it during that conversation.

And so the kind of conversation between the attorney and the expert witness kind of moved on.

And there wasn't any further delving into that.

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