Returns (returnable books)

Returns are the book trade's peculiar safety valve: a shop that buys copies from a publisher may send back the ones that don't sell — months later, often damaged — and receive full credit. The practice dates from the Depression, when publishers used it to persuade nervous shops to keep ordering, and it never went away. A quarter or more of the hardcovers shipped in a year come back.

For a self-published author the setting appears as a checkbox in the distributor's dashboard: returnable (with the returned copies either destroyed or shipped back at your cost) or non-returnable. Bookshops rarely stock non-returnable titles from unknown authors, so returnable status opens the door — and creates the risk of a negative statement when a shop orders forty copies for an event and returns thirty-five.

Ebooks and print-on-demand orders shipped to the buyer have no returns in this sense; the mechanism belongs to physical stock on physical shelves.