Returns, hurts, remainders, overstocks—they’re all books you can’t sell to your regular trading partners. But what you call them is not nearly as important as what you can do with them to cut your losses or earn a profit.

When shrinkwrap has been removed, covers have been scratched slightly, or revised editions are now available, many publishers resell copies—either to the general public online, at special events, or to wholesalers as bargain books. Options in addition to reselling include donating the books, preferably in a way that allows you to take a tax deduction, and using them as samples and review copies.

PMA members use each of these methods:

Selling online through used-book sites. Some publishers sign up as used-book vendors at Amazon.com, Abebooks, and similar sites. You can discount a book slightly from retail and still make more than you would by wholesaling it. (For information on Amazon.com’s Marketplace program, select “Help” on the home page and scroll down the menu on the left until you see “Selling at Amazon.” At Abebooks.com, select “Sell books.”)

Steve Carlson at Vermont’s Upper Access, Gordon Inkeles at California’s Arcata Arts, and Lynn McGlothlin at Michigan’s North Country Publishing are among the PMA members who use Amazon’s Marketplace. Others, with more books to sell, have created storefronts at Amazon.com.

Selling online via your own Web site. Add a “Bargain Books” page for earlier editions or badly damaged books. Older titles that are available only as scuffs on your Web site may draw traffic to it, as Richard Godwin at CGP/Apogee Books in Wheaton, IL, points out.

Selling at book fairs, street fairs, and craft sales. Judy Geary at North Carolina’s High Country Publishers reports, “There’s frequently a reader in the bunch who is delighted to find a booth with discounted books. Authors can make a real killing providing ‘local color’ and signed copies, even if the books aren’t perfect.” One caveat from my experience: If you have only one title, it can be hard to sell enough copies to make a profit after paying fees and travel costs.

Selling at bargain-book expos. Many of the big names in book publishing take booths at BookExpo in the spring to promote new titles, and tables at CIROBE in the fall to dump the old ones. The tables don’t come cheap at the Chicago International Remainder and Overstock Book Exposition: this fall the regular rate for a six-foot table was $1,175. But if you have dozens of titles and thousands of copies of each to move, it may be the place to take samples, covers, and an inventory list. Check http://www.cirobe.com for early registration dates for the 2007 show; discounts on table rental are usually available between January and April.

The Spring Book Show (www.springbookshow.com, 865/922-7490), scheduled for March in Atlanta, is slightly less expensive: $975 for an eight-foot table booked before December 31.

Wholesaling inventory to bargain-book dealers. You may recoup only a fraction of your cost, but some dealers will pay the freight on their purchases.

American Book Co., in Knoxville, TN, which expects to sell 40 million books this year, calls itself the world’s largest remainder dealer. This past summer it had 12,000 ISBNs in stock, representing 15 million units.

“We’ll look at everything,” says Chris Eaton, senior vice president of purchasing, but the company prefers larger lots. It’s unlikely to be interested in a few hundred copies of a single title. American, which does cover freight costs, usually pays less than 10 per cent of cover price, and far less than that if a publisher restricts where the remainders can be sold (for example, not in the United States, or not to major chains).

Retail price means little when a dealer bids on books, says Eaton, who emphasizes that this is a closeout market. Dee Mitchell, head buyer at Half Price Books, echoes his thought. Half Price determines what to pay for remainders by establishing what it wants the remainders to retail at; that may be as much as half the original price, or as little 20 per cent of it.

“We work backwards from that to an offer,” notes Mitchell, who makes no offers until Half Price has a sample book in hand. (But don’t start out by swamping him with samples; “If the list is over a dozen or so titles,” he says, “we ask for samples only for books that we might bid on.”) You can send a list of available titles to Mitchell at Mitchell@halfpricebooks.com or call him at 214/678-6680. Quantity is not an issue with Half Price; it will consider a single title or several dozen.

Dawn Jeffers, at Raven Tree Press in Illinois, recommends Taylor Marketing, in Houston, run by Virginia Taylor (vtaylor@taylormkting.com, 281/213-8658). She works primarily with larger quantities—at least 1,000 copies of a title—and cannot consider quantities of a few hundred unless they are part of a large purchase. Like Half Price, she bases her bids on what she thinks her customers can charge their customers, who buy at flea markets, dollar stores, military bases, catalogers, and book fairs, among other places.

“My customers need to be able to sell a book for at least 50 percent off retail; they prefer 60 to 80 percent off, and they want a 50 to 60 percent margin,” Taylor explains. The result: her bid is usually 5 to 7 percent of the original retail price.

Taylor focuses on what she calls “pretty” books, usually hardcover, with lots of attractive full-color photos. She likes to buy cookbooks, children’s books, and books on interiors and gardening. Today she’s also looking for Spanish, African-American, and Christian titles.

Another dealer, this one recommended by Michael S. Levins of Innovative Kids in Norwalk, CT, is Strictly by the Book in Bridgewater, MA (contact: Erez Bredmehl, erezb@strictlybythebook.com, 508/675-5287). “We sell to them for a fixed percentage of the retail price, which allows us to recapture 20 to 30 percent of our original cost,” Levins says.

Using PMA’s online Remainders Expo.For $25 a quarter, a publisher can advertise a title on the PMA Web site (see https://pma-online.org/). You’ll be asked to describe the book, give its retail price, and indicate how many copies you have available, what the carton count is, and when the publication date was.

Remainder dealers, retailers, and others can use the PMA site to place a bid, and bids are immediately forwarded to publishers. All transactions are between the publisher and the bargain-book buyer, so PMA keeps no record of the number of transactions that occur.

The sponsors of the Spring Book Show run a similar program, Bargain Book News (bargainbookbids.com), which charges $250 to list up to five titles in its electronic newsletter.

Donating to prisons, literacy programs, or disaster-struck regions. As explained in “Announcing a New PMA Project” in this issue and at www.lifetimeliteracy.org, PMA’s new lifetime literacy program helps publishers make surplus books available to such good causes as prison libraries.

Franci Prowse at California’s White Rose Millennium Press sends books to Texas prisons. “Books of any kind are treasured there by thousands of inmates,” she points out, “especially those who are Latino, uneducated, or semiliterate.” Jeffers at Raven Tree sends bilingual children’s picture books that don’t sell to her local Salvation Army. “They give the books to kids in their programs; sometimes that’s a child’s first book,” she reports.

Many libraries devastated by Hurricane Katrina or other disasters continue to solicit books, often on their sites or through publishing and writing associations.

---