This Friday I received the news that Signal to Noise is being pulped, which in short means recycled. The cover is torn off, the paper is mixed with water and cleaned of ink and dried out. The resulting “pulp” can be used to make new products, such as toilet paper or more books.
You might think I’m sad about this, but I’m not. Books have life cycles. We get glimpses of them in the womb (through advance review copies), celebrate their birth and then they reach bookstores where hopefully they’ll be bought. Books age quickly, especially these days. Many booksellers will only stock a new book a short window of time. For example, right now The Bewitching, which came out in July, is a ‘backlist’ title having aged out of the ‘frontlist.’ If a book is not selling, it’ll be returned to the publisher for a credit.
The publisher will first try to ‘remainder’ the book (sell it at a discount) to merchants that take these kinds of books. That’s how you find hardcovers for $2 at Dollar Tree. Another last ditch strategy is to rejacket the book. The cover is stripped off and a new one glued on. This is not that common, but we discussed this with the first edition of Signal to Noise . The book has had three different covers, and my editor changed the cover from the first to the second edition in the hopes of cashing in on the Stranger Things mania by picking a font that evoked the series. Can’t say it worked. Eventually the book was reissued with a third cover, which is the one you see below and my favorite of the bunch.
Anyway, things happen and inevitably publishers will be left with extra books. Those books will be pulped. Why does his happen? There are way too many books! As this 2010 story indicates in the USA “a small bookstore might be stocking 40,000 different titles. A larger [chain] bookstore might be up to 150,000 or 200,000.” Although publishers try to gauge demand, inevitably numbers don’t align perfectly and publishers must dispose of stock.
The percentage of books pulped varies depending on the format. Mass market paperbacks tend to be pulped at higher rates, though the format is now going out fashion. I’ve seen figures mentioning anything from 40 percent to over 70 percent of books returned to publishers are pulped.
Variations in pulping also vary depending on the country and the imprint. The small Canadian publisher that put out my collection This Strange of Dying doesn’t like to pulp. They have a large enough storage space, and they’re a small enough operation, that they can store stock for many years. American publishers on the other hand may be keener to dispose of their stock because there are tax implications for this inventory. But publishers in other countries also pulp books: “In France, an estimated 140 million new books are ‘pulped’ every year. Almost one in four books are destroyed.”
It might be tempting to imagine all those books could be donated, but in general this is unfeasible. If you know people who work in bookstores, libraries or thrift stores, you’ll quickly realize books are hard to dispose of. As this story points out “Seeing the sheer volume of those same books that do nothing but take up warehouse space, gather dust, and house silverfish, it’s pretty frightening ecologically. I often threw away upwards of five copies of the entire Twilight Saga every week. We couldn’t sell it, even for mere pennies.”
I buy a lot of books every year and often have storage issues. A few years ago, I remember taking several boxes of pristine hardcovers to a nearby used bookshop to see if I could get rid of them, but they only took one title (stores have limited space and the rest of the books didn’t appeal to them). I swooped by the Salvation Army to drop another box but that still left me with several more boxes. Like a thief in the night, I remember going around the city stuffing books into all the Little Free Libraries I could find. I viscerally understood what publishers go through when they must dispose of books.
One of the tempting ideas would be to diminish waste by only publishing books that will sell well. Of course, this is difficult since even the biggest publishers can’t predict the future (many factors can alter the outlook of a title). The other wrinkle here is that the books that sell the most are not exactly the most diverse ones. I know a bunch of people are upset about representation in the Goodreads awards. Imagine if publishers decided to trim their list so that only the one or two titles deemed the most popular ever made it into print: you would have even less books by authors of color.
In the case of Signal to Noise, the book is going out of print and hence it’s being pulped for that reason. I bought two boxes of deeply discounted books, but the publisher had several more in a warehouse and those are being taken for pulping. Mind you, it’s not bad that this is going out of print: my contract with this publisher has come to an end. The book will still be available in audio and I’m hoping it’ll be re-released at some point in the future. I’ve gone through many publishers. It’s just another day. If there’s anything you learn in publishing it’s how to keep calm and carry on.