Bernie Sander's campaign bought his own books to inflate sales.

[torius]

37. No, they do not create revenue for the publisher

because the bulk price is discounted by 40%. The publisher may be making zero profit or very little, I think none. It costs a lot to publish, distribute, and market a book and pay emplpyees.

Yes his purchases go into overall numbers, but he had buyers, so what is the issue? Is it bad to sell books? Is it bad to buy them? Why write a book and not try to sell it, especially if you have millions of supporters? What's good for publishers is good for all authors and keeps bookstores in business.

because they are sold in bulk at or near cost. Books that don't sell well, like poetry, are "loss leaders" supported by best-sellers. If you don't have best-sellers you don't have the less commercial books either. (The problem is getting publishers to keep on taking risks).

Yes, buying and selling your own books it could lead to more book contracts, the horror! That is exactly what authors do. That's how children's authors and illustrators make a living. We buy cartons of books, this is encouraged by the publisher. Then we go to schools and sell them at a higher price as well as get paid by the school. If we don't do that, we can't keep writing and illustrating, because it doesn't pay well. You go to the readers, and you have to make a living. Some authors do this full-time--anyone have authors come to their kids' schools with boxes of books? They bought them in bulk, not to game the system, but to resell them for a few bucks more, so they can eat. Is it OK for musicians to sell CDs at concerts? It's the same thing. It doesn't matter who paid for the bulk copies, those sales are on a different list--it's a wholesale sale. Sure, a billionaire could buy a ton of their own books but if it's in bulk the publisher is not making money so it doesn't help get another contract. The revenue for the publisher comes from stores and anyone who pays the normal price.

99.9% of books do not "earn out," meaning do not earn back their advance, and the author receives zero royalties. The publisher loses money. The publisher do not get rich if an author buys bulk books and the author receives no royalties, only profit from reselling. Worse yet, if you don't earn out, and then do another book with that same publisher they may withhold your royalties because your other book lost money. So that second book has to earn both its advance and the first book's. You get about a dollar a book.



Books that authors buy that don't sell sit in the author's garage. I don't know, but I doubt, if Bernie (or Ted Cruz, etc., also mentioned in the article) made a profit from the campaign books. I would think it would have to go back to the campaign and that either way the campaign got back what it spent. I doubt Bernie has trouble selling books in stores and I would think the profit he kept comes from that (and he didn't say he made a million selling books alone. You make about a dollar a book in royalties but you first need to earn back your advance which may have been considerable and the bulk sales do not go toward that. Maybe as you said some were giveaways from the campaign so that's an expense, fine. No I do not see anything unusual, bad, or weird. I guess publishing is rather mysterious to most people, but it's a long chain, from printer to warehouse to store to the final sad days when a book goes out of print (some never do). Authors, especially unknown ones, bear the responsibility of a lot of promotion and selling themselves if they want a book to last.

Things that are gaming the system: Offering something in return for a review. Concealing bulk sales, for instance, by paying people to buy the books one by one at a higher price, or by buying a ton of them yourself one by one at the higher price (but who does that? What would you do with them? You would be losing money. Possibly this is what Don Jr. did. or something like it. But the issue there seemed more like he got on the NYT list--however the asterisk will always follow him). You can game the Amazon numbers by getting people to buy at a certain time. But Amazon is bots and things like the Times are human-edited. So no, I think if there is demand for your book, it makes sense to have them at campaign rallies just as a musician sells CDs at concerts. If you're giving away the bulk-bought book then you're not making money nor is the publisher (or very little if any).