I could make you a whole thread about how accounts between publishers, distributors, and retailers are a dizzying ballet of credits, payments, and open deferrals based on established marketing windows ... okay, so here goes.

Bookstores buy books and put them on shelves. Some of them sell. The ones that don’t are sent back (trade paperback), remaindered (hardcover), or pulped (mass market). They’re all called returns.

Publishers/distributors do not send money back to bookstores for unsold books: usually, they give credit toward the next order. This is why booksellers say indie books are “not returnable”: they get no cushion for unsold copies, no way to recoup that money on another title.

This is why bookstores are precarious: a lot of their funds are caught in this tide of credit and payment, as the numbers shift slightly and unpredictably back and forth.

Publishers also commonly delay some portion of print royalties from author payments, in case bookstores return the author’s books. It’s called a reserve against returns, and it means they don’t have to ask for money *back* from the author when books are returned.

Usually books stay on bookstore shelves for a certain number of months, then are sent back. You get that one window to prove you can sell, or you get returned and never reordered. This is why it’s so hard for midlist authors.

My best guess is BN wanted to tell print publishers they’ll be holding funds back in a similar way. Store closures would mean a lot of physical books and accounts to sort through. In a pandemic, no less.

Some categorization of scale meant D2D received the same email. Indie/digital publishing *does not* use the same system of reserves/returns. It’s very much a quirk of the print publishing world—like advances, or bound galleys.

So this isn’t so much a question of BN being so financially shaky it can’t pay indie authors — it’s a question of them being so disorganized and mismanaged that they can fuck up such a basic distinction. Their reputation took a huge hit in a single day.

Meanwhile D2D did precisely what an author would hope they would do in such a situation. It’s kind of amazing! And extremely rare!