Intro: Welcome to the Business of Bookselling! In this podcast episode, I get to do my best impression of a dictionary and define some commonly used book industry terms that may or may not be familiar to you. If I don’t define something you’ve always wanted to know about or if your definition of a term differs from mine, shoot me an email at [email protected], and I’ll try to address it in a future episode. Now let’s dive in!

Transcript: We’re starting off with some very important basics – frontlist and backlist. These two terms – frontlist is one word and backlist is another – are probably two of the most used, industry-specific terms you need to know. Frontlist refers to books that are forthcoming. They’re not yet published. Quick aside here that not yet published is sometimes abbreviated to the initials NYP. Frontlist titles are new titles coming out on this season’s or a future season’s list of books from a publisher. Let me back up a minute, in case words like “season” and “list” in this context are also new to you! So, each publisher has books grouped together every year by season. Season refers to the time of year the book comes out. You might think this would be standardized across the industry, but surprise! Every publisher defines a season in their own way, and it’s a happy coincidence when multiple publishers have seasons that coincide. So, a spring season of books may be publishing between January and April or between March and August. Publishers might have two seasons – Spring/Summer and Fall/Winter, or 3 seasons – spring, summer, winter, or 4 season – spring, summer, fall, winter. Regardless of how many seasons a publisher has, each season is comprised of a list of books being published over a certain set of months, and THAT list is what is known as frontlist. 

Now, you might think to yourself, “If frontlist refers to not yet published titles, surely backlist means ALREADY published titles.” And you would be right in thinking that! Mostly. It’s not quite that simple. Each publisher also defines backlist as separate time periods as well. One publisher might define it as anything published the season prior and older. Another might define it as anything published before today. And another might define it as anything published last calendar year. Why is it so important for you to know how a specific publisher defines backlist? Because publishers often offer independent bookstores backlist and frontlist specials! So a backlist promotion might say something like, “Stock up for the holidays! Receive an extra 3% off on orders of 20 units or more placed in October. Use promo code BLSPEC25. This code may be used twice between October 1 and October 31, 2025.”  Now, if you saw that special come through and you wanted to plan out your two orders – say, one for the first week of October and one for the last week of October – you would need to know if books published DURING October counted as backlist or if you should use whatever frontlist special is on offer to order those titles.

Don’t confuse the word backlist with the word back order. Those are two different things. Here’s what a backorder is: any time you place an order with a publisher or distributor, they’re going to try to fulfill that order immediately by sending you the books they currently have in stock. If a book is not yet published or if a book is out of stock at the warehouse and they are waiting for reprints to come in, the books they can’t send out to you yet will be backordered for you until they’re able to do so. I’ll do a whole separate episode about how to make buying decisions, but for now, let’s keep moving on to other definitions.

In addition to backlist and frontlist titles, there’s also a special phenomenon called drop-in titles, or drop-ins for short. These are books that the publishers didn’t announce as part of their original season of titles, but they’ve announced them now and the book is going to be coming out very soon, so get those orders in now. Drop-in titles are usually really hot titles that publishers are trying to keep details under wraps about so that information doesn’t leak before they’re ready to publicly announce the titles, but that does mean that bookstores have to stay on top of whether or not they’ve ordered that special drop-in title once it IS announced because you’re probably going to want to carry it and not miss out. Because these are hot titles, publishers could run through their first printing, and if you haven’t ordered it quickly, you won’t get it during the first rush when customers are really looking for it. A lot of celebrity memoirs are drop-in titles, or more recently a lot of self-published authors who have really blown up on TikTok and other social media channels and have been offered publishing contracts from traditional publishers to help with sales and distribution of their hot titles into a wider market have been dropping in never-before-published titles, or reprints of old titles, or collector’s editions of their old titles as well.

So far I’ve been defining terms that refer to new books. Books that come from a publisher or wholesale distributor are considered new because no one else has cracked that spine and read that copy yet. Wait, what’s the difference between a publisher and a wholesale distributor, also known as a wholesaler, you might be asking? I’m going to back up again for a second: in common language practice, the word “publishing” usually refers to everything up to and including the point of printing, warehousing, and shipping the book. But, not all publishers have the ability to do all of those things for themselves, because costs. If that’s the case, Publisher A may be the publisher of a book, meaning they edit, design, and print the book, while Publisher B may be the distributor of the book, meaning they store, sell, and distribute the book for Publisher A. Penguin Random House, Macmillan Publishing Services, and Hachette are just a few examples of publishing companies who also act as distributors, meaning smaller presses, such as Beacon Press, publish their own titles while Penguin Random House distributes them. A distribution client, however, is not the same as an imprint. An imprint is the name for a collection of books being published under a certain theme, idea, or person’s direction. To stay with our Penguin Random House example, they have more than 300 imprints that they publish, meaning they have more than 300 distinct departments or groups working together to put out books under a certain imprint name every season, such as Berkely, Crown, DK, Knopf, or Penguin Classics (all examples of PRH imprints). PRH distributes all their own imprints’ titles, of course, in addition to their distribution client’s titles, and usually when a bookstore orders from a publisher, they can order any of the books published by that publisher AND distributed by that publisher, but sometimes there are special deals for certain publishers’ books only. A publisher that is selling or distributing the book would let you as an independent bookstore know, through your rep that you were assigned when creating an account with them, about this special offer. A wholesaler, or wholesale distributor, is an organization that stores or warehouses books by multiple publishers, also often distributing self-published authors (books that remain self-published, not ones brought into traditional publishing) as well, and it’s usually easier to meet the minimum requirements for placing an order at a wholesaler because they have so many more books on offer. This is why many independent bookstores who are just getting started begin by ordering from one wholesaler, rather than through many different publishers.

Admittedly it gets tricky sometimes to figure out and remember what imprint is published by which publisher, and what publisher is distributed by which publisher, especially because large publishers often buy and sell smaller publishers and also buy and sell other publisher’s imprints. The American Booksellers Association (also known as the ABA) has a resource on their website called the Book Buyer’s Handbook (https://www.bookweb.org/), which lists publishers, imprints, distribution clients, and even discount terms, and it’s mostly up-to-date at any given time. I believe publishers are in charge of updating their own entries into the handbook, so anything that’s out of date is because the publisher hasn’t updated it yet. You do have to be an ABA member in order to use the Book Buyer’s Handbook. It’s one of the biggest resources available to independent bookstores, so becoming an ABA member is highly recommended.

Before I continue on to defining other types of books other than “new” books, I’m going to define a really important word just used. That word is “terms,” which is short for “discount terms.” Basically, it means how much do I have to buy this item for as a wholesale customer, as whatever that cost is will then impact my profit when I turn around and sell it to my retail customer? What you might not realize is that you as the independent bookstore are also a customer; you’re a wholesale customer purchasing books from publishers and wholesaler distributors. When you’re wearing your wholesale customer hat, you’re going to want to purchase from the place that gives you the best discount because as a retailer – that’s when you’re operating as the bookshop selling books to your individual customers – you can’t charge more for your books than what’s printed on the book, also known as the MSRP or manufacturer standard retail price. In the case of books in America, the publisher sets the price of the book, it’s printed on the book, and no one can sell it for more than what’s listed on the book. Used books and antiquarian books are a different case, but this is focused on new books. You can charge for more than the book itself, if you’ve bundled the book into an event ticket of some kind, but in that case, it still has to come with something extra; you can’t actually charge more for the book itself. You can always sell it for less, and there’s where Amazon has significantly devalued books, by selling them as a loss leader to get customer information so that they can then sell additional products to them not at a loss for the company, and this is why retailers discounting products is so dangerous – it’s a very slippery slope, it devalues the product, and it trains customers to not want to pay for the full value of a product. But I digress. Back to terms. 

Because I am an independent bookstore owner talking on a podcast about the business of bookselling to an audience of, I’m assuming, mostly other bookstore owners or bookstore owning dreamers, I need to be careful about what I say about terms thanks to the Sherman Act’s antitrust guidelines, which say that competitors – which we technically are from a business perspective, even if we don’t necessarily feel like competitors in our hearts –  can’t discuss price or pricing policies. I’m going to use general examples from this point on in order to illustrate what terms actually look like from a financial perspective.

Most independent bookstores are getting their books at between a 40 to 50% discount, which means they’re paying 50 to 60% of the cover price for that book. That’s one part of terms offered – how many units of a product the wholesale customer has to order in order to receive the largest discount on offer. So one publisher may have their terms defined as an order of 20 units equals a 45% discount, meaning you as the wholesale customer would need to place an order for 20 units of the product, and in meeting the order minimum quantity, you would receive a 45% discount off the MSRP, meaning you would pay the publisher or wholesaler 55% of the MSRP. I’m saying “units” because you can purchase multiple copies of the same title, and you also might be ordering more than books – you might order stickers or toys or puzzles or games at the same time – so the word “units” covers all those bases. So to keep this simple, let’s say a bookstore ordered 20 copies of a book priced at $18.99. The retail cost is 20 x $18.99, or $379.80. The wholesale cost is that $379.80 minus your 45% discount, which equals $208.89. When the store charges their individual customer the $18.99 for that book, their potential profit on that book is the wholesale discount that you received on that book. So the most a bookstore could make in profit on 20 copies of an $18.99 book would be $170.91. The publisher or wholesaler would make more than you; they are making the $208.89 on those 20 books. As a side note, wholesale customers are exempt from paying tax on the products they purchase as their stock, so we don’t need to factor tax into this equation yet. As a retailer, you will still charge your customers tax though; that’s sales tax. Now, all of that is just one type of discount term offered.

Another part of discount terms being offered by a publisher or wholesaler is what’s called “dating,” which no, doesn’t mean candlelit dinners and long walks on the beach, but the amount of time you have to pay the invoice for the product you purchased. Standard dating is usually 30 days from the time the product has shipped out, not 30 days from when you ordered that. Thais said, you might not even receive the product until 7 days into its 30-day invoicing countdown. If you order a book on standard terms and it doesn’t sell before the invoice is due, as a bookstore, you’re going to be paying for that book out of your own bookstore pocket. This means that you could be paying for the majority of the books in your inventory, on your shelves, upfront, before anyone purchases them. This is one of the main reasons that it’s so expensive to start a new book bookselling business. Of course the hope is that a customer is going to buy that book at the MSRP, thus covering the cost of that book and putting extra money into your account, technically called profit, above and beyond the price you paid for the book. But if you’re receiving only 40-50% of the MSRP of a $18.99 book after you’ve paid for its cost to your store, that’s not a lot of profit leftover for you to pay your bills, including line items like staff salary, your overhead (that’s line items such as rent and associated costs for your physical space and physical running of the business), and the rest of your as-yet-unsold inventory. Independent bookselling runs on really thin profit margins, sometimes called just “margins” for short (like how discount terms is shortened to just “terms”), and that’s why it’s so important to order from the place that’s going to give you the best overall terms for the product you’re purchasing. 

In addition to the discount and the dating, the other terms piece to consider is freight costs. Most book inventory publishers and wholesale distributors will throw in free freight as part of the terms you receive when you’ve met the minimum unit order quantity. Freight charges can really add up and obviously cut into your as-already-discussed very limited profit margin, so it’s really important to try to meet the minimum order required for maximum discount benefits. 

Another side note – if you’ve met the free freight minimum for your book order, but not every book on your order is ready to ship right away, you could be charged freight on your order if the terms specified that all books ordered need to ship together to meet the free freight minimum. You may still receive the discount terms and dating, but freight can sometimes have its own stipulations. If you’re lucky, you’ll still get free freight on subsequent orders shipping out when the books are ready. This is why it’s so important to know all the little details of the terms.

Also, whenever you’re calculating cost-of-goods-sold (also known as COGS, for short, or also known as your margins) in your accounting system, it’s important to factor in those hidden costs, such as shipping. The cost for the book or other product may be more than just 50-60% of the MSRP if there are freight costs for physically getting the book to your store. That said, staff time for physically processing and receiving the inventory into your point-of-sale system and shelving the book into its appropriate display or section does not count toward your COGS. 

Depending on what the order minimum is, it can be difficult to meet, especially if you’re a smaller shop, a novel model, or niche store, and it can be time consuming to track the terms for the different publishers, which is hard to commit to if you’re a one person or smaller staffed store. This is why so many stores simply use the wholesale distributor Ingram, because they have so many books by so many publishers, and as noted before, also by self-published authors. But for the sake of adhering to the Sherman Act, I’ll just say, please do your due diligence in checking which publisher or wholesale distributor gives you as their wholesale customer the best discount on the books you want to order from them, and it’s up to you to decide if convenience is worth paying more upfront for your books or if the higher discount is worth more and worth ordering direct from a publisher. 

Also, sometimes when looking at books on a wholesaler’s inventory website, you might run across a short discount book. This means that for a variety of reasons, the standard, or regular discount (often represented by the initials REG, short for regular), does not apply to this book, and if you order it, you’re going to get a smaller discount on the book, meaning you’re going to have to pay more for it and you won’t make as much money when you sell it. 

One other bottom line advantage of ordering directly through publishers, is that they often offer more special promotions at even higher discounts (such as backlist or frontlist specials), extended dating opportunities (that’s invoicing that is not due in 30 days, but could be due after 60, 90, or even 120 days), and waived minimum order opportunities than wholesalers, so it’s a money game that you should commit to playing if you want the most optimal COGS, or cost-of-goods-sold, for your inventory.

Now back to defining types of books! Of course the opposite of a new book is a used book – one someone else has read before. Some bookstores sell new books only, some sell used books only, some sell new and used and remainders. And there’s another word to define – remainder.

Remainder is basically a nice word for leftover, though no one calls them that. Sometimes remainders are called hurts or bargain books, in addition to remainders, though. Whatever they’re called, and I’m going to keep using the word remainder, these are books that remained in a warehouse as they either never made it onto a bookstore shelf or made it on to a shelf but didn’t sell and so it was returned to the publisher. This often happens with hardcovers, for example. Say a publisher prints 100,000 copies of a book in hardcover but then the paperback comes out a year later (as it often does), and the publisher still has 3,000 hardcover copies left in the warehouse. What are they going to do with them? Well, they sell them! But not directly to us bookstores, usually; they sell them to a remainder company, usually by the pallet for basically pennies. Then the remainder company has to sell them on, so they sell them to bookstores for probably around a quarter of the cover price. The exact prices differ by book and remainder company. Then we, as independent bookstores, sell those remaindered books to customers at a reduced or sale price that’s less than the cover price but more than we paid for it. Why not sell it for the full cover price, as it’s a new book? Because remainders all have a small bit of damage done to them intentionally to indicate they’re remainders. This can look like a dot or a slash somewhere on the edges of the book with a permanent marker, or a pen slash through the bar code, or a box cutter gash on the barcode or cover itself. But however it’s marked, that imperfection declares it’s a remainder and so it should probably only be sold at a reduced price.

Since I just talked about a paperback coming out after a hardcover, let’s really quickly define industry standard language for the types of books out there. Hardcovers are, of course, books published in hardcover. A hardcover can have a dust jacket – that’s the cover of the book that’s detachable or often covered in plastic (called mylar) at the library – or it can be what’s called “paper over board,” which is less common, but it means there’s no dust jacket on purpose. The reason I’m defining hardcover is because sometimes publishers publish a book in both hardcover and in a library binding. While a library binding is technically a hardcover book, the binding is actually reinforced to last longer, and that is why a library binding book will cost more or have a higher MSRP than a standard traditional hardcover book. A paperback book can come in a few different trim sizes, meaning how tall and wide a book is from top to bottom and side to side (the depth – front-to-back – of the book is determined by how many words a book is and the font size), but the only trim size that’s really called something different is a mass market paperback. The term trade paperback or just paperback usually do NOT refer to a mass market or pocket-sized paperback. The mass market paperback sized books are the ones in the spinner racks most often found in airports, convenience stores, and big chain stores, though indies can certainly sell them, too. They’re usually the cheapest format of an adult title; though a lot of genre books – those are books published in the romance (bodice rippers, for example, as they used to be called – the historical romances with a half-naked woman on the cover), fantasy, science fiction, and mystery genres – were traditionally published in the mass market size, it’s been many years now that genre titles are being published in the more traditional paperback and hardcover size book. A traditional publishing schedule for a fiction title might look like this – first version, hardcover; a year later, trade paperback; anywhere from 6 months to several years later, a mass market version; somewhere in that span of time, possibly a collector’s edition. And don’t get me started on reprints with new covers, etc.! A book can have a thousand different publishing lives if it’s what’s been identified as a classic or if it’s having a hot moment. Anyway, those are the standard formats for most adult titles. 

Young adult or YA and middle grade titles also have hardcover and trade paperback editions, and though publishers might play around with the trim size of book, YA and middle grade are usually not published in mass market format. Graphic novels come in various trim sizes and formats, including hard cover paper over board, hardcover with dust jacket, and paperback, and books called beginning readers or leveled readers – those can be books that are literally printed with level 1, 2, 3, or more on them and are in a spinner rack, or they can be books intended for the age 7-to-9-year-old learning to read on their own, shorter chapter book-style books – often have trim sizes that are the same if they’re going into those leveled reader spinners, but can also be published in varying trim sizes and book formats if they’re not intended to be part of one of those leveled reader series – I’m thinking of the “I Can Read” series that goes into spinners vs the Elephant and Piggie series by Mo Willems (which has its own spinner) vs the Mercy Watson books by Kate DiCamillo and Chris Van Dusen. Picture books and board books also go rogue on the sizing and format. A hardcover picture book with a dust jacket is often a larger trim size and price than a paper-over-board picture book, both of which are going to be more expensive than a paperback picture book. And board books come in all kinds of exciting sizes and shapes and interactive elements nowadays; I personally believe board books are one of the most creative book art forms out there today. Activity books and work books are mostly paperback with some hardcovers thrown in there, and while hardcover cookbooks have their own binding style to make them lay flat, they’re still just considered hardcover or paperback in format. I’m sure there are a million exceptions people will think of, but I’m trying to give a general overview here, so I’m going to stop there for describing general physical book formats.
There are also audiobooks and e-books, of course. These are both book products that you can sell your customers, and they’re also formats you can explore when reading books on your own. By that, I mean you can sell them to your customers thanks to Libro.FM for audiobooks and Bookshop.org for e-books (you do need to open a wholesale bookstore account with each of those places, but then you can direct your customers to purchase their audiobooks and e-books from your Libro.FM and Bookshop.org stores), but you can also receive free ALCs, or advanced listening copies, of frontlist audiobooks that publishers select for booksellers via Libro.FM each month, and you can download DRCs, or digital review copies, which are free e-book versions of frontlist titles that publishers make available for booksellers on Edelweiss (or NetGalley, but Edelweiss is the primary book ordering ecosystem for independent bookstores, so I recommend using them over NetGalley once you become a bookseller). Publishers will also send out ARCs or arcs, while I’m defining book-related acronyms, also known as Advanced Reading Copies or sometimes called galleys, to bookstores and specific booksellers. Picture book advanced copies are also called ARCs, but they used to be called F&Gs, which stood for folded & gathered, which was essentially the different sections of picture book pages that hadn’t been bound into a completed book yet. That’s more of an old school book person term; not many still use it in a bookselling context, but sometimes it’s fun to learn things like that. The publishers make ALCs, DRCs, and ARCs available to booksellers because they want you to read upcoming titles, they want you to submit reviews for them to the Indie Next List put together by the ABA, they want you to choose them for staff picks, for upcoming book clubs, for events, for preorder campaigns, and ultimately, they want you to sell the heck out of them and then report your sales so that the books can become bestsellers. The more you as a bookseller interact with a publisher by telling them you love their books, you’ve chosen their books for store opportunities, etc., the more likely the publisher is to send you advanced copies of your favorite author’s not-yet-published titles, and that is one of the very best perks of independent bookselling.