The Book Return Trend

Dear Reader,

You wake up and check your KDP sales dashboard. You see a number. You’ve made a sale or sales. You’re happy and excited, overjoyed, even, because someone has just bought your art. Someone has paid for something that you’ve put your blood, sweat, tears, and time into. You go about your day. Maybe you write. Maybe you edit. Maybe you go for a walk. Maybe you go to work. Later, you check your dashboard again, and something’s off. The number was higher this morning, and typically, sales go up… not down. What’s happened? You check the report details and see that someone has returned a book – or maybe multiple books, like an entire series that you spent hours upon hours crafting and a lot of money just to publish it.

This happens every so often, and you hate it because you know that, most likely, that person did one of two things:

1. Read the book (either liked it or didn’t) and returned it instead of reading it and rating/reviewing it appropriately.

2. They downloaded it, scraped it, and uploaded it to a pirate site. Then, they returned it.

It hurts, but you move on. Then, it happens again. And again. It’s not just one book that they’re buying and returning. They’re buying an entire four-book or even eight-book series at once and then, within hours, returning them all. That hurts more.

Then, it’s happening at a faster rate. You’re seeing sales and returns of the same books on the same day more and more frequently; to the point where you can’t even trust that whatever you sold that day will be what you end up with, and you’re happy when you don’t “lose a sale” on any given day.

Later, you open your ACX dashboard to check your audiobook sales there, and you’re not surprised to see that people are returning your audiobooks more than usual, too. When you used to get a few returns a month, sometimes, you’re seeing a few or more in a week, and they’re your most popular and well-reviewed audiobooks.

What you’re not seeing is an influx of negative reviews; people who bought it, hated it, and returned it because they hated it so much that they had to then review the book poorly. So, what conclusion is left to draw, other than people are consuming your art for free and that they just don’t care? (That they clicked accidentally? Eight times in a row?)

Maybe that’s what hurts the most. As I’m typing this now, I know that the people who read it aren’t the people who are doing this, and if someone who did do this to me or to other authors does happen to read it, it’s likely that this one blog post won’t change their behavior.

Here’s what I try to equate it to, because I used to work in restaurants and this is the easiest example I can come up with. Someone goes to a restaurant, and they eat everything on their plate. When the waiter approaches, they tell them that they didn’t like the meal and want it taken off the bill. This is different than someone taking one bite and not liking it or the meal being cooked wrong. They consumed the entire meal and want their money back. When someone buys a book (hopefully, after reading the description or listening to the sample), they take a leap of faith that they’re going to like the book. There’s a chance that they might not, sure, but when I go to an art museum, pay for my ticket, and don’t like the art I see there, I don’t ask for my money back after consuming the art, just like people shouldn’t ask for their money back after consuming the entire meal at that restaurant.

I know that people have made the argument that piracy allows greater access to books, but here’s the thing: it really doesn’t. It allows someone greater access to that particular book, the new release from their favorite author, that they want to read now and for free. There’s no shortage of things to read these days. There are plenty of free books to read. When I got my first Kindle, I grabbed a bunch of the old classics that are now copyright-free because the duration of the copyright has expired. I used my library card and read books that maybe weren’t that new release, but I was still accessing books and reading them. There are other options for book access. I read so much free fanfic back in the day that I didn’t sleep for days at times. There are plenty of books that can be accessed for free. They just might not be the one(s) someone wants right at that moment.

The newest Hunger Games book came out recently, and in less than a day, I saw someone on social spreading a free e-pub – a “fan” of the series saying that when she can afford it, she’ll buy the special edition hardcover, but she can’t possibly be expected to wait until then, so she’s grabbing the free copy now. We live in a dangerous time in so many ways that I can’t even begin to put them all in this blog, but we live in a culture of consumerism, of binge-watching a TV show in a day that we used to have to wait to watch weekly over months. We live in a time when we can scroll through pictures and video-based content that took someone days, weeks, or months to produce but only a few seconds or minutes for us to watch, so we devalue it in our minds.

Think about how much content we consume for free on a daily basis. How many of us actually stop to think about the work that went into creating it? A YouTuber posts a fifteen-minute video that took them hours to record and edit, and that’s not including the other behind-the-scenes work. A streaming site posts ten new shows in a weekend, and we don’t always stop to think about how many people and how much work went into making one season of a show. We watch all the episodes in hours and complain that it’ll be another year or two until we get the next season. I’m not here to defend streaming sites, to be clear, but it’s still someone’s time and effort spent, and it’s an example of how much content we’re consuming and how we’re devaluing it as we go.

What’s worse is that some folks seem to believe that books should just be free altogether because they want to read them… now. I used to work at a bookstore before social media dominated so much of what we did – three bookstores, actually – and I can’t recall a single time I was working the register or the info desk and someone returned a book that they’d bought after reading it. Now, yes, people wouldn’t likely be honest about that, but most of the returns I witnessed, and there were very few of them – as in, I can count them on one hand for the over two years I worked in bookstores – were people who had gotten them as gifts and didn’t want to read them, or people who found something wrong in the book itself so they were exchanging it (i.e., a page was torn in the book).

The perception then was that if you bought the book, you read the book, and it was your book that you wouldn’t return because you had consumed the art. Now, people are on TikTok encouraging people to buy and return books as some trend. That’s not only unbelievably inconsiderate, but it hurts. It actually hurts those of us who write those books. (And I don’t just mean financially, even though that’s also true, and I’ll get into that in a minute). I mean that it hurts our hearts; our souls. It hurts because we have to be brave in the first place just to publish our books, only to see people actively rooting against us by suggesting that, “You can just return the book after you read it because who the fuck cares about the person who wrote the thing?” It hurts because we love our characters; because we see the sale come in and allow ourselves one moment of excitement in a world that, quite frankly, sucks right now, before that excitement is taken away.

There’s a reason the description is there and that authors nowadays market with tropes and triggers. I even go so far as to have book summaries on my site because it would give someone who’s thinking of buying the book a chance to make sure it’s the right book for them before doing so. There’s a reason there’s a five-minute sample on audiobooks. The rest is that leap of faith that I mentioned. If you don’t like the book, that’s fine. There’s nothing stopping you from rating and reviewing that way and letting others know why you didn’t like it. But returning the book hurts the author.

Here’s why: I have to write. It’s just part of who I am. For me, writing is like breathing, and I love it. I always have. I will always love writing, but I don’t always have to publish.

Right now, in the current landscape, things are really bad for writers. We have people “writing” books with AI and flooding the market. We have an Amazon boycott that’s impacting our income. We have software prices for the things we have to use to publish going up year after year. We have to actively avoid AI because it keeps popping up everywhere, and we have to keep checking our settings just to make sure we’re not giving them our work to train on every time there’s a freaking update. We don’t even feel safe using the products we’ve used for years for this very reason – because everything has a damn AI now. I feel like I’m about to start handwriting all my novels and then typing them out copy by copy on a typewriter just to try to get away from all that crap.

Then, we have a terrible economy (at least, in the States). We have an authoritarian government here that’s trying to ban our books state by state and maybe even federally. We’ve got people pirating our content left and right, and most recently, a giant corporation that could have afforded to pay for intellectual rights but decided to steal our work instead. And in the sapphic fiction genre, we have people specifically telling us that our books are less than because they’re sapphic, that our stories don’t deserve to be told because they’re about women sometimes falling in love with each other. Add to all of that people returning our books at a higher rate, and you’ve got a recipe for authors to throw in the towel. That’s just the book-related stuff, by the way. I’m not getting into the life stuff.

I have to write, but I don’t have to publish. That’s not a threat or anything. It’s just a fact. There are many authors right now that I can guarantee are asking themselves, “Is it even worth it?” An indie author will likely have to pay for an editor, a cover designer, a formatter, all the software, and the list goes on. Then, they have to take the time and money to market and hope that people buy it. They might be looking at the current landscape and asking themselves if they should even publish. That makes me sad. It makes me angry. It should make all of us angry.

Art is meant to be consumed, but we’re not living during the Renaissance, where art patrons paid for an artist’s room and board just for them to create art for them. We live in a day and age where there’s so much art, and people are consuming it so quickly, that some people think it’s not worth paying for, so they consume and return, or they pirate and return. We live in an age where it’s a trend, and it’s encouraged because, “I want it now, and I don’t care who suffers.”

In summary, if you want the art, take a listen to the sample, read the description, and take the leap of faith. If you don’t like it, rate and review accordingly. If you love it, rate and review accordingly. Don’t pirate books. Don’t return books that you read just because you can get your money back. Don’t return an audiobook that you listened to and enjoyed just because you want a credit back in your account. You may be hurting authors now, but eventually, you’ll be hurting yourselves because with this and everything else going on, writers might still write, but they might not be able to afford to publish.