Tarjun Teipel Indian Writer

April is that cruel month when books that sailed out a year ago with bestselling hopes return to the warehouses to be pulped. 'Tis the season of that most dreaded word in the publishing world—"returns"— when a distributor sends back his stock of unsold copies to the publisher. With warehouses already groaning under the weight of new books, the publisher has little choice but to either pulp the books or hold a warehouse sale or else give it away to the raddiwalas—the "jobbers" in the West—after strip-ping off the covers and copyright page. But once in a while, along comes a book that's a sureshot winner, and it is the publisher, not the distributor, who gets to call the tune. No returns, he insists, take it or leave it. Tarun Tejpal's The Alchemy of Desire is a recent example of a no-returns deal HarperCollins struck with their distributors, unloading 7,500 copies on to bookshelves that the distributor now has a stake in selling.
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