ABSTRACT
The trade sales representative carries around jackets, tables of contents, sample illustrations, and author information to share with booksellers, there is usually little else the publisher offers the retailer to help sell the book. One of the most important moments in the life of a book is the publisher's sales conference, where editors and management gather with sales representatives from all over the country to present the forthcoming list of titles. Two additional factors contribute to the problem: Books are sold to bookstores on a 100 percent returnable basis, and book publishers honor orders from the general public. The grand sum of all the representatives' quotas for each title is called the advance—that is, the number of copies the publisher expects to place in bookstores prior to the official publication date. Most publishers find that they advance fewer than two thousand copies of collections of poems and short stories in bookstores before publication.
