Choose non-returnable and you keep your costs predictable, but you make yourself harder to stock. Most bookstores, chains and independents alike, are reluctant to shelve a book they can’t send back. Taking a chance on an unknown author is easier to justify when the risk belongs to someone else.

Choose returnable and you become easy to order, and you take on that risk yourself. If a store returns unsold copies, you can have them shipped back to you at the wholesale cost plus a few dollars a book in handling, or you can have them pulped and pay only the wholesale cost. Either way, you have already paid to print books that came back. And there is a sting in the tail. In any month where returns run ahead of sales, the platform can simply invoice you the difference. It is entirely possible to have a good month on paper and owe money at the end of it.

The story people tell about independent publishing is usually a story about volume, and the volume is real. More than three and a half million self-published titles appeared last year, and the number climbs every year. In the United States, books brought out through indie channels now outnumber those from the traditional houses by a wide margin — not a rounding error, an order of magnitude.

Volume, though, is the least interesting thing about it. The interesting question is who is choosing this road, and why.

For decades "self-published" carried a quiet asterisk. It described a writer who couldn't get in the front door and slipped around the back, and the reputation was, frankly, earned — plenty of what got printed should have stayed in the drawer. What has shifted in the 2020s isn't mainly that the door swung open. It's that more writers who could get through the front door are deciding not to knock.