Non-Selling Title Charges

Non-Selling Titles Charge for Publishers

Every night the Central Books database runs a simple set of rules that determines the updated sales category of a book (see Details below). Currently the category for books that have not moved in the last 90 days is Q. These Q titles will not have moved for 90 days and maybe longer. It is very expensive for a distributor to hold and make available titles that do not sell or move for 90 days. We call these titles Non-Selling Titles. When we looked at all our live in-stock titles in early 2025, we found that over half were Non-Selling Titles. Having 17,000 such titles is a problem for our systems, our picking areas and our medium term storage areas.

In 2025 we are introducing a quarterly charge for holding stock of titles that do not move for 90 days.

Once a quarter (every 3 months) Central Books will look at your title list. For each title we carry in stock that has a no movements sales category for the last 90 days we will charge £5.00 a quarter. Central Books can provide a list of such books. On instruction Central Books can pulp or despatch the stock of such titles.

We will begin making this charge in July 2025.

We believe that our publisher clients make very little or anything from these non sellers. If our client publishers use this incentive to clear out stock of non sellers there will be little negative impact on sales and it will reduce exposure to excess storage charges. 

Details

Every night the Central Books database runs a simple set of rules that determines the updated sales category of each book from category A (fast seller) to Category Q (no normal sales, gratis despatches or consignment supply for 90 days) to Category Z (no longer active titles). If a book is moving between 51 and 100 in the last 90 days it gets a sales category J. We have plans to show these categories in your monthly sales reports. Currently the category for books that have not moved in the last 90 days is Q. These Q titles will not have moved for 90 days and maybe longer.  It is very expensive for a distributor to hold and make available titles that do not sell or move for 90 days.

We are having to use our picking space to make all of these very slow selling titles available. We are using a significant portion of our palletised storage to hold stock of titles that never sell or sell very slowly. If these books have not sold in the last 3 months, we have had zero distribution income to cover the cost of managing the stock in our picking area and our bulk storage. This is a charge for handling very slow selling titles; it is separate to our excess stock storage charges. This is not a charge for listing a book on our database. A title will incur a charge if we have stock at the time of charging and the category denotes no sales movement in the last 3 months. We will ignore new titles for a month after the publication date.

As stated above, the charge per zero movement titles will be £5.00 a quarter. This charge will be invoiced and deducted from the Publisher’s sales revenue in the same way that other service charges levied by Central Books are deducted. This charge may change on an annual basis. The increase in the rate for zero movement titles will go up by no more than +2% above inflation (RPI).

The sales category of a book is dynamic and is updated every working day. If a book sold 1 copy on 15th March 2025 it will not be classed as a Non-Selling title for the next 90 days. If there are no more trade sales, gratis despatches or consignment despatches until 13th June 2025 it will become a Non-Selling title on that date 90 days later. Alternatively, we could provide a client publisher a list of Non-Selling titles on 1st May 2025, but if many of these titles just start selling 1 copy a quarter they might not incur any charges for the relevant quarterly months July, October, January and April.

Exactly what counts as a movement that affects the sales category:

1. An ordinary trade sale or Central Books selling to an individual.
2. A gratis despatch to an address the publisher or client asks Central Books to despatch to.
3. A consignment supply if Central Books manage consignment sales for your publications (usually Amazon but it can be other accounts). Note the activity that affects the sales category is the consignment supply not the consignment sales.

(Please note that pulping does NOT affect the sales category)

We will make the charge near the end of each quarter, of the quarterly months July, October, January and April.

The charges for pulping and despatching are available for client publishers on the Distributors’ knowledge base at https://www.centralbooks.com/knowledge-base.html.

Click the links for details and charges for pulping, gratis despatching or storage or knowledge base at https://www.centralbooks.com/knowledge-base.html.  

Common Questions and Answers

Question 1

If a publisher removes all their Non Selling Titles from stock will that be the end of Non Selling Title Charges.

Answer 1

Removing all the Non Selling Titles will have a big impact on reducing  Non Selling Title Charges. but a title that sells 1 copy every three months currently might become a Non Selling Title in future.

Question 2

I am paying for non sellers do I have to pay storage. I am a publisher who has 4000 units in stock and has sold 3000 units in the last 36 months so I have 1000 excess stockl. If I am paying for non selling titles do I aslso pay for excess stock.

Answer 2

Yes these are two seperate charges. There is a cost of holding a title and making it available that we can not cover if no one orders the title in a quarter. There is also a charge for holding more that what we sell on a publishers behalf in a 36 months perdiod.  See https://www.centralbooks.com/knowledge-base/book-publishers-information/storage.html .   A publisher might sell 3000 units in 36 months but have only 2000 units in stock. There would be no excess stock so no excess storage charge. The same publisher migh have 10 books that never sell so they would pay for Non Sellers.  A different publisher may encurr both non selling and excess stock charges, whilst another publisher might  just encurr excesss stock charges as none of their titles are non sellers they just have a lot of stock.

Question 3

How can a publisher know which of their titles are non sellers. 

Answer 3

Open monthly report “booksales” in the csv format  Every publisher gets sent a number of reports each month. These include a book sales report that can be opened as a spreadsheet that reports on each titles activity in the month the report have names like  CENTRRbooksales31032025.csv.  If a publisher opens this report in Excel and follows these instruction they will be able to isolate the relevant Non Sellers  that are in stock. 

1. Open your NNNNN31032025booksales.csv file in excel
2. Use the Freeze function in View to be able to keep the first few columns on the left visible
3. Apply a filter to the sheet
4. In the column Report (column N) Filter by STK titles only in the Column  Product Category (column AU)  Filter by Q. 
5. Now you should only be seeing your non seller titles.