So, what exactly does YouTube—or at least the technology it employs—mean for book publishing? Well, duh, book trailers for one. (But that’s not all. More later.) In an interview with Publishers Weekly blogger Barbara Vey, Sheila Clover English, CEO of book trailer producer Circle of Seven Production, said she “expect[s] to see book video become a main element in most authors’ marketing campaigns.” Whether trailers become the “main” element remains to be seen, but there’s little doubt that online marketing and publicity efforts—including YouTube and other social media—will become standard in book launches.

This year Simon & Schuster partnered with the New York Film Academy to create the “Reel Reads Book Sizzle Contest,” in which 400 students were invited to create a three minute trailer for one of S&S’s titles. The contest itself hasn’t much to do with YouTube, but another S&S project does: BookVideosTV. BookVideosTV is a channel on YouTube that exhibits book marketing and publicity possibilities other than book trailers. It features author profiles and even some behind-the-scene looks at the book in the developmental stage. It’s like VH1’s “Behind the Music,” but twice as sordid! (No, not really. Not at all.)

So, bottom line, YouTube can be way more than just trailers for books. Even Oprah and Harpo Studios announced this month the launch of the “Oprah on YouTube” channel. Neither the press release nor Oprah’s welcome video mentioned Oprah’s Book Club specifically, but who knows? Perhaps the juggernaut that is Oprah’s Book Club will eventually find a second home on YouTube.

The publisher hasn’t said whether it will appeal the ruling, but the book seems to still be on track. You can already order it on Amazon! (Current user tags: “neocon garbage” (4), “glorified excrement” (5), and the succinct “Evil” (3).) Plame’s looking fetching on the cover, but the lack of classic spy imagery is disappointing.

Related books:

• Plame’s less hot husband Joseph Wilson wrote a door stopping account of the leak (The Politics of Truth, Carroll & Graf, $16.95) that was well-reviewed, but failed to reach sales of hotcake proportions,

Some numbers:
• 40 percent of manufactured books never sell.
• The typical waiting period before books start the long and expensive trek back to the warehouse is a mere four months.
• The industry return rate is 36.3 percent for hardcover and 25 percent for paperback.
• Superstores like Barnes & Noble sell around 70–80 percent of what they order, discounters like Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club only 60 percent.
• 37 percent of all books sent to stores in 2002 were returned.
• HarperCollins lost $250 million in 2002 on returns alone.
• Between 65 and 95 percent of returned books are destroyed once they come back from a bookseller (that’s a lot of time, energy, and money to be turned back into pulp).

The process was developed to help the little guy. In 1924, Max Schuster and Dick Simon were two enterprising young men scrambling to get the world’s first crossword puzzle compilation off the ground. They pitched the idea of a completely refundable product to the bookstores in hopes that it would make them more willing to buy. It worked, but in retrospect the practice seems almost as gimmicky as the little pencil that came attached to The Crossword-Puzzle Book. Bookstores decide how much to order; if they order too much, they can send it back.

So why continue such an antiquated and outmoded system? It’s a good question. The most important benefit is that returns allow bookstores to take risks, just like they did back in the crossword craze of the 1920s. A book buyer with a bit of intuition can have a spunky little unknown rubbing spines with Dean Koontz and Anne Rice in no time. Without the guarantee of 100 percent returnable merchandise, bookstores would be tempted to order only bestsellers or books with huge preestablished appeal.

So returns are a vital part of getting the book into stores. But once your book is on the shelf, returns become the enemy. As it exists currently, the returns process is often an exercise in inefficiency and waste. Perhaps reform is the key: Several years ago the advisory firm KPMG produced a report called “Tackling Returns,” which detailed steps to a more organized and less wasteful returns process in the U.K. That report sparked the Book Industry Returns Initiative, a movement that now lists hundreds of companies as supporters of its cause. Key to the proposed new methods are better organization and improved stock management. In the U.S., returns have been getting worse in the last decade, but the climate for small publishers has been improving. It’s also worth noting that of all bookstore outlets, independent stores have the highest sell-through rates (around 80 percent), suggesting that careful and insightful buying can minimize returns.

On the publisher’s side, preventing returns means getting back to basics: producing a quality product in numbers you can sell through, then timing publicity to coincide with distribution so you don’t have huge numbers of unpromoted books sitting on the shelf. When you do have to deal with returns, just remember that the ability to return your fresh-printed babies may be what nudges a buyer into giving them a place on the shelf and a chance at a reader’s attention. There’s something to be said for the process—but if you could give those ol’ crossword-puzzle hustlers a piece of your mind, even they would probably understand.