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Booksellers that overstocked the "wrong" books have ways to return stock to the publisher. Publishers will try to recoup losses from overstock in various ways, including withholding future royalties or dropping future projects from authors.

(The way of overstock returns I was most fascinated by as the type of kid who loved deep dives into weirder parts of the libraries is that some libraries have an "illegal" section of books that they literally dumpster dive local bookstores for. These books had their original covers removed, which is the simple, minimal way how the bookstore "marks" them as unsold/unsellable/"destroyed" before tossing them in a dumpster, because by that point even the publisher doesn't want the overstock physically back collecting dust in a warehouse, but also still needs a good relationship with bookstores. Many publishers still to this day have some form of wording in print books like "if this copy was found without its original cover it is to be destroyed and is illegal to be resold". The bookstore would get some form of partial refund on all the "destroyed" overstock.)