Print on Demand

Print on demand is sometimes used interchangably with digital printing technology, although they are really somewhat different. Digital printing technology uses an industrial-sized laser printer to print whole books at a time. This is cheaper to use for small orders, but if you want to print 10,000 books, it's cheaper to do this with old-fashioned offset presses.

Digital printing technology, however, is often used with the print on demand business model. The normal publishing business model is to print up a couple thousand books, keep the books in a central warehouse, and sell the books to bookstores, who attempt to sell them to the public and return them for full credit to the warehouse if they don't sell. This is much the same way that Home Depot sells paintbrushes, except that the brush factory won't give them nearly so generous a return policy. With print on demand, however, the publisher only prints a book when someone, either a customer or a store, orders a copy. Normally these books are not returnable. It's kind of like the way Home Depot sells buckets of paint - you can walk in holding a colored object and they'll make the paint to order, but you can't bring it back for a refund.

Your typical print on demand shop isn't like a commercial publisher. They're more like a printing shop with a few sales tools. POD outfits don't buy books and market them like a commercial publisher. Instead, they are in the business of selling printing services to people who want to print and sell a book on their own. For someone who simply wants to print a short run of a particular book, this can be a good deal - the setup fees are less than with offset printing, and you can get another batch quickly if you need one.

While POD is good for the printer, it's not as easy on the customer. Since POD publishers usually print anything that they are paid to print (well, they may have rules against things like hate speech and so forth), there isn't any editorial staff to decide if a book is something readers will enjoy. A POD outfit will accept all sorts of manuscripts that a commercial publisher would turn down, and it often won't give them the same level of editing that a commercial publisher would. So the average quality of writing is lower. The books are also often impossible to return. This tends to discourage the general public from buying books from a POD publisher. Consequently, POD is not a good way to sell most fiction or general interest non-fiction.

POD publishing does have many valid uses, however. They are good for printing family stories that are of little interest to people outside the author's immediate family. If I made money on the lecture circuit, I could use a POD company to print up a stack of books to sell at my lectures. My father, a college professor, uses iUniverse to print course materials for his classes. It's also great for printing small runs of specialized nonfiction for small groups, like if the Miami Seashell Club wants to make a guide to the seashells of South Florida for its own members. But POD is not something you normally want to use to print books with mass appeal.

If a POD actively contacts you, you probably want to run screaming. Go to somewhere like Lulu and you can get set up and add a book to the system for free - but companies like Authorhouse or Publish And Be Damned will try to get between hundreds and thousands of pounds from you in assorted services, mandatory purchases, editing fees, costs to copy the file to the server and a load of other complete nonsense.

Two key things to consider, whether you use Lulu or another:

1) The price will be CONSIDERABLY higher than a standard trade paperback, and the quality can be very variable (paper stock, the printing used, how long it takes for the cover to curl in and get covered with fingerprints etc. etc.) These things can be a real turn-off.

2) Bookstores won't carry it. The lack of a return policy will prevent them, except possibly a few local copies or other token gestures that you really shouldn't count on.

3) Almost nobody will find your book - it'll get lost either on Amazon or on your POD company's website. Even with perfect positioning, it'll be in a cloud of other titles competing for attention, and again, with higher prices. You'll have to work your *** off to promote it to people if you want to sell more than a handful of copies to friends and family.

Just one clarification:

Matt's distinction between "print on demand" and "digital printing technology" makes some sense; more sense, in fact, than the actual usage of terms in the publishing industry. (Nobody ever said publishing was rational—at least not with a straight face.) As the terms have come to be used, POD refers to the technology, not the business model (particularly as "digital printing technology" also covers "direct-to-plate" presses). More particularly, one of the markers—it's not infallible, but it's pretty reliable—for hidden vanity-press scams is self-reference by the publisher as a "POD publisher." It's one thing for a publisher to say that it uses POD, and quite another for a publisher to claim to be POD. And most of the time, at least in my experience, when a publisher that calls itself a "POD publisher" is not a vanity-press scam, it is so inexperienced in the industry that it's not a good choice—particularly in the face of Lulu, CafePress, and a couple of other reputable alternatives.

There was an interesting article on the evolution of self-publishing in writer's digest recently. It seems a number of POD shops are arranging to accept returns from book stores. This could revolutionize the way PODs are viewed by them in the future. This is the link to the article. I hope it helps you.


http://www.writersdigest.com/articles/klems_selfpub.asp

I personally consider printing your fiction work at a POD or any self publishing project cheating. If you're too lazy to see your work fit enough for agents and publishers, then it is unworthy print. Period.

I see a very rare few exceptions. If you are a well known author and are tired of dealing with publishers would be one example. A nonfiction book that you plan on selling on your own website might actually be a good reason to publish POD but only if it is edited professionally before sending to the publishers.

A few more exceptions are out there, of course, but in general, to me, it is cheating and I wouldn't dare touch it with a ten foot pole with any of my books.

There are legitimate and respectable small presses that use POD technology as well, especially in certain genres. Google is your friend.

Did you query this publisher, or did they contact you out of the blue? I'd consider a cold contact a very, very bad sign, personally.

Watch out for books, articles, and online posts by POD boosters who explain at length that this is the Hot New Thing in publishing, and that it's overturning the previous regime, or paradigm, or industry, or whatever.

It isn't. POD is changing publishing, a bit; but things are always changing publishing, and POD is only one of the things (and one of the smaller things at that) which are currently doing it.

ButtonTheCat said:

I personally consider printing your fiction work at a POD or any self publishing project cheating. If you're too lazy to see your work fit enough for agents and publishers, then it is unworthy print. Period.

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And who are you cheating? Yourself? Self publishing might be unwise, it might make you no money at all, but it is hardly cheating. There are plenty of publishable books that are never published, with authors that are not lazy at all, but after hundred of rejections, they've given up on the system.

One interesting thing has just happened with regard to POD -- and for once it's a stellar idea! Several major publishers, such as Tor and Berkley, have decided to look into using POD to make old out of print books available. This would save the publisher immense money and let a whole new generation of people have access to old classics without scouring the used book stores. Apparently, the marketing people looked at the quality of the product and have decided that it's evolved to the point of being worth putting their name on.


It'll be interesting to see how this affects the whole business.

In the world of comic books it's not cheating. It's becoming the norm. Not POD, per se, but self-publishing. The Big Three publishers (Marvel, DC, Dark Horse) have their heads up their butts so far they don't want anything but the same old same-old, so it's up to small presses and individuals to publish themselves, or there's a lot of good work that would never get seen at all.

And "Small Presses"? That's just another name for a self-publisher with more than one title out, in many cases.

But we're talking a whole different scale, here. My graphic novel did well in that I made money on it, but I also had a grant to defray much of the cost. In terms of total copies sold -- about 2000 -- that's NOTHING in the world of prose-book publishing.

POD is helping the comics industry by making it feasable to self-publish on a smaller scale. I went through a regular printer and had to print 3000 copies just to make it cost effective. If you do the math, you know how many copies I still have stashed around my house, leaking out slowly to Amazon. With POD, one souldn't need the storage space any longer -- you could print out as many as you needed during convention season, and sell them off your table. You wouldn't get rich, and you couldn't sell them through a distributor (the distributor's discount would make this cost-prohibitive), but you'd still be a) getting the work out, and b) having a wonderful time (and covering your expenses) at comic-book conventions, which is worth a LOT.

I think POD is perfect for small projects not likely to sell to the general public. It was the perfect solution for my genealogy book. The book pertained only to relatives from one branch of one ancestral line (500 people maybe) and was very photo intensive. The intention was to only have about 200 copies. Kinkos would have cost 15$ per, at Lulu.com, I got a better book and the only money I paid was for my copy. Instead of shelling out $3000 and then mailing them off and waiting for checks, I paid $8 and actually made money off my three years of research.

Novels are another story.

POD is just a technology.

My publisher is a proper publisher with a website, actual sales (and royalty cheques ) and their own promotional activities, but as far as I can gather, they use Print On Demand - they print and bind books to order, in addition to their e-book sales. However, they are a niche market (WARNING the link in my sig is not worksafe).

Unfortunately, vanity presses use POD as a euphemism for their own nefarious activities.

So, go carefully.

ButtonTheCat said:

I personally consider printing your fiction work at a POD or any self publishing project cheating.

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That’s an interesting use of the word “cheating”. It implies that there is something supremely and cosmically worthy about the act of being published in the traditional way, and that any alternative approach to having your own crisply printed monograph in your hands can only be the first step on the slippery slope to obloquy and madness.

I can see where that kind of thinking originates. Like many things that are worth having, the road is long and hard and strewn with the rocky shards of broken dreams, so surmounting the obstacles is thought to be character forming, like hair shirts and self-flagellation. Actually making it after a long struggle must feel like a kind of nirvana, which I eagerly anticipate. (Although, I’m reliably informed that it’s often a bit of an anti-climax, what with the tedious process of endlessly re-working your stuff after acceptance to make it ready for publication).

But I also suspect that thinking like that makes mendicants of too many writers, unnecessarily. True, if your unequivocal goal is to figure among the 2% of writers that make it to publication in exchange for (received) money, or the 0.5% of writers that earn enough from commercial book publication to make it their sole activity, self- or vanity-publishing is almost always a poor choice.

But for the 98% who don’t make it, do they deserve to have nothing more to show for their efforts than a wall papered with rejection slips and a garage full of yellowing manuscripts? Fuel for the bonfire your children will make of your unwanted crap when you finally turn up your toes?

Not for this little black duck. If agents and publishers are too feeble-minded to recognise my obvious genius within a reasonable timeframe (I’m being generous here, but not silly), the good folks at Lulu or equivalent will be getting some of my hard-earned to turn my ramblings into neatly bound books. Then, as deeply personal Christmas/birthday/St Botolphs Day gifts they will at least adorn the shelves of friends and relatives for a respectable period. And you never know, they might even be read. I feel that if I don’t do that, the only cheated party will be me.

Please notice that the AuthorHouse "returnability" is actually the author buying Returns Insurance at the rate of nearly seven hundred dollars a year. That is, the author agrees to buy back around forty copies of his own book at full price if they fail to sell -- and he doesn't get to keep the books. If more fail to sell, it becomes a slightly better deal ... but that depends on getting more than forty copies into bookstores, which isn't easy for a self-published author.

The one Infinity book that I've ever seen ... sucked. Both in physical quality and in the quality of the words on the page. (Infinity owns their own digital printing machines, rather than going through Lightning Source.)

Huzzah, pianoman!

But I also suspect that thinking like that makes mendicants of too many writers, unnecessarily. True, if your unequivocal goal is to figure among the 2% of writers that make it to publication in exchange for (received) money, or the 0.5% of writers that earn enough from commercial book publication to make it their sole activity, self- or vanity-publishing is almost always a poor choice.

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Wealth has never rated high on my list of goals. Raised amid a fair amount of it, in my experience if there's one thing money loves, it's misery. Happiness is what I strive for and fortunately, I achieved it without fame or fortune. That said, armed with a manuscript which is praised yet still rejected, my muse stands angst-ridden at the self-pub fork in the road -- urged to ignore the turn-off by some twisted (and apparently inbred) impulse to reach only for the shiniest brass ring.

Your post reminded me precisely *why* I started to write in the first place, what I hope to accomplish, and instantly reduced the psychic weight of an internal and external gray morning.

Thank you, friend storyteller. Truly.

kaku said:

It seems a number of POD shops are arranging to accept returns from book stores. This could revolutionize the way PODs are viewed by them in the future.

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If the returnability issue were the only thing keeping POD books out of the stores, that might be true (though see Uncle Jim's note above). But other significant issues that work against POD books are the lack of marketing and the highly variable quality of both the physical books and the writing.

Respectable, legit publishers that make their money selling to readers instead of authors are way too busy dealing with their submission piles to go cold-calling authors. You can safely assume that any publisher, POD or not, who contacts you out of the blue isn't worth your time.

Samuel Dark said:

Is this a bad thing? And what exactly is it? If a Print on Demand publisher contacts u, should u reply? I am just curious and wondered if anyone here can give me some help. Thanks. (ask me if u need and or want more info to answer my question).

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I would never pay someone to publish me, they need to pay me. And call me old fashioned, I like to see my books sitting on the shelves with people curiously picking them up, reading a couple lines of the first page, and then flipping them to read the back.