The long-term effect of POD self-publishing service providers

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jamiehall

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After reading this article, I'm wondering what the long-term effects of all this will be.

Is a whole generation of writers going to have many people with careers derailed, delayed or blighted by the too-easy availability of self-publishing options? Is promotional burnout going to cause many promising writers to give up early in their careers or spend so much time trying to promote that they don't live up to their potential as writers?

Will the entire publishing industry label the newest generation of writers with particular stereotypes and anticipated behaviors because of the influence of POD self-publishing? Will there be a "POD generation" with recognizable traits?

Also, what about other long-term trends and effects, both positive and negative? Obviously, POD self-publishing is so common that we may eventually face a world in which most commercially successful writers have a POD self-published book somewhere in their pasts. How will this affect the writing world? In the case of authors who reach celebrity level, will these be extremely rare collector's items?

Please add any other long-term effects you can think of too.
 

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First, I have to make myself get past the fact that, with an admittedly horrible novel, he had the thing bound at Kinko's, sent to a New York agent (who did not wish to offer representation, but only to give advice) and yet he gets invited to New York to have lunch with this agent??? Most agents don't even do this for the clients they offer to represent, let alone for a writer who couldn't sustain an entire novel nor even be bothered with a professional presentation. Boy, that "connection" he had must've been a good one!

All that aside, he makes some valid points. What with the increasing ease of POD publishing, more and more authors will waste time and money publishing and promoting their "crappy" novels instead of dedicating themselves to learning the craft and skill to write a really good, publishable novel worthy of a major (or even small) publisher. To his credit, it sounds like he had the ability to learn from his mistakes. POD publishing, unfortunately, is a quick fix alternative that doesn't offer any opportunity for such learning or improvement. I'm not knocking those who have turned to POD publishing, but it does seem too often that writers are tempted to turn to it in a desperate attempt to sell an unpublishable book, rather than spending their time (more productively, perhaps) writing a new book.
 

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I have to say one thing - POD is NOT always self- publishing. Self publishing is when the author is the publisher.

Many smaller presses are using POD. Print on demand is a technology for printing books in small quantites.

Sorry, I get frustrated seeing that people lump POD with self- publishing.
So - which are you asking about the long term effects of then - POD or self publishing?
 

blackbird

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GhostAuthor said:
I have to say one thing - POD is NOT always self- publishing. Self publishing is when the author is the publisher.

Many smaller presses are using POD. Print on demand is a technology for printing books in small quantites.

Sorry, I get frustrated seeing that people lump POD with self- publishing.
So - which are you asking about the long term effects of then - POD or self publishing?

I think the confusion comes about simply because so many POD publishers today ARE self-publishers, and these are the ones people generally tend to identify with the technology. I did fail to make that distinction in my previous post, for which I apologize.
 

jamiehall

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GhostAuthor said:
Sorry, I get frustrated seeing that people lump POD with self- publishing.
So - which are you asking about the long term effects of then - POD or self publishing?

I'm mainly asking about the long-term effects of POD self-publishing service providers, but I have no objection to discussing the long-term effects of POD technology itself, in both the realms of traditional publishers and conventional self-employed self-publishers. Just make sure you use the distinction yourself so we know exactly what you're attributing expected your predicted long-term effects to.
 

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I imagine that, just like the advent of the printing press, photocopier and internet, it will give people more options and allow more people to have their work reproduced and read in some form.

The number of people who opt to submit to major publishers will always be hundred of time larger than the slots available so that side of the business just isn't going to change much. I don't think having a small press to hobby teir will destroy publishing--or even effect it much.
 

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I have no objection to discussing the long-term effects of POD technology itself

I'm very positive about the effects it might have longer term. At the moment, it's not cost effective for publishers to take on new writers unless they can print huge runs, and discount them. They can't really take a punt on a many new writers by doing a lot of small runs to see how they sell. So they prefer the "sure fire" bestseller, the celebrity book etc mixed in with the ocassional new writer who they can promote like mad.

A new printing method that makes it cost effective to start out with a small print run has to be good news. The problem will still be in the marketing, getting shops to stock them and the buying public to notice them if you don't have the lazy 3 for 2 massive discount method. But anything that can shake that lazy attitude a bit and bring more new writing out has to be good - for readers as well as aspiring writers.

If they can try out a larger number of books and see what flies - brilliant. Like the music industry, I think it'll take a few independents having some success to start changing the way the industry works, but I think it will longer term, and for the better, hopefully.
 

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FergieC said:
I'm very positive about the effects it might have longer term. At the moment, it's not cost effective for publishers to take on new writers unless they can print huge runs, and discount them. They can't really take a punt on a many new writers by doing a lot of small runs to see how they sell. So they prefer the "sure fire" bestseller, the celebrity book etc mixed in with the ocassional new writer who they can promote like mad.

A new printing method that makes it cost effective to start out with a small print run has to be good news. The problem will still be in the marketing, getting shops to stock them and the buying public to notice them if you don't have the lazy 3 for 2 massive discount method. But anything that can shake that lazy attitude a bit and bring more new writing out has to be good - for readers as well as aspiring writers.

If they can try out a larger number of books and see what flies - brilliant. Like the music industry, I think it'll take a few independents having some success to start changing the way the industry works, but I think it will longer term, and for the better, hopefully.

I agree with you fully. I know the mass market books have a very limited shelf life and then what ever doesn't sell - their covers are torn off and sent back - Imagine all that wasted paper and money?
I think in the future we are going to see smaller runs from larger houses and more movement toward POD. There are quite a few small to midsized publishers using POD and seeing some success.

And I think the publishing industry has a lot to learn from the music industry.
 

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But what kind of print runs are you talking about? Offset runs are cost-effective after even a couple of thousand copies, which is a small print run by any regular standard. I don't think you necessarily understand how the publishing industry works, Fergie. Publishers don't run off massive print runs of their books and then discount them; they sell their books to bookstores at a wholesale price, and the bookstore can do with them whatever they want. POD is not the least bit cost effective if you are printing more than a couple of hundred books; and no publisher is going to make money with that kind of business model.
 

jamiehall

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Nomad said:
But what kind of print runs are you talking about? Offset runs are cost-effective after even a couple of thousand copies, which is a small print run by any regular standard. I don't think you necessarily understand how the publishing industry works, Fergie. Publishers don't run off massive print runs of their books and then discount them; they sell their books to bookstores at a wholesale price, and the bookstore can do with them whatever they want. POD is not the least bit cost effective if you are printing more than a couple of hundred books; and no publisher is going to make money with that kind of business model.

I was under the impression (but I may be wrong) that Fergie was talking about some point in the future when POD becomes less expensive (all technologies become less expensive with the passage of enough time) and the price gap between an offset print run and a POD print run would be much less.

It's quite obvious to me that, at the present costs, very few people other than the vanity outfits can make much money by printing all their books POD. Thus, the widespread conception that POD = vanity, which is based more on truth than falsehood, even though it is technically untrue.

However, if digital printing could be done at a cheap enough price, it may encourage small presses to take more risks on authors who were almost good enough to be accepted.

But this isn't really occurring yet, and it's seemingly a long way off. So we're talking about LONG term effects.

However, the things that are happening right now with POD will have long term effects of their own. I'm curious to know what people think those effects might be.
 

veinglory

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People are making money off POD now, or at least I assume the small presses using it right now aren't all going into debt or back by secret millionaire donors.
 

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jamiehall said:
Also, what about other long-term trends and effects, both positive and negative? Obviously, POD self-publishing is so common that we may eventually face a world in which most commercially successful writers have a POD self-published book somewhere in their pasts. How will this affect the writing world? In the case of authors who reach celebrity level, will these be extremely rare collector's items?

Please add any other long-term effects you can think of too.
I hope you're right, given that I did supported self-publishing! I will say that I hate being made to feel like it's a stigma, or that your book was "unpublishable." Read my book and judge it on content, not on how I got it in print. And just to show that I'm not just trying to market my own books, I'll gladly send a pdf version of my book to anyone who's interested.

Sorry, but I just couldn't get an agent to bite, so I did what I had to do. Maybe I'm totally off-base, but logically I would think that POD / digital printing (yes, I know they are two separate things) would be the way to go down the road, albiet when the technology becomes cheaper. It just seems like it would save on warehousing or having to recycle unsold books. It almost seems like everytime there's a big publishing run of a certain book, even from big names, it's almost a crap shoot, ie print off enough copies for everyone who wants one, but not too many that will remain unsold. But of course maybe I just need to take a few less hits off the bong. . .

Personally, I'm not one of those who went with the infamous PA with dreams of stardom. I'm actually very pragmatic about my chances. I went through iUniverse, who by the way I think did a stellar job producing the actual book, but I have no allusions. I know that my chances of writer stardom are remote, though I do think that I may be on to something, given that historical novels about the Roman Legions is a surprisingly untapped market. This is odd to me, given the huge success of the movie Gladiator. One would think that there would be more Gladiator clones out there, but there are not. Anyway, I'm getting off topic. . .

I admit that marketing on a national scale may be insurmountable if you do POD self-publishing. I disagree somewhat with the concept that if you have to do your own marketing you're automatically shooting yourself in the foot when it comes to writing subsequent novels. Granted, my approach may be different, given that I do not make my livelihood by writing (more's the pity!). It's more of a hobby for me.

One thing I do like about iUniverse is that your contracts are nonexclusive. Hence I can still pursue other options, while at the same time I've still got a book in print that people can buy (and oddly enough some people actually are). Heck, I'd be stoked if my first edition (POD) of my books became collectors items! Hey, one can always dream, just remind me not to quit my day job in the meantime (I kind of like being able to make my mortgage payments). :D
 

jamiehall

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veinglory said:
People are making money off POD now, or at least I assume the small presses using it right now aren't all going into debt or back by secret millionaire donors.

Only a few of the small presses that use POD exclusively are making much money at it (companies that use the author mill business model are most likely to benefit from using POD exclusively). Most books of even modest success are more profitable if you start out with offset printing, and only switch to POD after demand drops to a low rate. Or, you do it the other way around: test the water with a POD, and switch to offset printing if there is even a modest demand.

Or, if you do print only with POD for the lifetime of the book, you limit yourself to (almost always nonfiction) books with a true micro-niche and market them only to your selected audience, selling directly rather than going through bookstores.
 

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I believe Samhain prints fully POD, as one example, and found 8 of their titles within two shelves at my small town Borders. I'm not saying these books will do as well as offset with double the cover price but I think there are more than a few profitable small presses currently using a fully POD printing process.
 

jamiehall

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veinglory said:
I believe Samhain prints fully POD, as one example, and found 8 of their titles within two shelves at my small town Borders. I'm not saying these books will do as well as offset with double the cover price but I think there are more than a few profitable small presses currently using a fully POD printing process.

There's a difference between barely profitable and highly profitable. I'm under the impression that (aside from conventional self-publishers) there are only about four legitimate small presses who exclusively use POD. Can anyone cite some hard numbers to confirm or deny this impression?
 

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If a publisher has that many title in one small town after being open less than a year a would bet they are more than 'barely' profitable. I think you may be setting up a straw man. POD presses tend to be smaller because it is often an process of evolution from e, to POD, to offset. So you can say outfits like Ellora's Cave aren't POD... any more. But without POD they might not even exist let alone be as extremely profitable as they are.
 

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I was saying the same thing the article says when POD first became popular. I heard writers say things like, "Well, it's my only chance to get published" and "How dare you dash my hopes?" The problem is that most people can't sit down and write a publishable book the first time out--and most are blind as to how good or bad it is. Sometimes it takes writing many, many unpublishable books before the writer is able to figure out what he needs to do to be publishable. Going a self-publishing route simply to be "published" creates a false sense of success, and they don't stop to take the time to learn the skills they need. Publishing was NEVER meant to be easy or to be owed; it's meant to be earned.
 

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I'll be damn happy when they design a digital printing machine that can put out MM paperback dimensions, so the cost can come down to seven or eight bucks a copy, and be competitive with that market niche. I don't see that happening in the near future. I think POD books are still too expensive for the reader.

POD is carrying a terrible stigma with it--No advance, distribution, questionable returns, and high, to very high prices. Some small presses have taken advantage of the technology and are functioning like major houses and have seen some success, but it is such a tough road.

Tri
 

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triceretops said:
I'll be damn happy when they design a digital printing machine that can put out MM paperback dimensions, so the cost can come down to seven or eight bucks a copy, and be competitive with that market niche. I don't see that happening in the near future....
Lulu can print that size, but the price is the same as for other page sizes.

Mass market paperbacks are (relatively) cheap on account of that "mass" part. That and cheaper paper and (presumably) other printing economies that a regular printing option can attain, as well as efficient distribution.

Lulu's sizes:

Available Sizes

6" x 9" - Novel
8.5" x 11" - U.S. Letter
7.5" x 7.5" - Square
6.625" x 10.25" - Comic Book
9" x 7" - Landscape
6.14" x 9.21" - Royal
7.44" x 9.68" - Crown Quarto
8.27" x 11.69" - A4
4.25" x 6.875" - Pocket size

--Ken
 

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Linda Adams said:
...The problem is that most people can't sit down and write a publishable book...
Maybe so, but "readable" and "[commercially] publishable" are not entirely the same thing. For that matter, "worthwhile" and "publishable" are not entirely the same thing.

A Confederacy of Dunces, one of the greatest comic novels ever written, was repeatedly rejected. The author committed suicide. Eventually, his mother got Walker Percy to read the manuscript, and he had the influence to get it published. Then it won a Pulitzer Prize. Rather late for John Kennedy Toole, alas. It was and is a great book -- but just slightly ahead of its time, and not in the commercial mold of the time.

Not every good book is suited to commercial publishing, and not every commercially published book is good.

My attitude is soured by dealings with an agent who deemed a memoir with which I am very familiar to be "not saleable," notwithstanding rave comments by readers in manuscript (men and women from 20s to 50s) and high praise from influential published authors/scholars. The agent would have had the manuscript rewritten into a commercial form (or what the agent felt was commercially suitable), thus turning it into exactly what the author did not intend to write.

It is now on its way to publication by a small commercial publisher, no thanks to the agent, who reluctantly and ungraciously allowed cancellation of the representation agreement. The author wrote a very fine manuscript, but did not write effective query letters, which probably accounted for previous rejection by an assortment of commercial publishers.

Sure, lots of folks write lousy books and self-publish or subsidy-publish them. I have seen my share, one so bad as to curdle milk and others sufficient to ignite painful laughter. But that is not the whole story.

--Ken
 

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In the case of the memoir, sounds like the wrong agent for that author.

I'm always made uncomfortable by the Confederacy of Dunces example. John Kennedy Toole made a lot of poor life-decisions while he was alive (committing suicide being only one of them). Is there any reason to think that his submission strategy was reasonable?
 

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James D. Macdonald said:
In the case of the memoir, sounds like the wrong agent for that author.
To say the least.

James D. Macdonald said:
I'm always made uncomfortable by the Confederacy of Dunces example. John Kennedy Toole made a lot of poor life-decisions while he was alive (committing suicide being only one of them). Is there any reason to think that his submission strategy was reasonable?
With all due respect, that is a rhetorical trick called "blaming the victim."

That aside, the argument proves my point. The manuscript was fine -- more than fine, brilliant, of Pulitzer Prize quality -- but the "submission strategy" was wrong.

I am hopeful that I have helped save Dandelion Through the Crack from that fate. At least I saved it from the odious PublishAmerica through a timely conversation with the author. The author wrote memoir described as "magnificent" and "exquisite" by a foremost scholar, a man (and a much-published writer himself) well attuned to the significance of Dandelion -- but the author was handicapped by ineffective query letters. Nice letters. Not effective query letters, and certainly not the full-featured and carefully crafted book proposal that was needed.

BTW, I am currently working with another manuscript -- a fine, valuable memoir, but not suited to large commercial publication (too long and too far off the radar screen for current interests; i.e., it is not set in Iraq). It might yet find a suitable small publisher (I might have made a lucky connection), and when it does, it will have a receptive audience, albeit largely niche and largely concentrated in a few regions. If time and energy ever permit, a sharply revised version might find a home in a large commerial publisher. I am loathe to advise the author to make the best the enemy of the good, and perhaps to spend the rest of his life in a futile effort to revise in hopes of catching the eye of Procrustes Publishing, Inc. A smaller scale effort with the current version (with appropriate copy editing, which is in progress) will meet his goals and serve an appreciative audience.

--Ken
 

jamiehall

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James D. Macdonald said:
I'm always made uncomfortable by the Confederacy of Dunces example. John Kennedy Toole made a lot of poor life-decisions while he was alive (committing suicide being only one of them). Is there any reason to think that his submission strategy was reasonable?

If I'm not mistaken, I've read that he only submitted handwritten manuscripts -a sure recipe for getting it thrown out every single time without a glance.
 
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