POD good?

III said:

I've had a very good experience using iUniverse (another POD publisher). For me, writing has become a serious hobby, but I have no aspirations of ever quitting my job to become a full-time writer (I've got four kids and a good-paying job that I enjoy).

I found POD publishing was 1) relatively inexpensive - about $400 for a novel (cheaper than buying another guitar anyway), 2) relatively easy, and 3) very gratifying. The books are automatically available world-wide on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. And since it's POD, you don't have to invest thousands of dollars for piles of books that might never sell.

The downsides (IMO) are 1) your books aren't carried in bookstores, although they can be ordered, 2) you are responsible for all your own marketing, 3) you either have to edit the book yourself or pay them to edit it, and 4) POD books are more expensive for the consumers than books from big publishing houses.

My first book was released in April, so I haven't seen the sales figures yet, but I'm pretty sure it's sold around 100 copies. I emailed everyone I knew and told them to email everyone they knew, so I'm just seeing if the book grows legs while I work on the next one. I figure if, by some miracle I do end up selling a few thousand copies I'll try querying agents again, but for now I'm just enjoying writing and talking to people who have enjoyed my books.

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III said:

I did indeed - in fact there's a link to it in my signature line below.



That was something I kind of wrestled with. Me am pretty good with English and grammaticality and I did no fewer than 20 reads through the book and had two friends who are teachers beta read and proof it, along with three other beta readers. That, along with Microsoft Word's spell checker and grammatical checker gave me a pretty high confidence level, so I decided against spending extra money for editing. Of course I wasn't sure if I'd even sell ten copies, so I wanted to keep my investment as small as possible. I'm not sure if I'll pay for editing on my next book unless I start hearing bad feedback about the first two.

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ChunkyC said:

Hey III, good onya for what you've done with your stuff.

As for Lulu, I think they're great. We used them for the Stories of Strength anthology for disaster relief we put out after Katrina hit. We had the book available for purchase two months after Jenna conceived the project, and that was our timeline. Lulu had it available for sale almost immediately after we had the book read to go.

To date we've sold 1159 copies, which puts it at #55 on their top 100 sellers list. Mind you, we had dozens of people all over the world actively pimping this book, and more than half the total sales were made in the first month or so. We also had a few very well known authors contribute stories, including Orson Scott Card (Ender's Game), romance novelist Robin Lee Hatcher, and Wil Wheaton of Star Trek fame.

With all that going for it, we still haven't sold very many copies when compared to what your average book from a traditional publisher will sell. But Lulu was the one place we could go to get a book out in a timely fashion. If, and only if, a traditional publisher had wanted to take on the book, we would have been looking at a much longer lead time, possibly over a year.

So, if print on demand is the right thing for your project, you'd be hard pressed to find anyone better than Lulu.

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