Re: POD
Where to begin, where to begin?
Okay, let's start here. POD is both a printing technology and a business model.
POD as a printing technology is as opposed to offset. The book exists as a digital file that's fed through an IBM DocuTech, and a perfect-bound book comes out the far side.
POD as a business model says that the file is only sent through that DocuTech after an order is received from a customer.
Self-publishing, true self-publishing, goes like this: the author puts up all the money, does all the work, and reaps all the profits. There is no question about "royalties." The author has all the rights. The printer is in the equation, but drops out entirely when the carton of books is delivered. After that the author has to do all the marketing and distribution.
In self-publishing the author can choose either digital (POD) technology, or offset. Both of those have setup costs; POD's setup costs are lower. The print runs can be lower with POD -- with offset the author can wind up with a garage full of cartons of books. With POD he can order up fifty more every time he sells fifty.
However -- the thousandth POD book costs just as much to manufacture as the first one. With offset the unit price goes down as the printrun goes up. After you figure in the setup costs you figure the printrun. At some point the cost-per-unit will become cheaper with offset. That point is somewhere in the low three figures. The problem comes in selling the books. If you already know by name everyone who's likely to buy your book (a family history, a church cookbook), or you have well developed niche but no hope of larger distribution (a town history), or if you have a specialized face-to-face market, like a poet who sells chapbooks of her poetry after a reading, or an inspirational speaker who sells copies of his book from the back of the hall after his talk, then self-publishing might be your best choice.
With a vanity press, the author pays the cost of printing, but the printer keeps the rights to the book. They pay royalties on sales. Some vanity presses use POD technology, and a POD business model. No book is printed until it's ordered. The problem here is still creating the demand. Another problem is that the cost of the service is many times what it would cost the author to do it himself with the self-publishing model. A third problem is the difficulty of putting vanity books into bookstores. You will have an easier time with a self-published book than you will with a vanity published book.
Some POD vanity presses include Xlibris, iUniverse, and 1stBooks. They ask for money up front.
Now we come to PublishAmerica. They're a vanity POD, but they've come up with an interesting twist.
They don't ask for a large sum of cash up front, instead they pay a token one dollar (which exchange of value makes the contract harder to break). The author is expected to buy his own copyright ($30, putting him $29 in the hole on day one), and provide a list of names of people likely to buy the book. PA sends that list an announcement; this is the sum total of their publicity effort.
The clever thing that PA did is this: they noticed that authors tend to sell, on average, 75 copies of their titles. When you take the total sales of 1stBooks, divide by their number of titles, you come up with around 75 copies per title. When you take the number of books sold by iUniverse, and divide by their total number of titles, you get around 75 copies per title. When you take Lightning Source International (the guys who own those DocuTech machines that all of these people, including PublishAmerica use), they claim around 90 copies per title. [Footnote here: LSI also produces digitial copies for major publishers including Random House, Simon & Schuster, and others. Those major publishers use PoD technology to create galley proofs, advance reading copies, and other low-print-run items. But this fact allows PA to claim that they use the same printer as major presses, and that most major presses use PoD technology.]
So. If you do nothing at all, you can rely on your authors to come up with 75 sales per title. This is because authors love their books, and mom and dad and Uncle Stu can be counted on to buy a copy or two or three regardless of the price.
So, PA puts its cover prices $5 above similiar books printed with identical technology, and relies on the immutable behavior of authors to produce 75 sales at the overpriced rate. That works out to a vanity press on the installment plan.
The PA business model relies on signing up mass numbers of authors. They cheap out on production -- the books aren't edited -- and pour the text through the DocuTech machines. The literary quality of the books doesn't concern them. They know that on average 75 copies of each will sell, and that's enough.
Other things you should know about PA: the contract is non-standard, and author unfriendly. Their royalites are paid on net, rather than cover price. The royalties are only 8%, low by the standards of traditional publishing, and low compared to other vanity PoDs. They, like the other vanity PoDs, don't accept returns from bookstores, which torpedoes bookstore placement, and offer a low discount to bookstores, which provides little incentive for bookstores to stock them.
Authors are put under heavy pressure to buy large quantities of their own books.
That should be a good starting point for this discussion.
[Why you should believe me, part two: I also write horror, and short stories, and young adult fiction.]
