Hi all. I'm not new here but might as well be since I haven't visited or posted in two+ years. But curiosity brought me back and I thought I'd share my own experiences with POD and standard publishing.
I had three suspense novels published by HarperCollins back in the nineties as paperback originals. All three sold moderately well, with moderate meaning anywhere from a little over 60,000 copies to just over 95,000 copies. But in the process of negotiating for my fourth book, Harper underwent some changes, bought up Avon, and dumped a lot of authors, myself included. A couple of years after that my agent decided to get out of the business. After losing both my publisher and my agent, I was understandably depressed but kept on writing and querying, to little success. And my previously published books all went out of print. I did find a new agent by querying with a humorous forensic mystery I wrote, but he failed to do much for me other than get my rights back for the first three books, so we eventually parted ways.
About five years ago I decided that the humorous forensic mystery (THE VICARIOUS LIVER), a work that I loved, should see the light of day. And since my latest queries for the book hadn't garnered me a new agent, I decided to do a POD thing with it and chronicle my journey in a newsletter. I released the work through Booklocker and over the next two years I sold a little over 500 copies. My net income was a couple of hundred books and that's mainly because I had a built-in readership from my previous books. I also entered it in the EPIC annual EPPIE awards for electronically published books (since Booklocker makes both electronic and print versions available) and it made it to the finals.
Still committed to the work, I withdrew it from Booklocker (a company I chose because it allows you to keep all your rights) and started querying again. And this time I hit paydirt, though it took dozens of queries and nearly two years. I found a new agent and she sold the work as part of a three-book deal to Kensington last spring. The book is scheduled to come out this September under a pseudonym (Annelise Ryan) with a new title (WORKING STIFF) as a hardcover, and a paperback version will follow with the release of the second book.
Would I do POD again? Maybe. I have another completed ms that my agent hasn't been able to sell and I might consider going the POD route for that work. But not anytime soon. In the meantime, I'm working on book #2 in my Kensington series and also writing another suspense novel in hopes of someday getting another book published under my own name and reprinting my first three.
Moral of the story? I'm not sure I have one. POD publishing is hardly a path to writing success and without my prior publishing credits I doubt my POD book would have sold 100 copies. (I do believe nonfiction has better success in the POD venue than does fiction.) Had POD been around when I first started submitting my novels to agents in the late eighties and early nineties, I might have given up more easily and let those first works (which I can now see were utterly dreadful!) be published as PODs. Had that happened, I might not have tried as hard to hone my writing skills. I might not have spent as much time on workshops, and writing classes, and analyzing the work of writers I loved in order to identify the areas where I needed to improve. I might not have spent as much time learning the ins and outs of the industry and staying up with the latest trends. Yes, those rejections are hard, and it's not easy admitting to one's self that perhaps you're a never-will-be, or in my case, a has-been. But if you truly love writing and want to be successful at it, you have to be able to set aside those personal feelings and persevere.
Nothing is guaranteed. My new book could totally tank, placing me in the has-been corner again. But if that happens, I won't give up. And I'll always seek out the traditional route of publishing over POD publishing. I won't rule out the POD route, but I know it's worlds apart from the traditional method and not where I'd prefer to be.
Beth Amos