Print on Demand FAQ from POD Self Publishing Posts

Index to Print-on-Demand Posts

There's more than one way to peel an onion, sometimes it pays to just start chopping. In my first post about POD, I tried to lay out the differences between traditional publishing models and on-demand publishing.

How to Start a Publishing Company with Print-on-Demand

Excerpt "We'll examine print on demand self publishing in the context of traditional publishing models and as a unique new model which has come into its own with the Internet. While the processes followed in preparing new titles for traditional publication on offset presses can also be applied to POD, it's critical to realize that there are other paths. The traditional publishing process evolved over hundreds of years, dedicated to making the peculiar economics of that industry feasible. POD does not obey the economics of traditional offset publishing, though many publishers have been slow to realize this. If you're thinking about starting a publishing company, know that you can publish books and make them available through 90% of US bookstores and Amazon, etc, for well under $500 in up-front costs. That doesn't include writing, editing, proofreading or marketing, but it does include the cost of an ISBN block and print-on-demand title setup with Lightning Source, in place of the $10,000 or more new publishers often spend on their first run of books. This book is written for both authors and self-publishers who are starting their own publishing company and wish to take advantage of the unique possibilities of POD, as opposed to simply using it to keep old books in print."

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It's easy to get caught up in the distribution and short discount opportunities available with print-on-demand, but I try to not lose sight of the fact that printing a single book at a time is a revolution in itself.

How to Print Books One at a Time

Excerpt: "Then I heard that Lightning Source was finally providing print on demand services to small publishers. I'd approached them at a trade show just a year or two earlier and was told they would only work with trade publishers who had a real backlist, which was probably false then as well as now. They'll work with anybody who establishes their own publishing company. The main attraction of Lightning Source over using print on demand service from a local printer with a Xerox Docutech is access to distribution. Lightning Source doesn't only print one book at a time, they'll ship it Amazon, Barnes&Noble or Ingram when they get orders, with no action required on your part. In other words, they allow small publishers to run production and distribution in a completely hands-off manner, and they'll do so at a short discount."

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I often talk about the "apples and oranges" aspects of the publishing business, and sometimes it's educational to put all the fruit in one bowl and take a point by point look.

Printing Offset vs Print on Demand Self Publishing

Excerpt "From a business perspective, the choice of which printing technology to use in your publishing business depends entirely on what you're trying to accomplish and what you can afford. For example, if you're publishing a full color cook book, there's just no way you can do it with print on demand at this point. The cost is too high and the quality isn't there. Although you'll have to make a big initial investment with offset printing, the amount of prepress work and the cost of preparing a full color cookbook makes the big printing investment a reasonable gamble. The cookbook will get a high cover price, you'll give up 60% to 70% of that to get it distributed, but that's the business model.

On the other hand, for a novel or a nonfiction book with limited black and white illustrations, print on demand quality is good enough. Print on demand printing is actually cheaper than a short run of offset (less than 500 or 1000 copies) in most cases, and now we get to the devil in the details. One of the biggest challenges for small publishers is getting their books into distribution, so they'll be available for ordering through bookstores, both online and on Main St. Self publishing with print on demand using either Lightning Source or Replica means you can get your books stocked by Amazon and available to bookstores through stocking at Ingram or Baker and Taylor, and at a short discount to boot!"

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If you read publishing pundits on any subject, it's often apparent that they are basing most of their conclusions on very narrow data sets, often limited to their personal experiences in publishing. I'm a huge fan of sharing personal experiences, but there's plenty of public data you can study before trying a new publishing venture, and Amazon is the best one-stop data shop around.

Fiction Print-on-Demand Published By Subsidy Presses

I thought I'd wrap up Amazon week with a look at how to use their database to draw conclusions about the book business. One of the more common questions I get about book promotion is how to promote fiction, especially fiction published by the major subsidy presses (iUniverse, AuthorHouse and Xlibris) using print on demand. The reason I'm hitting on the big subsidy presses here, plus the hybrid PublishAmerica, is because they release so many books it makes it easy to look at a large sample size. Since none of these publishers do any meaningful marketing for books, the sales are comparable to what you could expect from self publishing your own fiction and doing your own promotion. While it's true that there's a stigma attached to using the subsidy publishers in the eyes of many professional reviewers, it doesn't seem to prevent the authors who really work at promoting their novels from succeeding. Of course, if you're really willing to work at the publishing business, you're always better off investing the time and money to set up your own imprint than using a subsidy publisher.

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I get tired of preaching facts and figures from time to time, even when they speak in my favor:-) One day, I decided to return to my fiction roots and wrote a little story about parallel publishing universes and the two paths taken by a new author.

A Story of Alternate Publishing Universes

Excerpt "Once upon a time there was a college student named Joe Newbie who blogged every day about the college life. He wrote about the food in the cafeteria, the parties he went to, what he paid for textbooks and life in the dormitory. Several times a day Joe posted updates to Blogger, and by the time he declared as a business major, thousands of people were reading Joe's blog every day. Joe's friends and readers kept asking him, "When are you going to publish a book?" but Joe laughed it off until he needed a project for Entrepreneurial Thinking 312, a senior honors class. Joe found an article on the web about how to write a query letter and sent it off to all the major trade publishers. To his surprise, Big Trade Publishers responded within the week, and after a brief phone call sent him a contract by Federal Express. Joe gave a presentation in Entrepreneurial Thinking class that very day, making an overhead slide show of the contract terms, and in a show of bravado, concluded by saying he would sleep on it before signing. That afternoon, Joe returned to his dorm room, put the contract under his pillow, and laid down to fulfill his word. As he began to drift off into happy dreams of royalties and cashing the $3,000 advance check, there was a knock on the door:"

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It's all about the marketing. If you can't promote your book, it's not going to go out and promote itself. That doesn't mean you have to become an entertainer to make a living as an author or a publisher, but if you don't have a plan for book promotion, you'll be keeping that day job for a long, long time.

How to Promote Books Published with Print on Demand

Excerpt "Learning how to promote books online requires just as much study and work as any type other type of marketing. I've seen the sales increase for each one of my titles on a year-over-year basis, doubling or more in the first two years and than smoothing out some. That's the dead opposite of the traditional model, where most new books, if they get that far, don't survive the trail period on the shelves, and see the majority of their lifetime sales in the first six months. One of the reasons my sales tend to go up over time is it takes a while for the increased visibility at places like Amazon to kick in, and word-of-mouth requires mouths. You can jumpstart your Amazon sales with paid promotions, I've never used one myself, and it also requires careful study to be cost effective. I've found the key to promoting books with a publisher website is very simple. You have to give away a lot, by posting major excerpts from your books and associated material. This is the only way that people who find your site will link to you as a resource. Most publishers remained terrified of doing this and just never experiment with it in depth. Websites that are essentially online advertisements for books don't attract anybody. You don't need super high numbers of visitors if excerpts are compelling enough to encourage buyers. It does take a lot of effort, but the cost is minimal if you do the work yourself, unlike say, paid advertising, where you can't."

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The numbers behind the POD book industry are often mixed and matched with the numbers of subsidy publishers. Subsidy publishers do not account for the lion's share of book sales, even for Lightning Source, which prints books for all of the major subsidy publishers.

The POD Book Business in 2006

Excerpt "POD doesn't mean low sales, but due to the huge number of titles turned out by subsidy presses, academic publishers and trades using POD for backlist, statistics would make the average title sales appear very low. I've never seen an apples to apples comparison of sales by say, self publishers who use POD vs self publishers who use offset. It's very hard to create such numbers, because survey participants tend to be self-selecting and many of the failed businesses drop off the radar with 10,000 books in the barn. I know we've sold far more copies of books printed by POD than printed by offset, but part of that has to do with the title choices and our evolution as a publisher. Book sales numbers overall are simply much lower than most new publishers realize. Books published by academic presses probably average a few hundred copies in their lifetime, the main market for most of these books are academic research libraries who buy everything on a subject, of which there are maybe 200 - 300 in the world.

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POD has brought about major shifts in the publishing industry in its black and white infancy. Color is around the corner, Lightning Source has been running a color POD beta for over a year. While the final pricing isn't out yet, parameters are beginning to shape up.

Color Print on Demand (POD) Economics

Print on demand has always been more about the work flow than the technology. Anybody who has seen the HP Indigo in action might convert to digital printing, but the Indigo isn't used for print on demand, and even though it employs toner (in liquid form), it functions like an offset press rather than a laser printer. Economical print on demand requires an industrial book production setting, with hundreds or even thousands of different interiors being produce a day on a single piece of equipment. There's no palette for each title to be fork lifted from spot to spot as in an offset facility, and collation has to take place at the time of printing and cutting. The interior has to be matched with the cover and glued, without being hand carried to the other end of the factory floor one title at a time. In other words, the whole printing process has to be as quick and automated as possible to keep the costs down, which results in compromises in the way the printers are run. The miracle of print on demand isn't that they can produce short runs of 50 or 25 books, but that they can literally print one book at a time.

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There are few areas in publishing with more aspiring authors than childrens books. Books for children have been a tough nut for POD due in part to the lack of color options. That's about to change, but will the dollars make sense?

Books for Children with Color Illustrations

Excerpt "On the bright side, it will be possible to publish very niche titles for children in full color, and even if you won't get rich, you can start building a list that may sell for many years. One example that comes to mind is highly localized books. Small publisher's utilizing POD will be able to publish a book about visiting the local park, or even the local dentist. Might help take the fear out of visiting the dentist if the child has a picture book about a happy kid getting a cavity filled by the actual kindly dentist. The dentist may be your biggest customer. In fact, I may have just invented a new niche for children's books, personalized versions for local health care professionals:-)"

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These excerpts were all taken from the Self Publishing blog