The Publishing Game Presents…

POD

Until now, I’ve recommended that POD really isn’t ideal for most books.

POD (which stands for Print-on-Demand) publishing is the denigrated vanity publishing of yesteryear dressed up in the Emperor’s New Clothes. Though most authors know to stay away from vanity or subsidy publishing, where you pay to have your book edited, designed, and printed and then it sits in your garage, for some reason, millions of authors have fallen for the appeal of POD publishing—where you pay to have your book edited, designed, and printed, and then it sits in someone else’s garage.

Not that there aren’t good reasons to use POD publishers—and for those authors who have books that work for POD, POD can be a fantastic time and money saver. If you’re doing a family genealogy, or a church cookbook, for example, where you have a limited audience and once you’ve given or sold the book to those 200 people, that’s it, POD is a great solution. It’s also an incredible timesaver for the busy corporate executive who needs to have a book to show the media, or for the workshop leader who wants a book to sell back-of-the-room at talks, or for a civic group that wants to do a book as a fundraiser, without investing the time-sink that is self-publishing. These are the cases where POD is a wise choice.

But what most authors (many of whom show up at my Publishing Game workshops depressed and already deep in the clutches of POD ) don’t realize is that doing your book POD probably precludes making many sales. Certainly you’ll have a hard time selling to bookstores and libraries—by the time you pay the POD company, and factor in the wholesale discount that the middlemen require, the price points are too narrow for most bookstores or libraries. Furthermore, you’ll probably never even get as far as the bookstore or library—because POD books are ineligible for review by the major review journals (Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, and Booklist) you’ll miss out on those thousands of sales automatically, regardless of how good your book looks.

Thus, for most authors, you’re better off self-publishing yourself, and avoiding the POD option. Until now.

This week, BooksJustBooks announced their partnership with Lightning Source, the POD division of Ingram Book Company (the largest book wholesaler in the US) to create Thor, which will provide all the benefits of Lightning Source POD to BooksJustBooks customers.

Unlike the usual POD model (including Lightning Source itself), Thor will let you operate as an independent publisher. Although they’ll provide POD books for you, they’ll let you use your own ISBN (thereby making you eligible for journal reviews) and let you set your own pricing (thereby avoiding the price point hangup of most of the PODs.)

Thor is targeting its new program towards small self-publishers who are not producing (or selling) enough books to merit larger (and more cost-effective) distribution, and who merely want to use this inexpensive system as a way to break into the system and have their books available. The idea is that once publishers begin to sell enough books, they’ll switch over to a traditional printing and distributor system (thereby making the price points money-making for them.) In the meantime, they get the benefits of listings everywhere (Ingram, Baker & Taylor, etc.) with order fulfillment guaranteed.

The beauty of this model—for any publisher, not just those smallest few—is that it can be used in a more creative way than has been traditionally done by POD customers. Here’s what I mean:

Let’s say you’re coming out with a book on a new diet, but you can’t decide whether to call it “The Stressed-Out Diet” or “The Stress Free Diet.” Rather than just arbitrarily picking one and hoping it’s the right decision, or spending lots of time trying to get a focus group to agree, simply come out with both titles—under different ISBNs—and see which one is ordered more frequently. You’ve just used POD as an easy, inexpensive way to do market research—on the very title that you’re marketing! The beauty of this is that even after you’ve committed to the “preferable” title, you can still sell the other title to whoever wants it, because both are in the system, and it doesn’t cost you anything.

And obviously this works with elements other than title. You can use it to decide between various cover designs, various price points, and other factors.

So let the rest of the publishing industry continue to quibble over the merits and detriments of POD. Me, I’m off to write my new stress book. Stay tuned—you’ll see it out there soon. Under many different names.

Copyright © 2003 by Fern Reiss

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Last 5 posts by Fern Reiss

• Publicize Your Novel - April 17th, 2008
• 19 Ways to Publicize Your Book - March 24th, 2008
• Publicize Via Social Networks - February 11th, 2008
• Get More Publicity For Your Book and Business - December 5th, 2007
• Sell More Books to Libraries - October 22nd, 2007