POD: An Essay

I got the link to this essay from a horror writer's board, that I frequent. There has been a lot of hoo-ha there recently, about people's attitudes toward POD. A lot of the members of that board are mass market paperback published, and they seem rather 'elitist' when it comes to those who go down the POD route.

Admittedly, we'd all love to be mass market published, but we've all got to start somewhere, and I do believe this new technology can be a good thing, if marketed and promoted properly.

However, I implore anyone who is looking into getting published: aim high. Always start at the top and work your way down. Never, ever sell yourselves short.

Lou

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Link: The Potential and Reality of POD

Publishing in the Future:
The Potential and Reality of POD

by Sean Wallace

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

In the last seven years, print-on-demand technology has become an established component of the publishing industry, affecting everyone in it from authors to publishers to wholesalers to bookstores. Print-on-demand (referred to in the trade as POD) is the ability to short-run manufacture books or magazines in relatively low numbers, from one copy to the sky's-the-limit. Initially, the technology suggested a potential revolution in the way books were manufactured, distributed, and purchased, with visions of customers placing an order for any title ever written and having a copy print while they waited — in effect upsetting the whole infrastructure of traditional book manufacture and distribution. No title would ever be 'out of print' again.

It hasn't quite worked out that way, unfortunately. The technology was first made available by national wholesalers such as the Ingram Book Group and Baker & Taylor, who established POD operations LightningSource and Replica Books respectively, with all sales demand (online stores, chain stores, library systems) fed through their distribution systems. This represents a POD printing-and-distribution business model, and it's become the basis for thousands of publishing operations since then, including science fiction and fantasy small presses Wildside Press, Prime Books, Babbage Press, Wheatland Press, and many more. It has even been adopted by larger publishing companies such as Time Warner, which has occasionally released backlist titles in pod editions. Yet not only has traditional publishing not been revolutionized, or even much affected, POD's position in the publishing universe of 2004 remains suspect, even disreputable to some.

The reasons for POD's failure to achieve its revolution are varied, but much of the blame (and stigma) is a consequence of the first ecological niche that was available for it to occupy: vanity publishing. Services such as iUniverse, PublishAmerica, XLibris, and others, took quick advantage of POD, flooding distribution channels and catalogs with thousands of titles produced with little regard to quality, design, or marketing. This brought about an understandable backlash from buyers, bookstores, and reviewers, who saw POD as just another variety of vanity publishing. Consequently, major wholesalers made it harder for new small press publishers to enter their systems, reviewers became reluctant to consider anything POD-printed, POD publishers found their ISBN acquisition costs increased, and industry observers came to disregard all publishers using POD technology, whether they were vanity houses or not.

But not all POD publishers are vanity presses. The failure of POD technology to have the impact that some foresaw can be understood by considering the economics of POD in the context of the four P's of marketing: product, price, place, and promotion.

**

Product: In its infancy, print-on-demand did have some production quality issues, but these days the quality is comparable to anything put out on the bookshelves. On most levels a nicely produced and designed POD paperback or hardcover is almost indistinguishable from its offset counterpart. Your average reader will not and should not be able to tell the difference. Unfortunately, there are still too many publishers who don't take advantage of the benefits of POD and continue to crank out shoddy product with inexcusably terrible designs.

Another factor is the editorial selections themselves. Too many publishers — like the vanity publishers — rely on desperate would-be authors crawling out of the woodwork. Others think they can succeed by imitating the majors, by publishing bad commercial fiction. That's not the place where POD publishers can thrive; it makes no sense for a small press publisher to publish in genres like commercial romance or suspense thriller, because of strong competition in the market from the bigger publishers. The answer is to carve out new niches and stick to them.

Admittedly, the economics of POD publishing carry limitations for some kinds of books. It's not always the best choice for original fiction, be it a novel or a short story collection or anthology, for a number of reasons, but for the most important: there's rarely any cash advances. The business model associated with most POD publishing operations doesn't allow it. Sales growth is the name of the game, and cash advances slow down progress, which is why you really don't see too many investing in them. On the other hand, POD is very well-suited for public domain titles, reference volumes, and other books whose warehousing expenses would make them impractical for traditional publishers to keep in print.

In contrast, POD enables publishers to take chances with authors, with design, with marketing. Publishing companies can do some really creative things with all this newfangled technology, things that would be rather expensive to do with offset and a larger print run. This is an advantage of POD publishing. There's just no excitement in cranking out the average book like sausages in a meat market. It's got to be something special, something exciting, to compete with the Big Boys.

*

Price: The high retail prices associated with the average POD book are also clearly an issue. This is an undeniable drawback of POD technology, as the unit costs stay fixed for each copy manufactured and offers no room for improvement; whereas with traditional offset printing the costs scale with increases in the print run. Let's take an example:

POD: 196pp hardcover, 6 x 9 trim size, four-color dustwrapper, unit costs of $10.00

Offset: all else being the same, but with a print run of 500, unit costs of $8.00 or less.
This offset example scales even further down with larger print runs, especially in the thousands, with unit costs dropping to $5.00 or less. From that perspective, it makes little sense to invest in POD for most projects, especially if your projected sales demand is high. Where a publisher is committing himself to a POD business model, there's not much to be done about the price, beyond keeping it as low as possible. Here's where vanity publishers have an advantage: they have no incentive to minimize production costs, because the low volume sales associated with their operations entail selling only a few copies of each book on the open market and relatively more copies to the large pool of authors, who are usually encouraged to purchase multiple copies of their own books at a 'discount'. But this is no way for a legitimate POD publisher to penetrate a market where the competition are traditional publishers out to make money for themselves and their authors.

*

Place (or distribution): POD printing-and-distribution business models are not a permanent replacement for trade distribution, by any means. Any publisher who wishes to expand and penetrate new markets will eventually have to approach trade distribution and either replace or complement his initial distribution method. In any case, POD distribution is further complicated by two decisions made by most (but not all) publishers:

They make their books non-returnable, which makes bookstores even less inclined to carry books on their shelves or for book signing purposes. Returns are a way of life in publishing.


They short-discount books. In other words, instead of extending a standard fifty-five percent discount through their wholesale distribution channels, publishing companies will usually offer far less, which in turn means a smaller discount to a bookstore. This obviously limits sales to mostly online venues and does not make it any easier to get into trade accounts.
Both decisions represent short-term and long-term limitations, making it that much harder to establish market penetration in terms of review markets, distribution channels, and so on.

*

Promotion: The cost savings in terms of setup costs and a royalty-based business model should allow a POD publisher to afford adequate marketing and advertising in order to push sales. But, too many publishers simply toss the books out, hoping for the best, and then wonder why they sink. Review copies, books signings, interviews, and more are the responsibility of the publisher, and a publisher that doesn't arrange these shouldn't be surprised by poor sales. Marketing can be an efficient and effective tool when utilized to its fullest. People want to read good books, but marketing has to make readers aware that the books are available before they can buy and read them.

**

There are other reasons POD publishing is still struggling for legitimacy, among them entrenched practices of industry analysts and bibliographers who have difficulties with books that aren't "published" in the usual sense of having fixed print runs (a problem shared in a sense with electronic publishing, which doesn't involve physical copies at all). However, the industry will catch up with the technology, eventually, as it always has. Despite its admitted limitations, POD does serve a function that traditional publishing does not, as outlined previously. The success of POD publishers should not be judged by the technology they employ, but — like any other publisher — by the care and effort they take to select, edit, and market books that readers want to buy.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sean Wallace works full-time for Wildside Press, as senior editor for the following imprints: Cosmos Books, Prime Books, Renaissance Books; and contributing editor to Wildside Press and Borgo Press. He currently resides in Hatfield, PA, with his two cats, Amber and Jade.

This is interesting, isn't there a thread somewhere about someone getting a contract with PublishAmerica?

Sounds very iffy. But interesting.

Gauche

gauchecritic said:

This is interesting, isn't there a thread somewhere about someone getting a contract with PublishAmerica?

Sounds very iffy. But interesting.

Gauche

Click to expand...

Yes, that thread was one of the factors that prompted me to post this here.

And, quite!

Lou

That's a good article. Having used a POD publisher, perhaps I can share a few thoughts.

First, don't confuse mass-market publication with quality. Just because a book has met with an editor's approval doesn't mean it has literary merit. Rather, it means that this editor, who is probably overworked and underpaid, has decided that this manuscript stands a good chance of selling enough copies to make the publisher a profit after expenses. Expenses, of course, including quality control, will be minimized as much as possible. The author will receive an advance, but unless they are an established name (and often not even then), they will receive little or no assistance in promoting the book. In this way they are pretty much where self-published authors stand, except that POD books don't have to go out of print. If your traditionally published book doesn't sell, the covers are ripped off and returned to the publisher for a refund and the books go into the trash.

What you can expect from a traditionally published book is that a copyeditor will have gone through it and most, but not necessarily all, of the typos will have been corrected, though poor writing will often remain. In a self-published book the author must either do this themselves or hire someone to do it, and considering the frequency of simple mistakes in many self-published works, it's obvious that many of these folks haven't dealt with this. In self-published work, I would advise you to never judge a book by its cover; read a few pages and make sure the author knows what they're doing.

Second, when you consider that about 150,000 new books are published each year in the United States, competition for book sales is high. Thus, it is in the best interests of commercial publishers to stigmatize the entire POD industry by pointing out the frequency of bad writing in self-published work. What they don't do, however, is acknowledge that there are many excellent self-published / POD books out there that for a variety of reasons (length, subject matter, authors re-releasing their old work, frustrated geniuses buried under rejection slips, etc.) are not and will not be published traditionally. Remember, every person who buys my book cannot spend that $10.95 on another book. What makes it worse for our poor editor friend is that my livelihood does not depend on my book selling well; it will be available indefinitely, and since I'm not going into this to make millions, I'm keeping my day job. Multiply me by several thousand, and there is an impact on traditional publishers' profits.

My book? I'm proud of it, and the folks who've read it have enjoyed it. Now if I can just get over this guilt over those editors I'm starving...

Thanks, Karen, for a great post. I loved your last line.

You made me think on there, about some of my own (previously) prejudiced views. The more I have heard about POD, from both sides of the fence, the more I think it is a very good thing. You are so right about the quality of the writing in a lot of mass market stuff. Or, should I say, lack of?

Anything that opens up the markets to us mere mortal, hard working and talented writers is a good thing.

Lou

Thanks, Lou, for a good and valuable article. POD is a technology, and like all technologies, it can be used for good or for evil

(psst -- was that the HWA board? You a member, too?)

I've used Lightning Source several times (gratuitous plug: check out the horror novel Black Roses, the Silver Doorway children's series, and the rpg supplement Naughty and Dice!) and have been pleased every time with their promptness, quality, and efficiency.

Sabledrake

Thanks, Sabledrake. It's always good to hear some first hand recommendations.

(No, it was the Shocklines board. I hang out at HWA now and again, but it's dog eat dog over there. I'm just small fry. )

Lou

I've been thinking about this POD thing since the PublishAmerica thread, and it seems to me like an enormous crapshoot for the writer, and here's why: In traditional publishing, the acquisition editor acts as a reviewer. Because printing books is an investment, they have an economic interest in publishing only the stuff they think will sell, and it's the editor's job to separate the good from the mediocre.

The POD publisher is under no such constraint. Their business model basically involves throwing as much stuff at the wall as possible and hoping that something sticks. Their books are not pre-selected for you and there's no guarantee of the label quality. You're buying a pig in a poke, sight unseen, and at $10-$20 a piece, that's a pretty expensive pig.

I don't know about the other POD outfits, but on their web site, PublishAmerica--which seems like a perfectly respectable POD; they're certainly not crooked--gives you only a story blurb and maybe a praise-filled review by no one you've ever heard of, and they expect the consumer to make an informed buy based on this scanty information. They don't even give you an excerpt of the book to read. Who's going to gamble $16.95 on something like that?

---dr.M.

Quite true, Dr. M. An editor does act as a reviewer, but remember they are reviewing with a particular bias strongly in mind: will it sell? While this does mean they will exclude the truly awful work (usually), it also means that they frequently bias against anything that isn't similar to stuff that's already shown itself to be successful. Editors themselves have told me this, and I know a lot of clever, innovative writers whose work will never see print because it just wasn't considered marketable and no editor was willing to risk their job over it.

POD is more open, which means it will be good and bad. I used iUniverse for my book, and I wrote the back cover blurb which appears on their website. They also have a preview feature which I have set to include the entire book so you can preview the whole thing before you buy, if you like, from the publisher or Amazon or elsewhere. Perhaps this is commercial suicide for me, but I agree wholeheartedly that you should be able to preview before you put down your hard-earned money for it, just as you would in a bookstore.

Here's a direct link to the start of my book to show you how this works. Enjoy!

On the subject of an entirely previewable book online:

"Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" and the second book by Cory Doctorow were published under the Creative Commons license, which Cory himself authored. Much like GPL for opensource software, it allows any reader to acquire and distribute the novel and use the world, settings, characters and situations for new creative work so long as it is released under the Creative Commons license as well.

Here is an interview and personal statement.

Basically, if one in thirty people who pick up his book in a bookstore, flip through it, and then buy it, he feels he is a successful writer. What is the difference, then, if thirty people download his book for free and only one buys it? To his pocket: nothing. Also, even if reviewed poorly, a book entirely available online and for free lets a curious listener decide for himself.

Baen publisher also has an impressive selection of books available in a variety of formats online. My understanding is that these books are out of print, highly reviewed at least on Amazon, and mostly form the first or second novels in a longer series. The publisher is trying to hook you on the series and not any individual book.

Doing all of my reading through a library, I've never seen much of a difference, but the idea of stronger sales generated when the entire product is freely available I find intriguing.

Re: On the subject of an entirely previewable book online:

thenry said:

Basically, if one in thirty people who pick up his book in a bookstore, flip through it, and then buy it, he feels he is a successful writer. What is the difference, then, if thirty people download his book for free and only one buys it? To his pocket: nothing. Also, even if reviewed poorly, a book entirely available online and for free lets a curious listener decide for himself.

Click to expand...

If the choice is betwen being published by a POD outfit and not being published at all, then clearly you're better off going with the POD.

But if the choice is between POD and a conventional publisher, then I think you're much better off with the conventional outfit. They're investing money in your book, so they have a vested interest in doing all they can to market and sell your book.

---dr.M.

Re: Re: On the subject of an entirely previewable book online:

dr_mabeuse said:

If the choice is betwen being published by a POD outfit and not being published at all, then clearly you're better off going with the POD.

But if the choice is between POD and a conventional publisher, then I think you're much better off with the conventional outfit. They're investing money in your book, so they have a vested interest in doing all they can to market and sell your book.

---dr.M.

Click to expand...

Yes, and that is something we should all remember - it kind of goes without saying.

As I said, in my first post in this thread... I implore anyone who is looking into getting published: aim high. Always start at the top and work your way down. Never, ever sell yourselves short.

Lou

I agree; one should aim high. But there is another issue that we must consider, and that is the degree to which you are willing to let an editor fiddle with your work.

Now, a good editor is like a good coach; they understand that each writer is different and that each will take direction differently. They try and improve your work, not change it into their own or that of their personal favorite writer in your genre. If they decide to buy your work, it's because they feel it has merit.

A bad editor, on the other hand, wants you to conform, and they will change whatever they want to, not caring why you wrote the way you did. They operate under the assumption that you know nothing and they know everything, and they generally treat authors with contempt or disdain. These sorts of editors are also amazingly common, especially in genre fiction, where writing just like everybody else is prized.

Remember that editors keep their jobs based on how many books they sell, not on how good they are at finding and refining art.

The advantage to self-publishing / POD is that you retain artistic control. This is also a huge disadvantage, because a lot of writers are convinced of their own genius when in fact they need guidance and direction. Just because you think your work is the greatest story ever told doesn't mean that everyone else will, and so if you are going to go the self-publishing POD route, you need to learn to be self-critical as well as self-confident.

Now I shall plug for Literotica. Two of my stories here are set in the same universe as my novel. I pay close attention to the feedback I get for these stories, because that tells me if the concept I am working with works for others. I would advise people to post a lot of work here before spending money on POD, to both master the craft of writing and get feedback from someone other than your friends and lovers, because those closest to you are not going to want to say anything harsh about your work, even if it needs a kick in the pants.

So aim high, not just in getting published, but in anything you decide to publish for yourself.

My book is published POD by 1stBooks, and so far I am extremely happy with how things are going. 1stBooks does offer a lot of services that a traditional publisher would offer, but you do have to pay for the options. In all I got my book produced and ready for sale with under $2,000. They have an extensive promotions department, they handle interview requests and provide review copies for working media, issue AP approved press releases, etc. It has been a complete pleasure working with, and through, them.

I started out by aiming high, going for top agents and top publishers. Then I slipped two the so-called second tier. Then the third tier. And so on. After a series of rejections, I said, "Fuck you, I'll do it my damn self." I feel that I got very lucky when I found 1stBooks. Editors were ambivalent, at best, about my work. Admittedly, my book would be a hard sell, considering the massive amounts of profanity and some of the situations. I knew going in that the traditional publishers either wouldn't get it, or wouldn't have the balls to give it a shot.

Things are going great with my book, and the press releases just went out on March 7th. The publisher has selected my book to receive more promotion. The marketing manager told me that she feels that my book has great potential and they are getting behind me. Not to sound like I'm bragging, but this isn't the norm for all POD authors. She told me that my book is getting pushed on the merit of the writing and the story. The marketability of the whole piece. She was the one who set up the submissions to the Hollywood agents for me. Maybe 1stBooks isn't Random House, but it feels good to have them behind me just the same.