POD: Perils, Pitfalls, and Possibilities
Monday, May 4, 2009 at 04:21PM 
Think you know what POD means? Maybe. Maybe not. There is a good deal of confusion here, and it is important that prospective self-publishers sort it out.
POD stands for “print on demand,” and is a digital printing technology enabling a publisher to print as few as two or three dozen copies of a book at an affordable price, something that was never before possible by any means. This technology has had a major impact on the publishing business. Because of it the publisher no longer needs to print several thousand books before discovering whether on nor his book will sell. The phrase, however, has come to be used in two very different ways, and it is important to distinguish between them.
1. POD as a means of production. Many publishers, of which my company is one, now utilize this technology to print small runs of books (25 books or more) for niche market sales or to test the market before ordering longer runs. This saves an enormous amount of money on books that, for some reason, do not find their market or which are not well received, well reviewed, or reviewed at all. The vast majority of published books sadly fall into this category. Just a year or two ago, a publisher would have to print several thousand books without knowing whether or not they would ever sell. POD technology is a great boon my company; we can take more chances on the books we publish because we have so little cash tied up in each one. And it is a boon for our cash-flow management. When times get hard, and revenues dry up, we don’t have hefty printing bills outstanding. A very successful POD model, in this sense, is that of Lightning Source of LaVergne, Tennessee. LSI is a POD printer and is also a subsidiary of Ingram, the biggest distributor of books to bookstores in the US. Lightning Source prints books for my own company in ultra short runs. It also fills orders for our books which come in to Ingram from bookstore and online customers. LSI is a printer, not a publisher.
2. POD has also been appropriated as an identifying feature of Internet firms that describe themselves as “POD Publishers.” Publishing with a “POD publisher” can be as bad for a self-publisher as the technology itself is good. Let’s take the mythical company WePublish.Com as a model POD “publisher.” WePublish.Com invites writers to send in their books. WePublish.Com promises to “publish” these books, formatting the interior and designing a cover at what seems an affordable price. These interior and cover designs are formatted into standard templates. WePublish.Com is the publisher. It assigns an ISBN to the work published and has a contract with author specifying royalties to be paid on retail sales and income sharing on sales of subsidiary rights—if any retail sales or rights sales do in fact occur. WePublish.Com promises to make the author’s book “available” in bookstores and other outlets. Note that this does not mean that the books will actually on the shelf. It simply means that the author’s book will be listed in the Books-in-Print database, and so available for special order whenever a customer asks for such an order. However, there is not likely to be any promotion to make the reading public in general aware of the availability of the book. Because WePublish.Com is not selective in what it publishes, busy reviewers are not likely to give its books more than a glance, if that.
When it does print books, WePublish.Com uses Print-on-Demand technology. WePublish.Com does not own printing equipment, but farms their printing work out to Lightning Source.
So how does WePublish.Com make money? It sells printed books directly to its authors at discounts usually ranging from 19% to 50%. Let’s say that the print version of your book retails for $19.95 and is sold to the author at a 40% discount, or $11.97. If this hypothetical book has 200 pages, the printing, at the very most, costs WePublish.Com $3.90 Thus WePublish.Com nets a profit of $8.07 on books sold to its own authors. Let’s say, further, that WePublish.Com publishes 1000 authors each month, each of whom orders 25 copies of his or her book for friends, relatives, and local reviewers, then the income is substantial. One thousand multiplied by 25 equals 25,000. This figure multiplied by $8.07 equals $201, 750. This produces an annual income of $2,421,000. When you consider that WePublish.Com, since it is a POD publisher, has no investment in inventory and probably no investment in printing presses, and that the whole enterprise, once set up, can do business almost entirely in the thin air of hyperspace, the net profit is substantial.
Reader Comments (15)
An excellent explanation of an often misunderstood topic. We, too, talk to so many authors who made the mistake of signing up with a "subsidy" firm, only to learn the hard way that this is not the path to self-publishing success. Unfortunately, these firms have larger advertising budgets than the smaller firms who offer better advice, and so they come up first in the search engines. To someone just beginning their research into self-publishing, it seems that this is the only way to go about it.
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In general aware of the availability of the book. Because We Publish.Com is not selective in what it publishes, busy reviewers are not likely to give its books more than a glance, if that
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Demand technology. WePublish.Com does not own printing equipment, but farms their printing work out to Lightning Source.
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Lightning Source prints books for my own company in ultra short runs. It also fills orders for our books which come in to Ingram from bookstore and online customers.
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In general aware of the availability of the book. Because WePublish.Com is not selective in what it publishes, busy reviewers are not likely to give its books more than a glance, if that.
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