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The Ditchwalk Print-On-Demand Roadmap

August 25, 2010 By Mark 14 Comments

As regular readers know, I put a collection of short stories on Smashwords four months ago, where it can be sampled, purchased and downloaded in various e-book formats. I now want to make a print-on-demand (POD) version of that content available, so people can order a physical copy of the book. (This post rejoins a conversation I had with myself — and many helpful commenters — shortly after making the e-book available. More here and here.)

Paranoid Overview
There are a lot of companies offering print-on-demand publishing to independent authors. I also know there are a lot of disreputable companies — known variously as vanity or subsidy publishers — whose business model is predicated on charging abusive up-front fees for middling or nonexistent services. Industry propaganda against fee-for-service publishing says that money should flow to the author, not from the author, but as I noted late last year that propaganda has always been a self-serving fraud. Authors can be ripped off by anyone.

For any independent author, controlling costs and maximizing each dollar spent is critical. Philosophically I don’t care whether costs are up-front, fee-for-service charges or back-end participation. What matters is getting the most service or product for my money. As a practical matter, however, minimizing out-of-pocket costs is important because it preserves operating capital. The longer I can keep my head above water the longer I can write, and the longer I can write the more chance I have of seeing a profit.  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: Ditchwalk.com, Publishing Tagged With: cost, CreateSpace, distribution, Lightning Source, POD, vanity

The Print-On-Demand Molehill

April 28, 2010 By Mark 12 Comments

One of the best things about being part of a community is that the whole has the potential for being self-correcting. It’s not a sure thing, as any example of mob rule or cultural intolerance can attest, but there is at least the potential for a group to help individuals overcome blind spots or obstacles. Individuals who do not belong to a group, or who do not have access to collective wisdom, may be doomed to reinvent the wheel or to repeatedly fail because of their own tendencies and shortcomings.

I’m not a big joiner. I just threw Facebook in the junk pile because the price of belonging to that group is self-deception, and like Sam Spade I’m not willing to be somebody’s sap.* More than wearing a team blazer or adopting a popular philosophy or expressing loyalty to a particular trendy brand, I value belonging to a community of ideas. This has always led to involvement with smaller groups of people who share my interests, but the benefit to me is that these more issue-oriented groups can both augment and check my own thoughts.

In order to derive such benefits, however, it’s not simply enough to belong to a group. Approaching someone to suggest that they may be incorrect about something is fraught with risk, and presumes that the individual is open to such communications. As we all learn at a very young age, this is usually not the case. Most people would rather feel right than be right, even at the expense of their own well being. There is also a tendency for people to be more interested in telling others how wrong than they are in hearing the same thing themselves, and this tendency is often (if not commonly) greater in people who are ignorant or uninformed than it is in people who are knowledgeable. As a result, even if we are open to hearing about our mistakes, the number of reliable advisers that anyone might hope to hear from is usually small.  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: Publishing Tagged With: CreateSpace, Lightning Source, Lulu, POD

Lightning Strikes

September 22, 2009 By Mark Leave a Comment

This is the kind of thing I love learning, courtesy Maria Schneider at Editor Unleashed:

To be very honest, I never noticed any difference in quality between the various POD shops. Most of these services use Lightning Source to actually print the books.

Who knew? Lightning Source.

Update: very nice links page on the Lightning Source site, featuring a wide range of author resources and author-service companies.

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: Publishing Tagged With: Lightning Source, POD, print on demand