print on demand

The TYOTE POD cover

December 19, 2010 By Mark 3 Comments

Having had the smarts to avail myself of the experience, insight, technical skill and patience of designer Joleene Naylor, I now have a cover for the print-on-demand (POD) version of my short story collection, The Year of the Elm. I’m not only satisfied with the result, I’m thankful I didn’t have to produce it on my own. Whatever time it might have taken to do it myself, and however much I might have learned along the way, I wouldn’t have been able to replicate the give-and-take that helped us arrive at the solution you see here.

All of the issues I wanted to deal with or resolve have been dealt with or resolved. The look of the POD cover is an evolution of the original e-book cover, but it also speaks more directly (albeit suggestively) to the contents of the stories. I can’t help but feel that it’s an improvement.

Total cost for all of the advice, artistic input, technical wizardry and plain old common sense that Joleene provided: $50. [ Read more ]

The Print-On-Demand Mountain

April 20, 2010 By Mark 9 Comments

At first blush, print-on-demand (POD) seems to be the middle-ground in the publishing revolution. It yields a physical book, much like traditional publishing, but is the result of a quasi-do-it-yourself process. To the extent that holding a book, or being able to physically transfer contents in book form, is important to an author, there are a wealth of companies providing POD services. (The big three are probably Lulu, CreateSpace, and Lightning Source, with Blurb anchoring the image-heavy end of the self-pub spectrum.)

Thinking that it would be nice to make a POD version of The Year of the Elm (TYOTE) available for anyone who wanted it, I spent a fair amount of time last night digging deeper into the POD process. What I’ve come away with today is both a renewed appreciation for the craft and complexity of publishing, and a growing conviction that I don’t want to go down the POD road, at least for now. [ Read more ]

Link Hopping, Rants and Andrew Sullivan

September 22, 2009 By Mark 3 Comments

One of the nice things about the web is that you never know what you’ll run across when you start poking around with a search engine. While doing a search for POD (print-on-demand) resources I ran across a rant on the Daily Dish site that contained this quote:

[Publishing] is an industry where agents only get work from editors, and editors only get work from agents. Where the writers are taken out of the process entirely in order to “protect” them.

I have to say, on those occasions when I actually tried to penetrate the book world that’s very much the feeling that I came away with. It really didn’t matter how good your writing was or how much of yourself you put into it — it only mattered if you would sell. And that would be fine if that’s the way they played it, but it’s not. [ Read more ]

Site Seeing: Mick Rooney

September 22, 2009 By Mark Leave a Comment

Mick Rooney is the proprietor. The full title of his blogsite is POD, Self Publishing and Independent Publishing. I ran across it while chasing down links related to the previous post, and it certainly seems to be up-to-date on the titular subject matter.

And no, I’m not pointing to him because of the awesome ditch mention.

— Mark Barrett

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