The Pros and Cons of Print on Demand Publishing

By Michael Mould

You have spent hundreds or perhaps thousands of hours writing your masterpiece and now you want the world to read it. You also want it to generate an income for you that is proportionate to the work you put into it. So, what should you do with it? You can send a manuscript of it off to dozens of publishing houses with the hopes that one of them thinks it is worthy of their label, or you can have it published yourself through a Print on Demand, POD, publisher. The pros and cons of POD are:

The negative aspects of using POD instead of a large publishing house:

1. It will not have the label of a large publishing house on it.
   
2. It will not be distributed by a large publishing house to nationwide book stores.
   
3. You will not receive a royalty on sales amounting to maybe 3% of the profit per copy sold by a large publishing house.
   
4. You will not make the bestseller list of a large publishing house.

The positive aspects of using POD and having your book published yourself:

1. You can have your own publisher's label put on your work if you like and it can still have an ISBN.
   
2. Your work can be made available to all of the online bookselling marketplaces and book stores nationwide through a POD global distribution service for about $100. They all receive regular notifications of new book put in print and in most cases, they will buy directly from a POD publisher directly and list the book on their marketplace. Since you will have established a price for them to buy it at (wholesale), you will get a known royalty per copy when they do buy from your POD publisher.
   
3. You will receive a royalty (that you decide) on the sale of every copy purchased by online marketplaces and book stores nationwide. Follows from (2) above.
   
4. You can make the bestseller list of any online marketplace that your book sells through based on your actual sales through that marketplace.
   
5. You can purchase copies of your own work through your POD publisher and become an online bookseller yourself which will yield the highest profit margins possible for you.
   
6. As an online bookseller yourself, you can set up your own website and sell your book through it.

Regardless of which sales scenario you choose, you are going to be doing the marketing and promotion of your book yourself anyway, why stop short of selling and mailing it too? Stuffing it in a padded envelope and shipping it to customers cannot be worth giving up over 90% of the profits after all the other hard work you have already done.

Michael E. Mould is the author of Online Bookselling: A Practical Guide with Detailed Explanations and Insightful Tips and the developer of Bookkeeping for Booksellers. You can learn more about online bookselling at his site, Online Bookselling.

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