Quote:
Originally Posted by Kevin Howard
...does POD change the challenge of marketing your book and getting retailers to sell it?
|
The book world is now dividing between those who buy at stores and those who use the internet. POD marketing tends to be internet based. POD is tied into the major wholesalers like Ingrams, thus libraries process their orders via internet. Retailers are not aligned with the internet, thus they are outside the scope of the question. The internet market is now big enough to allow one to ignore the retailing market entirely (except for customer demand walk-ins, who have their retailer order from Ingrams).
POD is being adopted by major publishers both for long-tail books and fast books (do I dare mention Sarah Palin's autobiography was a POD... good thing, no leftovers to dump). In the future nothing should be out of print... I was astounded recently to find my grandfather's PhD dissertation from the 1880's is now for sale on Amazon as a new paperback.
I have been amused to read the disparaging on-line comments about the new directions of the industry. It reminds me of Bill Gates' speech attacking Linux.
POD and self-publishing are actually different businesses. A friend of mine, a biologist, self-publishes... made over a million dollars US on his first book because he earned about 60% of the cover price rather than the more typical 5%. In his case, he traditionally printed the book. Self publishing is not vanity press. In self-publishing you have to be a good author, pay or be a good professional editor and hire or do a good job with typesetting and layout. More importantly, you then need to know how to get into the top ten of Amazon. My friend learned that skill (he took a workshop that offered a money-back guarantee which he did not get to collect as he hit it). Even today he ranks 154 in Amazon's total ranking. It's called viral marketing, and in these early stages of the internet, it still works.
In our case, books are written not as an end in themselves, but as a means to initiate billion dollar real estate developments. It was those friends who self publish and have international reputations that called my attention to the industry, and provided me with the insight to realise the usefulness of the new technology.
The decision to use POD was for us a cost/time projection question. Our prime book was traditionally printed (and makes higher profits), but it requires a back office. In North America and Europe we used POD both because the global shipping is difficult, and because we could find a huge spike in orders if we get a review from a celebrity. If we used a traditional printing house, we would lose the orders due to the lag time. In contrast with POD we get instant fulfilment. So far the traditional book is selling 7x that of POD, but this is because the POD is solely long-tail marketing at present.
So, in the end, these are just business decisions. But as Bristol collectors seem to be a literate sort, I thought it might be useful to let folks know that their business decisions have more choice than they did a decade ago.
Claude