The Insiders Guide to Self Publishing

Short print run versus print on demand

When talking about self publishing, it is important to differentiate between the two different types - short print run and print on demand (POD). With short print run, you choose the printer, sort out the internal layout etc, register the ISBN and take care of all of it yourself, including sending out the printed copies as and when the orders come in. This is very labour intensive, but usually cheaper than POD - because the more books you print, the lower the cost per book becomes. With POD the cost remains the same regardless of how many copies are printed. With short print run however, you have to have the space and the time to store the books and fuflil orders yourself, but not so with POD, which is where it really comes into its own.

POD is, as the name sugguests, when the books are uploaded as a digital file to the printer (usually Lightning Source) who then print them out to order, and send them back to your publisher, or wholesaler, for distribution. A good POD company will manage the whole process for you, taking care of the sales and ordering side of things in return for a a percentage of your royalties. This varies enormously and can be as much as 80 percent in some cases.

What factors did you consider when selecting a print-on-demand supplier?

The most important points, apart from set up costs were for me, royalties, print costs and distribution network. In terms of distribution, most POD companies are actually pretty much of a muchness anyway, as they all tend to work with the two largest wholesalers, Bertrams and Gardners in the UK, and Ingrams and Baker and Taylor in the US. These are the middle men who get your book into the shops and on amazon. When I say into the shops, this is not to say that the book will physically be on the shelves, but rather, that it is on listed on a database, provided by Nielson Book Data, that shops have access to, alongside the 100,000 or so other titles that are published each year. This means then that someone who knows the ISBN will be able to go into a shop and order a copy. If you want to get your books on to the shelves, then that is another matter altogether, and one that you will have to work very hard at. I will talk a bit more about this later.

With regard to royalties, all POD companies seem to offer different things - some as little as 12 1/2 percent, which is hardly more than you would get from a mainstream publisher (typically 8 to 10 percent depending on the volume sold and whether your book is hard or paperback). The publisher I went for, Authors OnLine works on the basis of a 60/40 split in the authors favour, which is by far the best deal I found.

Print costs though are also vitally important, since it affects the final cover price that you set. Because my book is non-fiction this meant that I could set a higher cover price than say a novel, which typcially retails at around £6.99. Most POD companies use the same printer, Lightning Source, but the cost they charge to you varies considerably. I found the larger companies, such as Authorhouse were charging twice as much as the smaller ones, in order to cover their own overheads (plush offices, author advisers etc) whereas my publisher, which is pretty much a one man show, with a few outworkers, can keep costs to a minimum as he does not have these overheads to consider. I then pay one penny per page plus 70 pence for the cover, which leaves me with a comfortable £7 a copy for books that I sell myself via talks and book signings, £6 when sold via the publishers own website and £2.50 when sold through amazon or book stores. This difference is due to the fact that Gardners, my distributor, buy the books at 55 percent discount. Gardners take 15 percent of this as their own cut, offering the stores that buy from them a 40 percent discount. Generally speaking, book shops will buy at anything between 20 and 60 percent depending on who they are. The big chains, such as Borders and Waterstones, are able to negotiate much higher discounts as they buy greater volumes of books.