A New Way to Publish

These days, there are several ways to get your book published. You can get an agent and go the traditional route, you can self-publish, or you can take advantage of a new form of publishing called "print-on-demand" or POD.

What exactly is print-on-demand publishing? Think of it as self-publishing with a twist. It used to be, if you wanted to circumvent the traditional publishing houses, you had to tackle everything from printers to cover designers, ISBNs (International Standard Book Number) to distribution. Feeling dizzy yet? Sure, there were also self-publishing houses called vanity presses. They churned out about 6,000 titles per year and the author paid anywhere from $10,000 to $20,000 to publish his or her book. Cost alone was usually enough to discourage anyone who had not spent a great deal of time in the industry. Options were pretty limited, until the Internet explosion occurred.

Enter the on-demand publisher. Now, for a minimal fee (usually from $159 to $1,500), you can see your book in print. Essentially, what you're doing is hiring a publisher to publish your book. They take care of the cover, the book interior, the ISBN, and the distribution. They are compensated for this by receiving a portion of the profits every time you sell a book. You are compensated through royalties and while these do vary, they typically fall somewhere in the 18-20 percent range per book. The great part about POD publishing is that the "on-demand" part enables them to print books as they are needed, meaning that someone (probably you) won't get stuck with a garage full of books you can't get rid of. If you only sell 100 books, that's what they'll print. There are no minimum orders, and your book will always stay in print.

To give you an idea of the scope of the on-demand publishing industry, consider this: the typical big New York publisher prints about eight hundred new titles a year. At last count, some of the print-on-demand publishers were doing five hundred a month. Early estimates indicate that POD publishers printed around half a million books in 2001. This year, there are indications that this industry will hit the $78 billion market. These indicators tell us that the POD industry is growing at a pace no one anticipated. Why? Because the traditional publishing field is narrowing. Only one percent of books published each year are by unpublished authors. Does this low number tell us that there are fewer new authors out there? Absolutely not. What it tells us is that publishing houses are cutting back, merging and no longer willing to take chances on untested material.






The challenge with this industry is that you can't get published unless you're published it's a cycle from which we all aspire to escape. Now, we can. If you publish your book through a POD press, you are no longer considered a first-time published author. That is, if you sell the book. You still have to market your book. But take heart. With shrinking publishing budgets, you have to market your own book, no matter who publishes you. The hefty marketing budgets that used to accompany new releases are dwindling quickly.

So, let's say you publish your book through a POD publisher and you market it. You market it so well that you begin to garner interest from bigger publishing houses. How many books you need to sell is anyone's guess. Traditionally, the range has been between 5,000 and 8,000. Recently, however, Kensington Books (an imprint of Citadel Press) formed an alliance with POD giant iUniverse (www.iuniverse.com) to consider any book that sold over five hundred copies. By "consider," they mean they will consider publishing it. At five hundred copies, this levels the playing field considerably. If you've written a good book and you market it effectively, you'll sell five hundred copies in the blink of an eye.

Publishers I've spoken to at some of the biggest houses in the industry (Time Warner, Simon & Schuster) readily admit they watch these books very carefully to see what's selling. By picking a book that is selling moderately well, the publisher knows two things: the book has found an audience, and the author knows how to market it.

Even if you don't get picked up traditionally, there's still hope. If you sell a reasonable amount of books and you still aspire to a bigger publishing house, you can include this first publishing experience in your query letter.

How do you find these on-demand publishers? A list of some I've worked with follows this article, but who you pick will depend entirely on you and the needs of your book. For some, it