There are lots of paths to get your book printed, so you have to sort out what your goals are, then take a look at the tradeoffs in your particular situation. For me, my primary goals were to get In Her Name 1) onto Amazon, 2) into Barnes & Noble (preferably both on-line and in the brick and mortar stores), and 3) available for distribution to booksellers everywhere, which means distribution via Ingram and Baker & Taylor.
One of the available options for Print on Demand (POD) is what I’m going to call a “Pay-for-POD” company like Outskirts Press, which is my personal favorite in the features-for-price matrix. They offer a number of packages, ranging from $199 to $999, that have different services to help you get your book into print and distribution. So once you pay the package fee and get your book out there, you can start earning royalties.
For a short book, this might not be a bad option, assuming you wanted/needed the services that the packages offer. But for me, the economic model doesn’t work very well. Using the Outskirts Press calculator (and the other PODs are similar, or even more pricey), consider that for my book in trade paperback (6″x9″) format at 678 pages, the unit price for the $999 package with a discount of 20% and royalty of 20% comes to $23.95; for the $399 package it would be $26.95. My royalty would be $4.79 and $5.39, respectively.
“Well, hey, that’s not so bad!” you say. But consider this: with a retailer discount of only 20%, the only place that might consider picking up the book is Barnes & Noble and Amazon! No brick and mortar store is going to pick it up at such a short discount (they expect at least 40%). And even Barnes & Noble won’t be able to discount it much to their buyers; it would likely sell at full price, and most folks aren”t going to pay $23.95 for a novel, even one as good as In Her Name (Okay, okay! Shameless self-promotion! Big grin!).
Just for fun, I raised the discount to a full 50% and lowered my royalty to 10%. That brings the retail price to $34.95 for the $999 package, and $39.95 for the $399 one, with my royalty at $3.50 and $4.00, respectively. Tell me, when was the last time you saw a novel with a retail price of $34.95? even if the retailer slapped an in-store discount of 30% on it, it would still cost the customer $27.95! So that’s not gonna work.
On top of that, I’d have to sell a minimum of 74 copies under the $399 package (20% royalty + 20% discount options) to cover my up-front costs; for the $999 package, I’d have to sell over 200 just to break even!
So, that route may work for you, but doesn’t work for me. Again, everybody’s situation is different, and there are pros and cons to everything.
If you’re wondering, BookSurge - Amazon’s POD that caused so much of a ruckus last year – falls into this category. I had heard there were a lot of complaints about the quality of their printing and customer service. I can’t say anything about the latter, but as far as the print quality goes, they use the same printing facilities as CreateSpace (which I have used), and I can say that the print quality is good, although not as good as Lightning Source. The major downside, though, is that neither BookSurge nor CreateSpace distributes through Ingram, only Baker & Taylor.
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#1 by Eric on December 29th, 2009 - 7:52 pm
Hey Mike, great articles and thanks for the advice. Things might actually work out for me after all.