Posts Tagged ‘Outskirts Press’
Getting an Account with Lightning Source
Posted by: Michael R. Hicks in About Publishing on January 30th, 2009
For those who may be thinking about Lightning Source (LSI), I wanted to give you a quick rundown on what it takes to at least get your foot in the door and get an account.
The first thing you need to keep in mind is that Lightning Source is not a path for those who don’t know how or aren’t willing to do all the in-depth pre-press work. This company is geared toward working with publishers who have technical people working the nuts and bolts of getting a book to press. They’re willing to work with authors, as well, as long as you really understand what you’re getting into.
So, what’s involved? First, assuming you’re up for the technical side of it, you log onto their site and go through the account creation process. A few things you’ll need up front: your company information; ISBN prefix from at least one of your ISBNs; charge card information so they can charge the necessary fees when you get that far; and bank account information (account number and routing number) for where your royalties will go. As far as I know, they don’t verify that you’re a company, but if you’ve gone this far in getting your book published, you’re silly if you don’t at least set up a sole proprietorship or LLC so you can write off your business expenses (there are lots of other good reasons to do this as a business, but that one goes directly to your wallet or pocketbook). Read the rest of this entry »
Print On Demand Options, Part 4: Lightning Source
Posted by: Michael R. Hicks in About Publishing on January 28th, 2009
Beyond just getting your book on Amazon, it’s now time to look at the bigger picture.
Amazon is a giant, but they aren’t the only game in town, by far. The other on-line (and storefront) biggie is Barnes & Noble, plus the other thousands of other “smaller” chains and independent bookstores out there.
If you decided to go with a traditional POD like Outskirts Press, their upper-tier plans offer distribution to Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Ingram, and Baker & Taylor. Those last two are key, because they’re the big-boy distributors to thousands of booksellers. I want access to those distribution channels, but I can’t get there through Lulu or CreateSpace (and as I noted previously, the price model with traditional PODs won’t work for a book as long as mine). BookSurge is also not an option, in my opinion, because they don’t have a relationship with Ingram. I wonder if that could be because Ingram owns Lightning Source, which is BookSurge’s main competition. Hmmm…
And that brings us to the focus of this post: Lightning Source. Now, for those who don’t know, Lightning Source is one of the world’s largest – if not the largest – print on demand company (with operations in the U.S. and U.K.) that is used by most POD publishers – but not Amazon’s CreateSpace – to actually print the books. But they don’t offer the “author friendly” services of the traditional PODs or Lulu: if you want to go to Lightning Source as an independent author/publisher, you can, but they put up lots of caveats and warnings that this is not a venture for the faint of heart! Read the rest of this entry »
Print On Demand Options, Part 1: Traditional PODs
Posted by: Michael R. Hicks in About Publishing on January 20th, 2009
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!). Read the rest of this entry »
