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(Not the article you wanted? Check the index for more) First a disclaimer. My books are published by FACP and distributed by Penguin across Australia and New Zealand. Long before FACP signed me up I investigated POD as a way of getting into print, and this article contains my findings. Print on demand (POD) is a technology for generating very small quantities of a book - even one copy at a time. Thanks to this technology and the phenomenal reach of the internet, many new 'publishers' have sprung out of nowhere to set up business. They'll take your manuscript, charge a small 'typesetting' or 'setup' fee, and make your book 'available' from amazon.com and every bookstore on the planet. Sounds great, but there are still problems with Print on Demand, whether the process is used by a company or an individual. For example, POD books are more expensive than those printed in a larger run using conventional means. It's not unusual to see a paperback priced at $29.95 retail. (All prices in this article are in Australian Dollars - the US$ equivalent is about two thirds of each amount.) As a comparison of cost pricing, I was quoted $14 for a single POD book and around $3-$4 each for 4000 books printed via offset press. At $4 each I could have posted dozens of review copies without a second thought, and there would have been enough difference in the price to allow for a distributor's 60% - 65% discount. (Unfortunately, distributors won't take self-pub books.) However, I would also have around 3599 copies in the garage right now, and a $16,000 hole in my finances. POD books are nearly always non-returnable, which is another point against them. Normally, a bookstore can return unsold copies for credit (if they couldn't do this, they'd go broke. They can't predict which books will sell and which will languish on the shelves - not even publishers can do that, and they're the ones buying up manuscripts in the first place!) With POD books, a customer goes into a store and places an order using the ISBN, author and title. In many stores, the customer has to pay for the book there and then, because the bookstore doesn't want to end up with a copy they can't sell. (They've all been conned by unscrupulous authors who've ordered copies of their own books and never returned to pay or pick them up.) The bookstore order is handled by the POD company, who organise to have the book printed and shipped. They'll usually wait for one or more weeks, to see whether any more single copy orders for that title come in so they can batch them up. The next problem is one of perception. There are good books being published using POD means, but the vast majority are works which, before the advent of the technology, would have languished in slush piles. Many POD publishers will accept anything if the author is willing to pay the bill, and that means book stores have been deluged with people trying to get POD books onto their shelves. The last thing they want is for their regular customers to end up with someone's first draft, and as there's no way they're going to personally read everything they're offered they generally refuse to take POD books point blank - although they will order copies in to fill firm orders. But how do they know it's a POD book? There are more clues than you'd expect: The paper. Pod books are often printed on 80gsm photocopy paper - since the machines that print them are basically huge laser printers, this shouldn't come as a surprise. The sales rep. Bookstores know their reps. They buy all their books through a handful of them (or through head office, if it's a chain store.) Therefore, when someone comes in with a cardboard box under their arm all kinds of alarm bells start ringing. The imprint. If the book store owner has never heard of the publisher they'll probably enter the name on their computer to see what else they've published. Or they might scan the barcode on the back of the book. Unless... No EAN barcode or ISBN. These cost money, so they're often left off POD books. No CIP data. Catalogue information used by libraries. This is free in Australia, but you have to apply for it. Part of the requirement for getting this data is that you have to submit a copy of your book to the National Library and another to your State Library. The format. As in the size of the book. Most paperbacks are A or B format, or trade paperbacks. If the paper hasn't already given them a clue, books which are almost exactly the size of A4 or Letter size paper cropped in half do the trick. The price. As mentioned above, POD books cost a lot more to print. If the average A format paperback is $19.95 the same thing in POD could be $29.95. And the killer... No returns. The bookstore has to be able to hand them back for a full refund if they don't sell. While you might be able to deal with your local store personally, book stores elsewhere will just turn them down. All of these things count against POD books. You can rant all you like, but it won't change the perception that POD is primarily used for books which don't have a big enough market to make a proper print run worthwhile. What's the alternative? Commercial publishers. Unlike POD publishers, they do the following: Print thousands of copies up front, just like newspapers and magazines. Get thousands of copies into hundreds of brick & mortar bookstores, which is where the vast majority of books are sold. Allow stores to return books for credit against future purchases. Pray that your book catches the eye of passing traffic - because there's no other way enough people are going to find out about it. Pray that enough of this passing trade will tell their friends about the book to create a self-sustaining buzz. A POD publisher does none of the above. They may argue that they're modern and efficient, but an author would (or should) ask how people are going to pick their work off a bookstore shelf if it's not there in the first place. Being available is nowhere near the same as being stocked. What's the alternative? The holy grail is a publisher who offers you a contract with a substantial advance on royalties (say, a four or five figure sum), prints thousands of copies of your book up front, gets them into hundreds of bookstores, posts out dozens of review copies to media outlets & reviewers, sends a large batch of freebies to their sales reps, pays 10% royalty on retail price of the book (NOT net) and has an established, comprehensive distribution channel which will get your book into stores, public libraries and schools right across the country. Is it difficult to get published in this manner? Hell yes. Is it impossible? No, but you may have to write and abandon several books before you break through, treating them as no more than practice. And it's a long, long road... it can take years of work to become proficient enough at the trade to attract a publisher's interest. In my case it took eleven years from writing the first sentence to putting my name on a contract. 
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