 What is a POD? For example the company I use (no I will not name it, you will have to choose for your self) charges a base price of lets say $7.00 per paperback book of about 150 pages. I as the author (and technically the publisher)can add a mark up so I get a commission of lets say $2.00 each. The problem here is the cost to the customer of POD books is higher than regular paper back off the grocery store shelf with a combined total cost of $9.00 plus shipping. There is nothing you can do about this cost issue as printing one at a time is more expensive than printing lets say 500 to 1000 copies at a time like a regular publishing house or a Vanity Press. The other issue with Print On Demand service (which this website is here to help solve) is they provide no advertising of your work. They obviously advertise their own service and all the books available on their site. However most POD services have hundreds or even thousands of authors and a corresponding number of titles in dozens of different topic categories (genre). What does this mean to the individual author? Anonymity and obscurity amongst hundreds of other authors and thousands of titles. Of course this does not mean you shouldn't use POD for your work. It does however mean that you are left to your own devices to promote your self and your work. If you have significant financial resources, like $500 to $1,000 to spend each month on things like Google ad words, professional web design, and payed search engine inclusion than you probably will not have a problem being found by potential customers. But alas most new authors,like me, are in the starving artist category and must find other means. So we use a social and professional network or fan sites, and free links pages like www.painbrain.com . Vanity Pres similar but not to POD. A vanity press is a more of a traditional book manufacturing outfit that will print anybodies work. there is no submission process they simply take your manuscript and print a minimum of between 100 to 500 books. Then they send you all the copies along with a rather large bill! If you go the rout of vanity press you will get your books for much less than the cost of basic POD per book cost. However you will have to buy a large number of them all at once. This means that now you have all the issues of self promotion you do of a POD and vanity pres companies do not provide a (usually) free electronic storefront. Additionally you have to physically distribute the books you just bought from the printer your self. BUT this could also be a good thing if you can develop a relationship with local book store owners. You can also rent space in some book stores to sell your work. The vanity press books where sold to you at wholesale or below if you bought a large number so you can compete with other traditionally published books in the store. One additional note, both POD and Vanity Press authors are looked upon as writers that were not good enough to make it in the traditional markets. It is just the way of things, and it is not always true ether. That is the primary reason for creating www.painbrain.com is to help all us starting writers to get the word out for as little cash as possible to as big a market as possible. You can be discovered by traditional publishers, screen writers looking for material, and simply sell more books this way also. We are writers, supposed masters of the written word. The internet is quite literally made of the written word. So lets use our considerable combined talent and let the world know we exist by creating web logs, domains, pages, loads of good quality content on social networks, and many links back to a common source where we all can be found www.painbrain.com . |
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