Self-Publishing Resources

Posted By Sue Collier on March 30, 2010

Media Shift had an interesting article last week on The Pitfalls of Using Self-Publishing Packages. Basically, it offered a warning to authors who opt to go with so-called “self-publishing” companies such as iUniverse, Author House, and Lulu. This is a topic I have covered here many times, but I think it’s always worth a revisit because there is still a lot of confusion among authors when it comes to the book publishing process.

Another reason I’d like to address this again is because of a phone call I had last week from a potential client. She published her book through one of the POD “self-publishers,” using their ISBN—so of course they are listed as the publisher of record. The book came out a year ago, and in spite of some good press she received (it’s a highly disturbing, newsworthy topic), she’s only sold about 20 copies of the book. She wanted to talk to me about marketing and promotions. After a lengthy discussion about the problems associated with subsidy publishing (for that is what she essentially did), she agreed to send me a copy of the book so I could take a look at it.

Well, the good news was that she had a well-written, compelling story. The bad news was that it was a poorly edited, unproofread book (I found more than a dozen typos in the first chapter alone) bound shoddily within an amateurish cover design. And the price was $21.95—for a 200-page trade paperback.

The even worse news was when I told her there wasn’t much we could do in terms of promoting a book like that—wrought with errors and priced too high. She was devastated—because although she hadn’t invested much from a financial standpoint in the project (these companies typically offer a very low up-front investment), she had given fully of herself from an emotional standpoint. The story was an incredibly personal one—and it was a story she really wanted to tell. Unfortunately, there isn’t much of a readership for a book in that bad of shape.

Then there is the price issue. What many authors don’t realize is that because it costs so little up front to publish your own book, the subsidies need to make the money up from somewhere—and they do it from the back end, by charging authors exorbitant fees to buy their own books back from them. This may not sound so bad, until authors realize how little profit they will make if they try to sell the books through, say, Amazon. Hence, they price their books from a profit-making standpoint, which is often a lot higher than the book-buying public will pay.

And it’s a story I see over and over; she is not the first client to contact me after investing themselves in a POD “self-publisher” only to learn they’ve wasted a lot of time and sometimes even quite a bit of money. I think the biggest problem with these outfits is that with such low up-front investment, the authors dive in head first, often without professional editing, typesetting, and cover design. Although these hybrids sometimes offer these services, I have found them to be less than satisfactory. The result of this low-cost approach is frequently a poor-quality book that sells few copies. (By the way, you can still get book digital printing without going to one of these POD outfits. Lightning Source is a print-on-demand book printing company that offers this service to authors/publishers directly—and they have good distribution channels.)

Furthermore, many of these companies are vanity publishers calling themselves “self-publishing” or “self-publishing POD” companies. In reality, though, they are often trading on the good name of self-publishing to make their companies appear to be a legitimate option for authors. Authors who truly want to self-publish books need to do their research. If you are publishing your own book, make sure you know what you are getting into.

Categories: POD self-publishing, authors, books, do-it-yourself publishing, marketing, promotions, self-publishing
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