(POB) publishers?
Are they any good? Are they worth the money? Or are they all just one big scam?
Any info you could give would help.
(POB) publishers?
Are they any good? Are they worth the money? Or are they all just one big scam?
Any info you could give would help.
The Print on Demand page from the Writer Beware section of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America website. No names mentioned but lots of good advice as to how to tell the good PoD sites from the bad.
The main Writer Beware page does have names to beware of.
Even if you’re not specifically interested in f&sf, these are good places to start because the scammers don’t care about genres.
Good advice, I’ll look into it.
I have had one or two who have been endlessly sending me e-mails and letters, and since getting into the nobel field of publishing is next to impossible these days, it seems like the only way to go.
Rule of thumb: never, ever, ever use a publisher who solicits you through email.
I second Exapno’s warning.
“Print on Demand” is a technology. It merely means that, instead of doing a large run of books, they do small runs as books are ordered. In general, POD prints their book on a souped-up copier instead of an ofset press, but you could do POD on offset (say, if you printed a thousand orders at a time).
There are many different ways POD can be used. Wildside Press, for instance, is a regular commercial publisher, but they use POD to publish books as ordered.
More commonly, though, POD is used by vanity presses (note that Wildside does not promote POD technology; the fact that they use it is irrelevant to the average reader).
A vanity press is not a technology; it is a business model. The idea of a vanity press is to make the author pay for the publication of his own work. Most presses that tout their POD capabilities are just vanity presses trying to hide that fact. They will accept any manuscript they are sent – good ones, and truly awful ones. And all the time they will be feeding authors a line about how hard it is to get published and how they are giving authors the opportunity, etc., etc., etc.,
Don’t believe them. They are a dead end. (The worst of the lot, BTW, is the infamous PublishAmerica. See my sig.)
And it’s a myth that commercial publishers aren’t interested in new authors. Library Journal publishes a “first-time novelist” article every quarter; they list over 200 new authors each time. So that’s 800 people who are having their books published for the first time each year. The key is to write a book good enough to be in that 800. That’s the difficult part.
And FWIW, I concur with both of them, RealityChuck makes some very good points. I think it’s important for prospective authors to understand the difference between a printer and a publisher. A printer simply produces copies of books, and that’s what most POD publishers and vanity presses do.
A publisher provides many other beneficial services for authors, including marketing, promoting, and distributing the book. Their ability to do those things will determine (to a large extent) how well a book sells. Printing copies of your book is easy. Getting two copies on the shelves in every Barnes & Noble is harder. Getting people to walk in and buy your book is harder still.
If you have a built in audience who will buy your book – maybe through a website you run, a special-interest group, or if you have a following of readers already for some other reason – then maybe POD publishing makes sense. if you have a niche title that you know won’t sell but that you feel passionate about then maybe POD publishing makes sense.
As RealityChuck said, publishers will take manuscripts from first-time authors if they believe they will sell. If you’ve produced something that 2000 people will pay for, you can find a publisher.