I’m glad you’ve already decided not to pay a publisher to publish your work. It may sound basic, but a lot of writers either give their writing away for free, or are willing to pay a publisher. When looking for a publisher, you might want to visit this site if you haven’t already: Writer Beware. It has some information on recent and not-so-recent publishing hoaxes by both vanity presses (the ones that expect you to “invest”) and so-called traditional publishers and agents.
I believe you. But places like PublishAmerica don’t charge a fee. They even give you $1 advance! That’s why you’ve got to be careful. There’s a lot more to a scam than up-front fees.
I used to be Virtual Print Supply Chain Program Manager for iUniverse. Basically, that means I was responsible for designing and implementing the technological infrastructure for iUniverse to communicate both book content and business information to its print providers. Unfortunately, the bursting of the tech bubble and the overall business decline after 9/11 led to a serious retrenching at iUniverse in early 2002, including scrapping that project and letting me go. So I have some first-hand knowledge on some of these issues.
Barnes & Noble owns a significant chunk of iUniverse (at one time, it was 49%, but I don’t know whether that’s changed in the last few years or not). B&N’s investment in iUniverse was probably as much a hedging of bets as anything else – they wanted to make sure that if on-demand publishing took off, they’d have a presence in the market.
When I was there, Lightning Source did still produce the majority of the books published by iUniverse, but we worked with several other print providers as well. Since Lightning Source was a competitor as well as a supplier, iUniverse wanted to broaden its supplier base – there was also the concern that if the growth of the market developed as projected, we would outstrip the ability of even Lightning Source to keep up (that never happened, of course). Much of my job was developing a standardized way of communicating between iUniverse and the print providers, so that we could dynamically obtain price quotes on any given job and route to the provider who had the best price and capacity to meet the turnaround. I worked directly with four other print providers, and had some level of discussions with several more, in my time at iUniverse.
Lightning Source is the big boy in the print-on-demand book market – they’ve had the most experience, and as one of IBM’s earliest customers for large-scale POD book technology, they had a lot of help from some of IBM’s best and brightest during their early days. The fact that they’re owned by Ingram means that they’ve been able to leverage Ingram’s relationship with publishers to grab a big part of the POD book market. Doesn’t necessarily mean they’re better than other POD providers, and if you’re a fairly small player they have little incentive to worry about treating you fairly, but they are far and away the market share leader.
The capacity to produce short-run paperback books has been seriously oversold by the IBMs and Xeroxes of the world, so there are lots of companies out there with excess capacity on their equipment. The problem is a whole lot of them don’t have a clue what they’re doing, and however cheaply they offer to print your books, they’re going to make a mess of it one way or another. If nothing else, working through iUniverse, Xlibris, or Lightning Source means that your book will probably be handled by a print provider that more or less knows what they’re doing.
That’s an interesting post, rackensack. What’s your personal take on the ebook market?
Sorry; I guess I did sort of hijack, or at least aid and abet the hijacking of, your thread. Anyway, I don’t have anything against e-books per se, but as a consumer I’ve never come across anything I’d rather own as an e-book instead of in dead-tree form. Every e-book technology I’ve seen so far still feels like a solution in search of a problem to me – I mean, I’ve been professionally involved with technology for nearly twenty years, I owned a Palm Pilot back in the days even before US Robotics bought Palm (and owned an HP95LX, even before that), and had any number of Project Gutenberg text files on my Palm and HP machines, so it’s not like I’m a Luddite or unwilling to try reading stuff on screen. I think it’s partly that I’m not a devotee of any particular genre that’s difficult to serve with hard-copy books, unlike some of the confirmed e-book authors and readers who’ve chimed in here. Most of what I’m interested in reading is either commercially viable for traditional publishers or available for free on the web.