Publishing Your Book :

Advice Print On Demand

We recommend that authors thinking about POD Publishing On Demand read these books:

Sell Your Book On Amazon - Brent Sampson
Aiming At Amazon - Aaron Shepard Link

If you can only afford one get Aaron's.
Amazon are probably the best route for POD they will take care of most things for you and advice what you can do to reduce fees i.e. self sourcing your ISBN numbers etc

AMAZON BOOKSURGE

We advice that all you need to do for yourself is to market your book independently with a web page for each book, this will give you a marketing channel independent of Amazon or any other POD publisher you might choose.
Even if you link from your website funneling sales through Amazon, you will be assisting your general marketing and sales more professionall

Recommended

We recommend that authors, all authors publish on demand their works and free themselves from the need to give away percentages to old world publishers, who have already missed the digital Amazon boat.

Bookshops demand large discounts, and these days most books are purchased online.

Amazon, and others require large discounts from authors (and publishers) so why pay twice, its YOUR WORK.

Print publishing on demand puts you the author in control. No one makes a fortune from writing a first book, unless you have written a 'Harry Potter' and if you do write such a best seller, controlling the books publishing and marketing means you will keep a reasonable share of any revenue, also you will keep your own rights, copyrights, film rights etc, whereas old fashioned publishing small print may take away all your rights, to you own work. Often many books cannot be re-published due to such constraints.

If you do not write a best seller, at least by using digital options YOU will get a better return from your work. And if it turns out to be a substantially popular work, then conventional publishers will be beating a path to your door.

The only thing that you need to concentrate upon is marketing your book.

Publishing through Amazon - looks like the best option.

You can leave the marketing to Amazon. However we believe that it’s a very good idea to build up your own independent marketing strategy. This means constructing a webpage/site about each book, and then optimizing with search parameters on the web. These last two functions are all you need in this digital publishing age, be in control, you have no need of old world publishers anymore!

Digital Age

We are living in interesting times and changing times for publishing.
The music industry with its distribution threatened by the internet and mp3 downloads may try to retain its control to some extent, however musicians can now do it all for themselves. Similarly these changes are now causing upheavals in the publishing industry, due mainly to Amazon.

But the good news is that authors are in a better position to control and benefit from their work, it is your work after all.

Why do you need an old world publisher, when you have Amazon?

Do you need a publisher to get your books into high street bookshops?

Why? When most books are now sold online.
You, the author, with digital POD are in complete command of your work, and you can maximise whatever the returns will be from your work due to the opportunities now available in the digital world.

If you you are convinced you have written a great best seller, and you want a traditional publisher, who will take about 70% of the revenue and charge out of your share for marketing and book shop discounts, OK that route is available for you; keep on submitting your manuscripts.

If you have realised that things have changed and your work can be published on demand and marketed by yourself (and Amazon) then we can assist.

The main thing to pay attention to after writing your book is to market it in the digital universe.

To build a promotional and factual webpage for it and maximise this to ensure that interested readers across the internet universe can find it.

Advantages & Disadvantages

Advantages
Selling through your own webpage is very positive it promotes your work and you will get full postal and email details of all your customers. This is not possible with book shop sales and not available from Amazon.

Knowing who your readers are means you can keep in touch, obtain feedback promote new editions and new books etc.

Disadvantages
Printing in batches can sometimes leave you without any books to sell until you re-order, so delaying your deliveries.

Short Print Runs

Advantages of short print runs of POD methods allow, for corrections and updates, even new and collectors issues i.e. variable front covers and additional chapters, and inclusion of graphics and internal photographs.

Pitfalls

Be aware that BOOKSURGE have adopted a new strategy – this is only to print and put authors books onto Amazon.com and on no other foreign Amazon!

This means that authors must buy books from USA Booksurge then pay the fees including posted i.e. to UK then Post to Amazon UK and then give a discount.

However Print On demand is still a good idea but for none USA nationals its perhaps better to print with a local POD specialist.

The problem is much more acute if the book has local and national characteristics e.g. a local book.

Distribution Lock-out
This is another issue it is difficult to get the large book shops to stock books that do not enter their normal distribution channels in the way these have been set up.

We have a book about Mods and Soul music in Manchester in the 1960’s – quite specialised buy of great historical interest in Manchester. But Waterstones, WHSmiths and Borders cant purchase locally and trying to contact nationally either directly or via their own distribution channels is very difficult indeed.

But on the bright side
Small bookshops should be happy, Ebay is a good option, Amazon, and other web channels and the best is to build a promotional website and sell through it as we have done, with quite a lot of success.

And we can do this for YOU.

The future must be for authors to benefit most from their work, not suffering from varying levels of give away discounts and postage/delivery fees eating away at tight margins.

The Espresso Book Machine