Print on Demand

Bookselling giant Amazon has thrown the self-publishing world into turmoil by imposing its significant influence, announcing a new, hardline policy for publishers: if you want a print-on-demand book to be stocked on Amazon.com, you need to leave your current printer and sign up with the Amazon-owned printer Booksurge. In other words, all those publishers who currently have a large catalogue of books being printed by other sources - such as Lightning Source Inc. - must break ties with their current printer, and reformat (as necessary) and resubmit their entire back catalogue to Booksurge (no small feat). Read more »

In 2004 I was writing a series of articles about Dan Brown's next book when a great thought hit me: why not do a little extra work and publish my work as a book. The big question was, how? The standard model of publishing didn't exactly suit my situation. If I attempted to 'sell' the book to a major publisher, even if successful it would likely take 12 months to 2 years to get the book on shelves (the standard turn-around). Brown's book would have likely been out by then (although, in this particular case, his book has been delayed). If I did an off-set run out of my own money, I would likely need around $5000 to print 1000 copies, a substantial risk for an author to take. Furthermore, I faced distribution difficulties as I live in Australia.

One final idea was worth checking though - the developing industry of Print-on-Demand. After plenty of online searching, I came across a Print-on-Demand company called Lightning Source, which offered the perfect solution for me. Below I'll outline why Lightning Source (LS) suited me so well, and why it will probably suit most other authors as well. Read more »

In starting out as a publisher, it normally takes quite a while to establish a catalogue. First, you have to find an author worth publishing (or write the books yourself), and even once a book is commissioned, the process of writing, rewriting, editing and production can take some time. However, small publishers should be aware that there is another way of building your catalogue, and making some profit in the process - through books which have passed into the public domain.

Many very interesting books are now out of their copyright period and have therefore passed into the public domain. If you have access to a target audience interested in a certain topic, it is definitely worthwhile browsing through the public domain books related to that topic, as there may be a hidden gem just waiting to see the light of the day (again). For example, if you ran a popular internet forum devoted to esoteric and occult subjects, there are many key texts from the past few centuries which are in the public domain. Certainly, a large number of readers might appreciate a beautifully designed version of one of the classics. Read more »