The Author-izer

Posts Tagged ‘POD’

These are my links for February 3rd through February 6th:

• Wiley Publising Spring 2009 eCatalog –
• Adventures in Publishing a Book: What You Need to Know About Self Publishing –
• A Long Winter – 1/5/2009 – Publishers Weekly –
• Blockbuster or Bust – WSJ.com –
• Nathan Bransford – Literary Agent: It’s The End of Publishing As We Know It: Do You Feel Fine? –

These are my links for January 3rd through January 8th:

• iUniverse Bookstore Premier Pro offer –
• John Kremer’s Birthday Bash January 16 at 5 PM Pacific –
• iUniverse Launches Bookstore Premier Pro publishing package –
• A Splash of Color for Your Whitepapers –
• How Commenting Can Lead to Book Sales « Book Marketing Buzz –

These are my links for December 14th from 18:44 to 19:04:

• Amazon Windowshop Beta -
• With Big Exception, Trade Sales Slowed in September   – 11/5/2008 7:57:00 AM – Publishers Weekly -
• Digital Textbooks Gaining Favor – BusinessWeek -
• AdaptiveBlue’s Book Widgets -
• Digital Publishing Solutions – Electronic Publishing Software -
• Cover That Book: Bestselling Book Cover System -
• Write To Your Market :: Marketing copywriting and bestselling book covers -
• Random House to digitize thousands of books – USATODAY.com -
• Book Publishers, Book Publishing, Self Publishing Companies, Print on Demand Publishing – Home -
• The Book Connection — Your Link to Publishing Professionals and Trade Quality Books -
• Book Marketing Maven: eZines for Authors -

These are my links for December 5th through December 13th:

• Wyeth’s Use of Medical Ghostwriters Questioned – NYTimes.com -
• scott westerfeld – ghostwriting -
• Learn to Write Fiction » Blog Archive » Book Marketing 2.0 -
• Give the gift of publishing from iUniverse – For the first time ever, gift buyers can purchase any iUniverse publishing package as gifts for the aspiring authors in their lives.
• Successful Self-Publishing: Cooking with Trader Joe’s -

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (30.0MB) | Embed

On Wednesday, December 3, 2008, I gave a presentation about self-publishing and POD to Clive Matson’s “Getting Published” writers’ group. I’ve reproduced my handout here. Click the “play” button below for the recording. If you pay close attention, you can hear me make a mortifying grammar gaffe: I said “have chose” instead of “have chosen.”

The recorder shut down before we had finished the discussion, which went on for quite some time, but after we had moved from the topic of POD to other aspects of marketing a book.

The example of POD success leading to a contract with a major publisher is Terry Fallis’ book The Best-Laid Plans.

The Handout

Traditional Self-Publishing

• Higher up-front costs, but lower per-book cost (offset printing)
• You’
  re responsible for storage and distribution (shipment)

Print on Demand

• Lower up front costs, but higher per-book cost (digital printing)
• POD company prints and ships books as needed

Costs Author Pays Either Way

• Copyediting
• Book design and typesetting
• Cover design
• Proofreading
• ISBN/Bar code

Podcasting Your Book

• Inexpensive, but time-consuming
• Builds audience/platform (might lead to publishing contract)
• Best for fiction, poetry

Some POD Companies

• Booksurge/Amazon (www.booksurge.com)
• iUniverse (www.iuniverse.com)
• Lightning Source/Ingram (www.lightningsource.com)
• Lulu (www.lulu.com)
• MagCloud POD magazines (www.magcloud.com)

Read

• The Self-Publishing Manual, by Dan Poynter
• The Fine Print of Self-Publishing, by Mark Levine

Listen

• The Writing Show (www.writingshow.com)
• Publishing Basics Radio (www.wbjbradio.com)
• The Publishing Insiders (www.blogtalkradio.com/ThePublishingInsiders)

Visit

• http://delicious.com/authorizer/
  (tags: bookmarketing, writing, ghostwriting, publishing, POD)
• http://www.selfpublishing.com/
• http://www.podiobooks.com/
• http://misssnark.blogspot.com/

A couple of months ago I wrote about storing your data “in the cloud.” Now Hewlett-Packard wants publishers to store magazines in the cloud and make them available on demand. These days, a “publisher” is anyone who posts content online, so that means you.

Thanks to colleagues in the Northern California chapter of the National Speakers Association (NSANC), I had the opportunity to attend a presentation on MagCloud at HP Labs today. NSA member Ian Griffin used MagCloud to create the first issue of “Professionally Speaking” and send it to NSANC members.

MagCloud prints on heavy 80-lb matte stock rather than the flimsy paper used by most magazine publishers. I compared “Professionally Speaking” with the assorted business magazines piled up on my desk and with the Better Social Media Communication Results newsletter my colleague Lee Hopkins published on an offset press. The MagCloud product compared favorably to both, particularly for printing photos.

The text didn’t seem as crisp or black as that in the BetterComms newsletter, but that may be a function of the resolution of the PDF file uploaded to create “Professionally Speaking,” or perhaps the font color or style, because the body text in HP’s own MagCloud Publisher Guide is as clear and sharp a black as anyone could wish for. (You can download a free PDF version of that to help you set up your own MagCloud publication.)

Technology

Many POD book publishers use the same HP Indigo printers that produce MagCloud’s magazines. We looked at an Indigo 3000 in the Color Lab, but that’s already been superseded by newer, faster models that push the break-even point versus offset printing to 5,000 copies. (That means that unless you’re printing 5,000 or more copies, HP Indigo technology, and by extension MagCloud, is more cost-effective than offset printing.) Even the older model is impressive—more than seven feet tall, yet amazingly compact and tidy for industrial production. Ordinary inkjets, laser printers, and even offset presses use 4-color printing: Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black (abbreviated “K” for reasons I can’t remember). The Indigos use six colors, either the standard CCMMYK of photo printers like my Epson Stylus Photo 1280, or Pantone spot colors. They’ll print on practically anything, including plastic cards, and the samples we saw were beautiful. I don’t think I will add one to my “covet” list, though: the PG&E bill would go through the roof, and the fan noise would keep me up at night.

Serial Typography

Until now, the burgeoning print-on-demand industry has focused on publishing books. Magazines are actually better candidates for POD, which allows for timely production and reduces wastage. (Some 50% of magazines sent to newsstands are never sold and get pulped.)

The defining characteristic of magazines is recurrence. When you sign up as a MagCloud publisher, you’re asked to enter a title and subtitle for your magazine, and then create your first issue. During the private beta, you’ll need an invitation in order to get a publisher account, and they’ve already had more than a thousand requests, so you may have to wait a while before you can try it out.

Many other print publications also lend themselves to this multiple-issue format: newsletters, annual reports, membership directories, course materials, and the like. So do e-zines and blogs. You might not really want to start distributing your e-zine in print format to all your subscribers, but having a print version to hand around at networking meetings could be useful, and it’s possible that a few of your readers will actually want to order one.

If all you want is a short run of a short-format document, however, you may want to consider another POD service, because right now MagCloud offers you one trim size, one binding, and one text stock. (Cover and text stock are the same.) Other features, like templates to allow non-designers to lay out their own magazines, are still in an extremely rudimentary phase. And MagCloud is not (yet?) in the business of selling ISSNs. (That’s like an ISBN, but for magazines; I remember getting one for my electronic journal in 1994, and if you ever want your magazine sold in stores, you’ll need one.)

If they can find a way to import RSS feeds easily MagCloud will attract bloggers in droves. Right now Blurb’s “blog slurping” function only works with hosted blogs, which is no use to those of us who publish our blogs from our own servers. If Windows Live Writer can access and import from all my blogs, I don’t know why BookSmart can’t.

Pricing Structure

MagCloud’s own business model is to charge US$0.20 per full-color page. That’s one side of an 8.5 x 11 sheet, the same as one page in a word-processing program or one page as a copy shop would charge you. This represents a comfortable but not extravagant markup over HP’s costs. It’s less than you’d pay for color photocopies and probably less than it would cost you in ink to print the magazine yourself on an inkjet printer (assuming you have a duplex printer that handles tabloid format sheets, which most people don’t). Publishers add their own markup on top of this base price.

Magazine length is based on a unit of 4 pages, up to a total of 60 pages. (This is short by comparison with most commercial magazines, but much longer than most corporate newsletters.) A 60-page magazine would have a minimum cover price of US$12 plus shipping—steep compared with what you find on the newsstands. And that’s assuming the publisher doesn’t want to make any money on it.

There is no set-up fee for publishing a magazine if your PDF is ready to go.

Magazines 2.0

Because of the Indigo technology’s advantage in short-run printing, the MagCloud team is focusing its efforts on niche publishers like NSA or the Palo Alto flying club. One person at today’s presentation described MagCloud as “iTunes for magazines.” MagCloud has a lot in common with blogging, podcasting, and niche networks created with Ning. While print magazines already exist to serve a phenomenal variety of specific interests, those magazines also cease publication with alarming frequency as subscriber numbers and advertising revenue drop off and distribution costs increase.

A New Model for Print Advertising

Print advertising is the oldest form (apart from yelling at passers-by in the open market, anyway), and it has long-established conventions that simply aren’t appropriate for MagCloud’s niche publications, any more than they suit most podcasts or blogs. Advertisers buy print and broadcast ads based on something called CPM, which means “cost per thousand.” So for every thousand readers you have, you get X amount.

Naturally, if you only have 500 subscribers—or 50—CPM is a rotten model. Traditionally-published magazines give away free subscriptions to “industry professionals” (meaning anyone who signs up): it helps them keep their circulations numbers high. If you’ve ever had one of these free subscriptions and tried to cancel it, you know how difficult it is to stop magazine publishers from sending endless issues of dubious relevance.

MagCloud publishers who want to subsidize their printing costs with advertising (an established revenue model and one not yet much used in book publishing) can learn important lessons from online content creators. Highly targeted audiences are more valuable than sheer numbers. If the advertiser’s product matches the interests of a magazine’s readership closely enough, sales are guaranteed. For some groups (like the wine geeks who listen to Grape Radio), the revenue per order may be quite high and the return on investment in a niche publication very enticing.

This won’t work for all niches, and finding an advertiser to match the interest of your readership might be a challenge. But MagCloud has some ideas about that, too.

Community Vision

Many POD houses make more money by selling design and editing services than by printing and distributing books. Rather than selling design services directly and overtaxing its creative department, HP Labs wants MagCloud to become a community marketplace where content creators can hook up with (and rate) designers, and publishers seeking content can find writers to produce it. In this vision, subscribers could create their own magazines from individual articles in other MagCloud publications. An advertiser could post “I’m trying to reach Baby Boomers in the financial industry” and publishers could respond with their reader demographics and psychographics.

So far the crowdsourcing and social networking aspects of MagCloud are only at the “vision” stage, however. Users of the MagCloud site have two options: to sign up as subscribers, and to sign up as publishers. Eventually, one presumes, it will be possible to sign up as a designer, a content creator, or an advertiser.

Even in its pre-release state, MagCloud offers fascinating possibilities. Like all great ideas, magazine publishing on demand prompts the question “Why hasn’t someone done this before?”

Most of Jeff Bezos’ session at this year’s Book Expo America amounted to an extended sales pitch for the Kindle and Amazon’s plans to get every book in or out of print digitized into Kindle format. This was actually pretty interesting, even though it wasn’t the reason I was listening to the podcast. It did make me see the appeal of the Kindle, though Bezos did not address the real problem facing any such device: you can’t “rip” your existing library of books onto your Kindle the way you can rip your CD collection onto your iPod. That makes replacing your print books with Kindle books prohibitively expensive—at least for compulsive readers like me, who can sell five grocery bags full of books to the local used-book store and still have overflowing shelves. Scanning printed books is a clumsy, time-consuming process that simply isn’t feasible for consumers today, and that’s a serious obstacle to widespread uptake of the Kindle.

But I digress. The reason I wanted to hear the presentation by, and interview with, Jeff Bezos was that I wanted to know more about Amazon’s recent move to insist that all their POD authors use BookSurge for fulfillment. Amazon owns BookSurge, so the move looked not merely self-serving but downright monopolistic to competing POD houses.

I have nothing against BookSurge. One of my clients has been using them since before Amazon bought the company, and while they aren’t perfect, they produce quality books for a fairly low set-up fee. Or, at least, it was low by comparison with AuthorHouse (then First Books) and its competitors at the time. And in 2003, at least, BookSurge was able to offer services that AuthorHouse couldn’t, namely including a color insert section for some critical illustrations.

Since then, companies like Lulu have drastically undercut BookSurge, and the differences in what an author has to pay are one reason for authors to object to Amazon’s decision. There are plenty of others, all with varying degrees of validity. And Amazon’s argument that printing all POD books at BookSurge made distribution easier seemed weak.

Yet it wasn’t at all difficult for Bezos to make a clear argument in favor of the move in his discussion with Chris Anderson at BEA. (Skip to 42:27 in the recording if you want to bypass the Kindle eulogy.)

If you’re going to pioneer something, you are going to create some controversy from time to time, and you have to be willing to be misunderstood. You have to be sure feel good about what you’re doing, and if you don’t, you can go back and course-correct. But if you’re simple-minded about the customer experience, that usually keeps you on the right side of that line… Even small things that we have done that people expect and later find helpful, have initially caused controversy…

Modern Print-on-Demand printers can print and bind a complete book in two hours. In our own fulfillment centers, we have millions of traditionally-printed books. They’re on shelves and in pallets in cartons, ready to be shipped out to customers. Latency for shipping these books is very short, and transportation cost is critically important to us. If somebody orders two books—and most orders are for more than two units—it basically costs us twice as much to transport two books if we have to send them in two separate boxes as it does if we can marry them together. [We have] things like Amazon Prime, where we make two-day shipping free, and things like Super Saver Shipping, where we make shipping free if you order $25, and that $25 [minimum] often gets people to order two items…

Very few books in a demand sense are POD books. Most books are traditional books that we sell. You probably ordered a traditional book and a Print-on-Demand book if you ordered a Print-on Demand book. So we want to marry those things in one box. We can save a lot of money by doing that, we can get the product to customers faster, we can pass on the savings to customers in the form of lower prices, and that’s a great customer experience. But it does require that the book be printed, if it’s a POD book, in our fulfillment center. That’s going to make some people unhappy…

System-wide, it does not make sense to print a POD book anywhere but in our fulfillment center…If you print it somewhere else, to get it in a single box, you gotta cross-ship that book to us, which is a delay, and we’re going to ship it to you tomorrow instead of today. That’s a bad customer experience.

So yes, it’s definitely to Amazon’s benefit to have all POD authors use BookSurge. The specifics of BookLocker’s class action suit against Amazon make it clear that Amazon has some less-than-altruistic motives. No one seems to be clear yet on what additional costs (if any) will be passed on to authors who use POD houses that agree to Amazon’s terms and use BookSurge for printing any books sold through Amazon. It’s possible that customers of Lightning Source or Lulu or Xlibris might have to pay an “Amazon surcharge” of some kind. But I doubt it will be as high as the set-up fee paid by BookSurge customers, because the files Amazon gets from these companies will already be set up and ready to be printed.

Given the way people shop at Amazon, printing books at Amazon’s fulfillment house really is to the customer’s benefit. Despite probable additional charges, it may well prove to benefit the authors of POD books. It might even benefit the other POD houses, because it saves them shipping costs and wear and tear on their equipment. It’s certainly better for anyone than if Amazon refused to carry POD books because the shipping costs are too high.

BookLocker, Lulu, and Lightning Source will continue to make the bulk of their money from the additional services they offer to their authors. It’s worth remembering that traditional publishers don’t have that added source of income, and all bookstores—not just Amazon—have required them to accept lousy terms since the 1930s.

No, really. Nancy Fulton asked “Do you know how to publish a profitable book (and get it on Amazon) in days?” on LinkedIn. She was hoping for additions to a list of POD she had in a blog post on HubSpot that’s no longer available (I’ve made the publish date of this post the date that I answered the original question, but it’s really September 2009 as I type this).

There was a point I made in my response that I think it’s worth making again here:

The process of getting a book printed is very simple these days. Profiting, on the other hand, is more challenging, because of the increase in the number of books printed: there’s a lot of competition for readers. And even though producing a book through, say, Lulu, costs very little, there are still enough costs associated with making the book publishable (your time in writing it, hiring an editor, hiring a designer) that you’ll need to sell quite a few copies in order to realize a profit from book sales.

On the other hand, if having that book gets you $50,000 of new business in the next year, it could be very profitable even if you give copies away.

In any case, profit doesn’t depend on how you publish, but on the quality of the book and—much more—your own marketing skills.

It’s also worth mentioning the Best Answer for this question, provided by Inna Red. Authors who use a POD house like Lulu or Amazon’s own BookSurge automatically get their books on Amazon, but if you print your books yourself, you need to sign up with Amazon.com Advantage or Amazon.com Advantage Professional, depending on the type of books you produce.

Reed Smith asked the following question on LinkedIn:

What is the best way to get a book published?

What is the best way to go about getting a book published. Any advice for a first time author?

This was my answer:

I’m assuming you mean a non-fiction book; things work a bit differently for fiction. One of the best things you can do, whether you choose traditional publishing, self-publishing, or Print on Demand, is write a book proposal. (There are plenty of books about how to do this, some with examples, and also professionals to help you.) A proposal forces you to analyze your target market, your book’s strengths and weaknesses, your goals for the book, and your own ability to sell it.

No matter what form of publishing you choose, promoting the book is your job. Publishers care less about how well you can write (you or they can always hire a ghostwriter like yours truly to ensure the writing is up to their standards) than about whether anyone will want to read it and how you’re going to reach them.

That means you need a “platform”—a way to reach potential readers. If you do a lot of public speaking, have a large (in the tens of thousands) e-mail list, have a popular blog, know celebrities in your field who can endorse the book, etc. and so on, it will help you immensely.

Once the proposal is finished, writing the book is easy. And it’s the proposal that will sell the book for you. If it doesn’t, you don’t have to write the book, unless it’s so important for personal reasons that you don’t mind investing the time and effort without expectation of financial returns.

It’s funny how I can never write a blog post that’s as short as my Answers on LinkedIn. Incidentally, my response wasn’t chosen as the best answer. The best answer was “Lulu.com,” and I would agree that Lulu is one of the best POD houses. I would definitely recommend them to anyone who’d already chosen to go that route. I wonder how Reed’s book is coming along?

Blame blogger Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine for adding “blook” to the proliferation of Internet-related neologisms.

So what the heck is a blook and why would you want to write one? A blook is one of two things: a blog (short for “Weblog”) created by serializing a book, or a book created from, or at least based on, a blog.

Jarvis coined the word “blook” in November of 2002 to describe the book of blog posts which Tony Pierce was preparing to self-publish. Pierce was sufficiently taken with the word to use it for the title, and is now the author of three blooks.

The Blooker Prize

It’s this kind of blook which has recently attracted media attention on account of Lulu.com’s 2006 “Blooker Prize.” Lulu produces and sells print-on-demand books and no doubt hopes to attract new business by means of this contest, which will award $1000 first prizes to winners in each of three categories: fiction, non-fiction, and comics or graphic novels. Entrants must submit three printed and bound blooks for the three judges (all well-known bloggers and authors). Non-Lulu blooks are welcome. (Tony Pierce published his two most recent blooks, which will not be competing, through CafePress.)

Blogs as Writing Tools

Time was, if you wanted to write a book you’d sit down with a pen and a piece of paper. (I wrote three never-published novels that way when I was an undergraduate.) Then word-processing came along, making it much easier to move and change the material in your book.

Many people think of blogs as “online diaries” or associate them primarily with political commentary, but blogs are really low-cost, easy-to-use content management systems. This is “content” as in “digital information.” If you’re a writer, your content will probably be in the form of text.

While blogs are not sophisticated word-processors, much less typesetting/layout programs like Quark or PageMaker, they allow authors to create, arrange, and publish all in the same place. The informal nature of blogging helps non-writers to get their ideas out there and create a first draft and let it evolve organically, then collect related materials together by means of the “category” function.

Getting from Blog to Book

Suppose you’re a blogger and you want to take your own shot at the Blooker Prize. Can you just export your blog into Word and send it off to a publisher? Well, no, it’s not quite as easy as that.

Blogs appear in reverse chronological order, with the most recent post first. Even if you sort your posts by category, the most recent will appear on the top of the page. If you want readers to start reading where you started writing, you’re going to have to reorganize the material before you send it off to the printer.

There are companies like Blurb.com working on creating software and services which will automatically import the contents of blogs and convert them into books. If you enroll in Denise Wakeman and Patsi Krakoff’s self-paced, open enrollment Blog to Book course, you get to beta-test Blurb, which is not yet available to the public.

Or you can hire a company like The Friday Project, a British publishing house which specializes in turning blogs and websites into books.

Manual Blook Creation

If you want to design and format your own blook, you’ll need to spend some time cutting and pasting. How long this will take depends on the amount of material you have. As of this writing, my FileSlinger™ Backup Blog has some 136 posts, mostly fairly long (600-1200 words), for a total of about 65,000 words. It took me about two hours to copy and paste the contents from the blog pages into the Word template I’d adapted from Dan Poynter’s New Book Model example, and another couple of hours to tweak the formatting to something more appropriate for a 6″ x 9″ book. Because the blog is based on a weekly column, I’ll have at least 9 more entries of that length before I finish at the end of December, so I can expect the final blook to be about 75,000 words, a respectable length for a business book.

What Makes Blooks Distinctive?

If you want your blook to retain the look and feel of your blog, you’ll have to put some effort into page design, or hire a designer who can create an appropriate layout and choose fonts and visual elements. You might prefer a square or landscape format book to mimic the layout on a computer screen, rather than a standard 6″ x 9″ business book. You might even want to produce the whole thing in color, particularly if photos are an important part of your blog, though that could result in an expensive blook if it runs more than 100 pages.

It’s a good idea for blook authors to reread their material carefully in order to correct mistakes and remove redundancies, even if they choose not to make any substantive changes. You may also need to get permission before reprinting comments left by readers, unless you already have a statement on the blog to the effect that anyone posting a comment is granting such permission.

Blooks vs. Books

In discussing the Blooker Prize, journalists have pointed out with some reason that a book which exactly duplicates a blog rather than reworking the blog’s content into a tighter structure could prove tedious reading. But this depends enormously on the nature of the blog, the blogger, and the blogger’s material.

The informality and the chronological arrangement may be part of a blook’s attraction. Replacing chapters with journal entries has proven effective both for fiction and nonfiction works of various kinds, and a blook of short entries can be ideal for reading during coffee breaks—or as a bathroom book, for that matter. If the blogger writes well and has something interesting to say, blooks will be just as enjoyable to read as traditional books, and possibly more so.

When Is a Blog-Based Book Not a Blook?

If you’re using your blog primarily as a way to generate a first draft or collect raw material for your book, the final book which results from your blogging efforts will bear about as much resemblance to the blog as the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel does to the charcoal sketches Michelangelo made before painting it. You probably don’t want to produce a blook at all if you’re after, not the $1,000 Blooker Prize, but the bigger prize of a sale to a major publishing house and a substantial advance. Even the “A-list” bloggers who’ve been approached by publishers have created books which are more than just a compilation of blog posts.

Why Publish a Blook?

Though the $1000 Blooker Prize is more than many POD authors make from book sales, money isn’t necessarily the best reason for bloggers to create blooks. The real value of a blook is much the same as that of any business book: it’s what one of my clients calls “The thud factor.” A blook is a demonstration that your blog has added up to something substantive. It also gives you a chance to show people your blog when you’re away from computers. If you’re a professional blogger, a blook helps give your prospective clients an idea of what a blog can do for them. (Professional bloggers might want to create several full-color blooks.)

In other words, a blook is a blogger’s portfolio. And who knows? People might even want to buy it for its own sake.

Links and References:

Jeff Jarvis coins “Blook” in his BuzzMachine Blog

Tony Pierce’s History of Blooks (Busblog)

The Lulu.com Blooker Prize

Lulu Print On Demand

CafePress

The Blog to Book Course

Blurb.com (currently operating in stealth mode; e-mail egittins@blurb.com for more information)

The Friday Project

Dan Poynter&rquo;s Book Layout Template

Blog Hosting Services

Blog.com

Blogger/Blogspot

LiveJournal

TypePad

Weblogs.us