Article :: Espresso Publishing – Printing Books in a Digital World :: by Jo Lennan

The Sydney Morning Herald recently reported on the unveiling of a POD (print on demand) machine in a Melbourne Angus and Robertson bookshop, with other stores to get the machines soon. The machine is called an Espresso Book Machine, and was dubbed by Time Magazine “an ATM for books”. Now many out-of-print books and out-of-stock books can be printed and bound on the spot in store.

All well and good, but what about the implications of POD for niche publishing? They’re significant and, I think, just as interesting as what it means for large publishing houses and bookstore chains.

Take the recent POD-published book Letters from Katrina. Its publisher, a guy called Mark Hoog with a micro self-publishing company for children, began donating books to a school in Colorado and invited each of the students to write inside a book a pen pal letter to a student in Mississippi. The project grew to over $20,000 in donated books, involving dozens of schools, and some of the thousands of letters written were compiled to become Letters from Katrina-with all proceeds going to establish a scholarship fund for young people affected by Hurricane Katrina. The 2008 Independent Publisher Book Awards listed the book as one of its Outstanding Books of the Year.

POD publishing helped Hoog to bring the book to print quicker and for less money than would otherwise have been possible, so the scholarship fund for young Katrina survivors started growing sooner. The turnaround time for publishing a new book, from uploading the copy to printing and distribution, can be as little as 1 week and up to about 8 weeks, depending on the publisher and the project.

How does POD work? Richard Corbett, in an online POD-publishing tutorial written for UK computer magazine PCPlus, cuts through the hype and helpfully points out that what POD publishing companies offer is not so much publishing as, well, printing.

Corbett explains how the process works with one POD company, Lulu (www.lulu.com). (Lulu distribute in Australia, as do a number of POD companies.) First, Lulu provides the free downloadable template, which plugs into Word. Corbett says: “You provide your book as either a PDF or a DOC file, set the details, and anyone can then buy a copy.”

Cover and layout options are basic and don’t lend themselves to art or design books, although we can expect this to change.

“Pricing is based on several important factors, starting with a base price for a book of your size, then being increased further by the amount you want to be paid for each copy sold (your royalty). One advantage of Lulu is that once you’ve got a book on the site, you can also turn it into an online eBook, where the prices come down considerably.”

No upfront fees, no stock of books. And if no orders come in, the book costs you nothing beyond your own efforts.

And, says Corbett, if you pay an extra couple of hundred dollars for a ISBN, you can get your book listed with wholesaler and distributor Ingram and usually, by extension, Amazon. (The same is true of Lulu’s competitor, Lightning Source, which is actually owned by Ingram.)

Lulu also has a “published by you” option which makes the registered publisher the author, not Lulu. This is a bit like having your own imprint, so it’s a shame the option is limited to self-publishers in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany and the Netherlands.

Apart from the mechanics of printing and post-sale distribution, the author is left to handle everything. By “everything”, read marketing-which, in publishing, it often is. This is why Corbett thinks POD publishing won’t work for fiction, although I wonder whether writers with existing cult followings could prove him wrong. And perhaps the downright directness of POD publishing could have saved Stephenie Meyers from the leak of her new vampire-studded romance, Midnight Sun, which appeared online in draft form before publication. (Meyers later published the book on her own site to save her fans from reading it illegally elsewhere. Plans for publication were canned.)

Of course, vanity publishing projects will be left to languish, unprinted and unread, on the e-bookshelves of cyberspace.

So, at least for the moment, POD comes into its own with niche titles that people can’t get elsewhere, for which they’re prepared to pay more than the usual retail price. Where you have an online market, a POD-published book can make sense. It may also work for a publication that doesn’t aim to turn a profit or is subsidised by a grant.

The innovative POD production of Letters from Katrina allowed Mark Hoog to release the book by the second anniversary of the hurricane, just in time for some serious media attention. Some of the reviews and promotional TV appearances get a bit schmaltzy, but it’s hard to ignore one letter quoted by Hoog. It was from a 5th grader who took the book, found a corner in the gym, and two minutes later brought the book back with the words: “Sometimes you have to tear down the walls of convention with a wrecking ball of creativity.”

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Jo Lennan is a lawyer and writer. She is one third of Punchup Press (punchuppress.com), a partnership that produces writing for and about the arts.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 6th, 2008 at 8:01 pm and is filed under Article, Technology and tagged with printing-on-demand, publishing, punch-up-press. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.