Comments on: When SHOULD you use a subsidy/POD/vanity publisher?

By: Marion Gropen

Marion Gropen — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 02:50:37 +0000

Hello, Mr or Ms Geary,

I’m sorry that this took so long. I’ve been on vacation, and missed the notice.

Yes, you should probably sign the contract, if you’re interested in self-publishing your book. You should, however, know that self-help books are almost as hard to sell as fiction, unless the author is already well-known. It’s a category where every other American seems to have written something, and most of the books have a hard time breaking out of the pack. I recommend that you think carefully about some of the other questions in some of my earlier blog posts (along the lines of who are you targeting, and why are they looking for a book, and then what does your book do for them better than the literally tens of thousands of other books out there vying for the same spots on book(store)shelves.

Best of luck,

Marion

By: Geary

Geary — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 04:16:52 +0000

I have been a minister and speaker for 15 years, and written a Christian Self Help Book to publish. Should I sign and fex the contract with LSI? I don’t want to spend a lot of money and hassle.

By: Vyrdolak

Vyrdolak — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 05:03:53 +0000

Like many small/self publishers do, I used Lulu.com for my Advance Reading Copies. There was no set-up fee, the procedures were simple and the turn-around was very fast. I paid more than double what I’m paying LSI per unit for the final books–but, I will say that I was very pleased with the ARC’s that Lulu sent. The covers were crisp and perfectly aligned (especially the spine, which had three sizes of type, the smallest in two lines) and the interior looked fine. There was also no problem using my own company name and ISBN, or the cover design I provided. They shipped the books to me shrink-wrapped in groups of three. So this is one legitimate use of a subsidy press–running off ARC’s or galleys. For what I wanted, they did a decent job for me.

By: PublishingGuide

PublishingGuide — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 16:56:44 +0000

Very true, and a point I have hit regularly in other posts on the old blog, but forgot to emphasize enough here.

Thanks for chiming in.

By: Dick Margulis

Dick Margulis — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 11:40:23 +0000

Marion,

Just to clarify–and I know you know this, but it still confuses a lot of people–PRINTING on demand is a technology, digital printing, that can be used by all kinds of publishers, from Random House down to the individual self-publishing her first book. As you say, you can buy print-on-demand service directly from a printer with no middleman. So-called PUBLISHING on demand is a phrase vanity presses latched onto to co-opt the “POD” initialism and suck people into the vanity press business model. The problem is that a lot of people who understand the difference nonetheless play into the vanity presses’ hands by tossing around “POD” without clarifying the distinction between print-on-demand (the technology) and publish-on-demand (the business model).