You should self-publish with a POD printer instead of with a POD publisher. You can get much better quality, and many other advantages.

BUT this is only true if you have reason to believe that your book will sell more than the 50-100 copies that an average book from one of those companies sells. Otherwise you’re best off with the least expensive of the pay-to-publish outfits.

In re your other charge: The reason that old-line publishers and the book business judge books on these standards is not elitism, it is that the public DOES make buying decisions based on them — but without understanding exactly what makes the book look “better.” They don’t need to know what pulls them in, but we do.

What an unbelievably general and judgmental statement. Some of the best talent lies with small presses, and being less restrained than big publishers, far more creativity is possible. A good publisher can print either way, POD or offset, but it is more realistic (and more environmentally friendly) to print on demand until a title is highly successful.

It is very unprofessional of you to make these broad, biased statements based on maintaining outmoded ways of thinking about publishing. Readers are not judging through your criteria. They are looking for good books that are attractive and exciting, which many POD publishers excel at. POD is a matter of economy of scale, and has nothing to do with the talent of the publisher. Many of the self-published books do suffer in both quality and design, because the writer has not gatekeeper and no training.

As a writer, I struggled for years until I realized the scam the big publishers and articles like this are perpetuating… trying to maintain that there is only one way to publish, the old way, and anyone who does not do that is degenerated as using POD or vanity publishing. You are mixing your concepts, and I encourage you as a writer, to make better distinctions when discussing publishing options. POD is an economic strategy that is favorable to printing thousands of books that sit in boxes in a warehouses. And it has nothing to do with the quality of writing or design. It is a smart choice to find a good small publisher who uses this option and you can scale up if needed with offset with the same publisher under the same ISBN.

It would be wonderful if this was a myth, Unfortunately, I’ve known more than one published writer (published with a major house) who has found it to be the case that an editor wants to change their work beyond recognition. Agents are also guilty of this. Maybe my friends simply had bad editors (at different houses), but there’s enough of this behavior to make this myth have the tang of reality.