Self Publishing - Are you thinking about P.O.D.?

Becoming an self-published author isn't as easy as many would think, or running a publishing company as well. All the things that your traditional publishers would do for you like marketing, promotion, distribution, warehousing, and arranging book signings is all left up to you. Okay let it be known, that the big publishing houses doesn't do too much of these items either, but what little they do, can help a lot.

I'm a self published author.....no wait, most true self-publish authors would not call say I'm self-publish, for the fact that I used an P.O.D. publisher who placed their name on my book as the Publisher. So in their eyes, I was published, but I am not self-published. -And they might be right. One of the cheapest items I could have paid for was an ISBN number, and bar code. The total cost would have been under two hundred dollars, and what make this so bad was, I knew this much going in.

Now with that, a good question to ask is, "what didn't I know, when I chose to go the P.O.D. route?"

What I didn't know was I am my publisher biggest customer. The thing about using P.O.D. publishers is they sale you on the ideas of you having this great flexibility, and full control, yet their service is affordable, and easy.

I can say, yes it's easy to use their service, which still depends on the level of service you are purchasing, and it is easy to submit your work and get a printed item if you so desire out of the deal.

Lets take my debuting novel "Shadows of the Heart"



A great book mind you, the initial retail price for this novel was $21.99. I'm not stupid and I don't think anyone else were either. I know the public was not going to pay $21.99 for a paperback book from a "who are you, author?" -Hell even if they did know me, who wants to pay this type of money for a book during a recession?

So I opt to purchase a package that would knot the price down to $15.99. Still a dollar above the national average, but they had to pay me a royalty, and that royalty is $1.00 per book sold, instead of the $6.00 dollars I could have made. -Do you get it? I had to cut my royalty to make the book affordable.

Now that's not bad. I can live with that. A dollar per book sold, is cool, some authors isn't making that much. Here we go, the part that got to me was, how my publisher bragged about the author's discount could be as high as 65% off the book price. Sounds great right!

No, it wasn't because that 65% was off the original book price of $21.99, and not the $15.99. Meaning for me to get that 65% I would have to order a minimum of 1000 books that would have cost me $7.70 per book, which is equal to $7,700.00. I don't have this kind of money. Now you see why I said you would be there best customer.

If I did I would have went the traditional self-publish route of putting out 10 to 15 thousand dollars for my first run. -Still if I would have done my homework, it would not cost me half that much. At the moment it's cheaper for me to advertise and promote my novel than it is for me to buy it and sell, because discount starts at 40% for me at $21.99, which is about $13.19 each, not including the shipping. Luckily I'm also a book retailer, meaning I can get my 40% off the actual retail price like all the other retailers, which is at a cost of $9.59 per book, but even this is too high to purchase the book to sale, or distribute, which is a completely another story and topic.

Okay so what is my solution to these issues? Do what I avoided from the start, be my own publisher completely from pen to shelf. -I'll tell you how it's done in another month or two after I've gone through the motions.


Peace



P.S. Oh and please buy the book from amazon where it's currently $12.95 at the time of this written blog.