The literary is the easy part. The Business is the tough shit.
Print on Demand (POD to those of you not hip) in the American market sucks fucking ass. But it’s become the only game in town left to play, which is why it sucks fucking ass. In the last piece about this I told you how POD rose to the top. Now I’m going to hip you to its epic fall, because it damn sure ain’t a soft drink and a smile.
POD in the American market, are ran by companies that are not in the business of publishing, and therefore do not give a fuck and a fart about how novels come out though their hands. There is no dedicated team ensuring quality and control – it’s a machine working on autopilot with no one checking for perfect margins not sliding off the page and each book cover having the same color range and tone trying to ship as soon as they can. Case in point: Amazon which you can check that out right here:
There are only a handful of reputable companies that offer this service in the American market (and for sake of the argument we are only talking about them and not the vanity PODs). This would be Lulu, Draft2Digital (which bought Smashwords), DriveThruFiction, Ingram Spark (owned by Barnes and Noble), Barnes and Noble Press (owned by Barnes and Noble), BookBaby (who owns CDBaby) and KDP (owned by Amazon). Not a big list at all.
None of these imprints offer mass market pocket paperback sizes and at a bare minimum will let you print in 5.5 in. x 8.5 in which is the softback American standard size. Right there, that is a problem. Sans Ingram Spark and B&N Press, all participate in literary censorship and will pull books from its distribution platform or shadowban them for writing about gratuitous topics of politics, sex, and violence, and in the case of Lulu, anything that will offend their Evangelical MAGA Christian beliefs. This is also a problem.
All of these platforms are free to sign up, so there is no cost of entry. They offer their ISBNs for free (which puts their name on your book if you can’t afford the very expensive American market ISBNs) and in the case of Amazon their unique ASIN number. All have a reputation for poorly printed books, because sans Amazon they contract to different printers they don’t keep after to ensure your product can compete with PenguinRandomSchuster. Pages fall out. Glue binding isn’t sufficient. Colors are faded and margins can be off. Also, in the case of Ingram Spark, books are shipped damaged and it’s a hassle getting anybody to rectify that since none of these companies sans Amazon have phone numbers.
The very big thing is, you are responsible for everything, like you’re your own publisher. The Artwork clearances, design, layout, editing on top of formatting with their janky ass tools (which everybody has different proprietary tools that are not universal), getting through their AI scans for dirty words and phrases, then marketing the book, advertising the book, and selling the book once it goes up. Yay, you can price the book, but at any time these platforms can put your book on sale without your approval, and even better, they can let people data scrape your ebooks to feed into LLM machines (like what Meta did via Kindle Unlimited) and they can let people undercut the price of your book through their “3rd party affiliates” (which Amazon does all the fucking time so they can go sell your book of ebay for half of what you’re selling it for). And for that you give, sans Amazon who takes 60%, 40% of your book’s revenue. But hey, they make you feel like a real author when they send you a proof copy under market rate to see, that you pay for, that doesn’t count towards your overall sales.
Then there’s the matter of shipping the book. Yay, they take care of that. But you have zero say in the cost of shipping. It can be high as hell in some markets because low and behold everybody wants to do it their way (like Amazon) and there is no media mail anymore. So, imagine a potential reader ordering your POD book, and it comes fucked up, discolored, with bad margins, pages falling out and they paid 20 bucks for it. They won’t ever buy another book from you again, and it wasn’t even your fault.
How the fuck are you going to build an audience and keep them thirsting for more when, at any point, the POD can kick you off, keep your earnings, and take all of your books out of print? Think it can’t happen? Ask the Romance writing guys that Amazon did it to in 2018: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/amazon-self-published-authors-books-banned-no-reason-134606120.html. Why can they do this? Because YOU agreed to it in the Terms Of Service that they can not only kick you off no matter what the mundane reason, but they don’t have to tell you and if you file a lawsuit you have to go through their arbitration.
POD is not our friend. The takeaway here is that authors no longer control their own tools of production, and that non-literary companies are doing money runs on their creative works as long as they find it financially profitable to be in that business. When it is not, they sell out in a merger or close their doors. In a time where we should be having an indie renaissance of authors, we’re still at the bottom of the pudding cup trying to get a scrape of residue. The only difference is, authors being extorted by companies like Amazon for the taste, because they just won’t say enough and leave Amazon and their ilk the fuck alone.
This is why POD is the only game in town. Don’t say nobody didn’t tell you.
