[ Home ] [ Up ] [ Publish on Demand ] [ Marketing ]

Marketing Print on Demand Books

They say everyone has at least one good book in them. That is probably true although crafting a book requires dedication and organization. Writing a book is possibly the easy part. Getting published can be a tale of sending dozens of manuscripts and reading numerous rejection letters, if you are lucky.

Publishers don't like taking risks. Even a small print run of a technical book may involve a couple of people full time at the publisher for several weeks plus the upfront costs of printing and distribution. They at least want to make back costs with some profit. What they don't want is hundreds of returns to pulp or send to the remained stores at below cost. The picture for fiction books is even worse, they are in competition for shelf space with dozens of established authors. You don't just have to write a good book, but one that stands out from the crowd.

Getting published these days also partly depends on fitting the fashionable profile for authors - young, pretty and female or on being well known, either through previous works or from a reputation earned in the field.

Print on Demand seem to offer aspiring scribes a way out. Using the latest digital printing presses books can be printed and bound one-at-a-time at relatively low cost. There are no large print runs, no stock to be kept on warehouses and distributed to bookstores and no returns. The author can upload his book as a word processor file and a couple of images for the cover and have it automagically turned into a nice, crispy paperback. Some outfits will do this at no cost, at least for a basic service. This won't turn the author into the next Stephen King or Patricia Cornwell. The publishers bet is that they will at least sell a few copies, to the author's family and friends perhaps, which will cover the storage costs of the manuscript.

Without a big publisher behind you marketing print on demand books is essentially down to the author. To be honest except for known authors or books like the "Dummies Guides" which sell themselves this is always the case. A big publisher will get your book onto the shelves of bookstores, and if it is appealing this will account for a few thousand sales.

Fortunately help is at hand in the form of online bookstores and services such as Google Print and Amazon's Search Inside. The author will be involved in a lot of guerrilla marketing and should not underestimate how long this will take. The life of a budding author is pretty thankless unfortunately.

Having gone through the process with this book I've learned a lot, realized I've made some mistakes and should have known better about other stuff.

What to Write About?

As Mae West once astutely pointed out: "If you keep a diary, one day it may keep you."

Book Titles

What you call your book is all important for PoD with small marketing budgets. It seems obvious but choosing a good title is tricky. Snappy, clever titles are okay if you have some keyword rich, descriptive subtitle. We almost need to take a lesson from Victorian writers who used to give their tomes long, wordy titles: The Compleat Angler - being about the art and techniques of river fishing.