Here’s an interesting experiment at the Boulder Book Store in Colorado. Print on Demand (POD — self-publshed) authors sell their books on consignment on the bookstore shelves, and pay for the privilege.

The Boulder way: A bookstore’s experiment with microdistribution » Nieman Journalism Lab reports:

“…The store charges its consignment authors according to a tiered fee structure: $25 simply to stock a book (five copies at a time, replenished as needed by the author for no additional fee); $75 to feature a book for at least two weeks in the ‘Recommended’ section; and $125 to, in addition to everything else, mention the book in the store’s email newsletter, feature it on the Local Favorites page of the store’s website for at least 60 days, and enable people to buy it online for the time it’s stocked in the store.

And for $255 — essentially, the platinum package — the store will throw in an in-store reading and book-signing event.”

If you’re a new author, and haven’t set up your own marketing, it sounds like a great offering to me. You’re getting your book out there, and that’s important.

Few bookstores will stock POD books, so let’s hope that more of them develop this distribution model for their local authors.

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Print on Demand (POD) publishing is filled with hassles, but this author seems to have had extraordinary challenges when using Lulu’s system.

Macopinion reports:

“Unfortunately, my impressions of Lulu went downhill when I began researching the details of the publishing process. For one, there is almost too much information on their site. Publishing is complicated and there are hundreds of FAQs split among thousands of pages: I spent many hours reading through their site trying to understand all of the available options and procedures.”

Lulu is hardly a new kid on the block, and they seem to be successful. So why can’t they get their site organized?

As Macopinion says, they offer “free” publishing; you just pay for the books.

You should read his entire post, but as for me, I’d rather pay for decent service than go through this kind of nonsense.

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Where will it all end? It seems that the POD world is in chaos.

An interesting post Which PODs are affected by Scamazon 2008? « PODdy Mouth – Daily Dirt on POD and Self-Publishing reports:

“There is a lot of guess work flying around the Internet about how the Scamazon shake-down will affect the POD services, and which ones it will affect the most (and why). Since I’m always up for a little conjecture, I’ll offer my two cents worth on that subject here and next time I’ll provide some data about each POD I mention to ‘justify’ my position (as if I have to do that – ha!) – I’ll focus on the 16 PODs that took part in my recent self-publishing sweet 16 tournament.”

The post makes for interesting reading – read the comments too.

If you’re writing a book and intend going the POD route, read your contract carefully.

Amazon’s new POD policy has set the cat amongst the pigeons.

IT’S NOT OVER! Amazon Tells Publishers, Pay Us To Print Your Books…Or Else reports:

“Tuesday, April 1st, was the rumored deadline Amazon.com gave to some POD publishers to sign an agreement allowing their printing division, BookSurge, to print each publisher’s book to be sold through Amazon, or risk having their ‘buy’ buttons turned off on the Amazon.com website. Publishers, authors, and even book buyers were outraged by this apparent power-grab by Amazon. Attorneys and government officials are still studying the legality of their actions. How could they demand such a thing and what publisher in their right mind would agree to their ridiculous terms? While a band of POD publishers stayed together, refusing to sway to Amazon’s demands, some did not.”

I’m not up to date with POD, but I applaud Angela Hoy’s BookLocker policy:

“You can’t promise your authors something that involves another company if you don’t have a contract with that other company. Our BookLocker contract states, “Sales channels can be added or removed at the Company’s discretion and without prior notice. While the Company provides listings to Ingram for print books, online bookstores, such as Amazon.com, are not required to list these titles for sale. Listings offered by online bookstores are at the discretion of each particular store.”

If you let another company control your business, essentially you don’t have a business.

There’s an interesting new development at Amazon.

Amazon Muscles Print-On-Demand Services reports:

“Amazon has announced that it will only sell print-on-demand books printed by its own print-on-demand service BookSurge.”

This is bad news if you’re currently selling your books published by Lulu.com and others at Amazon, because now you won’t be able to do that. You’ll have to use Amazon’s own services if you want Amazon sales.

This may be a quality issue. With BookSurge, Amazon could demand further editing with books which don’t meet quality guidelines. OTOH, it may just be that they want to build up BookSurge and make it the de facto POD standard.

Either way, it will be interesting to see what happens.

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