POD: Print on Demand True Terror Tales
on August 12th, 2011If you are a self publisher, or interested in just putting a few of your own books out there using a Print on Demand service, you must read this post.
Looking to avoid The Man? Want to go your own way and own the whole enchilada? When you sign on with a POD service, you’re just signing on with another The Man.
Some months ago, I posted this (very well trafficked) info on iUniverse and their business practices. If you have not already read it, you should. Here’s a sample:
iUniverse charges you $699 to tell booksellers they can return your book if it doesn’t sell.
Returnable books is standard in publishing, except for the comic book direct sale market. Why on earth anyone would charge you $699 for this service I cannot fathom.
Except they want to make a buck from your ignorance.
First off, you guys gotta realize that once booksellers see your book coming from iUniverse, they know it is self published and are far less likely to stock it. Booksellers know Vanity Press when they see it. OK? Let’s just get that out of the way right now.
Scour the shelves of any retail bookstore outside the direct market, and I defy you to find five copies of anything self published. I’m not saying it never happens, I am saying it is sort of like, I dunno, having a meteor hit your house.
Now author Tracy L. Darity has posted an extremely important overview of the Print on Demand service and their biggest scam: outsourcing work, allowing other printers to handle your book. With no payments to you. Especially if the printer is selling the book as “used”.
Read the whole thing.
Although the on-line agreement has a clause indicating they can allow any third party to assist with fulfillment, the truth is only books I order are fulfilled by them. It appears all other orders i.e. a physical bookstore or on-line seller; the book is most likely printed by a third party source. It is then up to that TPS to notify the POD that they have generated a book. There are two huge problems with this arrangement: 1) if the company printing the book never notifies the original POD, the author will never get paid because there are no checks and balances currently in place to track the activity. 2) The printer, at their discretion, can alter the format of the book. By alter, they can change the physical size, reduce the font size, use a poorer quality paper, or choose not to coat the cover.
holy… chrome. Seriously bad juju.Is this industry standard or are there some that don’t do this?
I understand there are some who don’t do this. In fact, someone just sent me a note to say some don’t. Unfortunately, they neglected to tell me who these companies are. I sure as hell don’t have time to research it.
And just in case a few folks don’t quite understand what is happening here, this is book piracy, plain and simple. Companies outsource your file. The company you did not hire to print your book now has your file. So they offer your book for sale in direct competition with you. And they undercut your prices. If you ask how they got your book, they claim it’s a used book. But as Tracy Darity found, there is no way they could have gotten these used books to sell because there were no hardcovers offered for sale to the public.
Nice, eh?
First time I heard of this was back in the 1980′s, BTW. Not with POD publishers, of course.
There is an illegitimate Spanish edition of A Distant Soil running about out there. Never made a dime on it.
That’s like when I look up my POD books (now out of print) at Amazon, and see people selling them for horrific (and laughable, considering) prices, I wonder if the fact that I took them out of print doesn’t mean they actually ARE. ((o.o)) I always thought they just had a physical copy, saw it was OOP and thought it was worth something. Now… aaargh.
Via Publishers Lunch:
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/12/amazon-cracks-down-on-some-e-book-publishers/
“Private Label Rights”… like the supermarket-brand canned food.
And don’t get me started on companies like “General Books LLC”, which basically reformat Wikipedia articles.
“The book descriptions we ask booksellers to display prominently warn that our books contain numerous typos.”
“The book descriptions we ask booksellers to display prominently warn that our books are not indexed.”
“The book descriptions we ask booksellers to display prominently warn that our books are not illustrated.”
“The book descriptions we ask booksellers to display prominently warn that our books may be missing text.”
www dot general-books dot net under “FAQS”
Caveat lector
They generate thousands of EANs every year, and clog up B&N data feeds; they get in the way of the “real” books. (Books in Print lists 811,956 titles under GB LLC)