Do you know anything about these on-demand publishing companies?

I read an article in the paper about on-demand publishing. Do you know anything about that? It mentioned the companies CreateSpace, Lulu and Blurb. What's your view on this? Do you have any experience with this field? ThanksDo you know anything about these on-demand publishing companies?
I expected to find Hellcat's answer, and of course, there it was. I was hoping she would stick to the question: that is, tell you her opinion about the publishers you asked about, but instead she went into her usual criticaim of self-publishing - SOMETHING YOU DIDN'T EVEN ASK ABOUT.



First of all, there is a big difference between POD publishing and self-publishing. POD publishers control much of the process, and they don't often have competitive pricing or good marketing programs. In self-publishing you have a lot of work to do, there are a lot of pitfalls, and it is certainly not for everyone (or for most authors), but it has rewards for the right person. She is right - not many self-published books make it to the bestseller lists. So what? Most traditionally published books don't get there either. Many hundreds of people make a good living through self publishing.



Self-publishing is not for everyone, but there are many reasons why a person would pay to have his/her book published:



1) The book might have a very specialized audience, making mainstream publishers unwilling to risk money for what will certainly NOT be a bestseller.



2) The author might (like me) prefer to control every aspect of his book - cover, layout, content, price.



3) The author (like me) might actually enjoy marketing his own books.



4) The author might be unwilling to wait the 1-2 years it often takes to see a mainstream book hit the bookstore shelves. This is a personal choice. It has been said on Yahoo Answers that you should be willing to spend twice as much time getting your book published as you did writing it. Well, that's all well and good, but we have more things to write, don't we?



5) The author might not be happy with the small royalty offered by a mainstream published in most cases, and prefer to take a risk to get the profits for himself. That, more than anything else, is my motivation to self-publish.



Self-publishing is risky, it is a lot of work, and most people should stick with the tradtional method. But to make a blanket statement that no one should ever self-publish, really does a disservice to a lot of people, especially to those people who make a good living through publishing their own books.



"Here's a list of authors who have self-published at some time in their life: Margaret Atwood, William Blake, Ken Blanchard, Robert Bly, Lord Byron, Willa Cather, Pat Conroy, Stephen Crane, e.e. cummings, W.E.B. DuBois, Alexander Dumas, T.S. Eliot, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Benjamin Franklin, Zane Grey, Thomas Hardy, E. Lynn Harris, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ernest Hemingway, Robinson Jeffers, Spencer Johnson, Stephen King, Rudyard Kipling, Louis L'Amour, D.H. Lawrence, Rod McKuen, Marlo Morgan, John Muir, Anais Nin, Thomas Paine, Tom Peters, Edgar Allen Poe, Alexander Pope, Beatrix Potter, Ezra Pound, Marcel Proust, Irma Rombauer, Carl Sandburg, Robert Service, George Bernard Shaw, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Upton Sinclair, Gertrude Stein, William Strunk, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Henry David Thoreau, Leo Tolstoi, Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, and Virginia Woolf. Ken Blanchard and Spencer Johnson originally self-published The One-Minute Manager so they could sell the book for $15.00 at a time when all the experts were telling them that they'd never sell the book for such a high price. In a three month time, they sold over 20,000 copies in the San Diego area alone 鈥?and then sold the reprint rights to William Morrow. The One-Minute Manager has sold more than 12 million copies since 1982 and been published in 25+ languages. " (This came from http://www.bookmarket.com/selfpublish.ht鈥?/a>



I have books published in the traditional manner, and I have self-published books. I make something off of each, but as I learn the business end of it I find that I am making more off the self-published books than off the traditionally published books, even when I seel a lot more of the latter.



Yes, there's a lot of self-published crap out there. I would not argue that. There's a lot of truly masterful work, though, that is self-published and would never have seen the light of day in the traditional publishing world. There's good and bad in both systems - Heck, just a random sampling from Borders will show you that a traditional publisher puts out a lot of crap.



I use www.48hrbooks.com --- they are lightening fast, inexpensive, reliable, and high-quality.
I have no personal experience with these sompanies myself, but I have heard good things about lulu.com.Do you know anything about these on-demand publishing companies?
I also have that article on one my blog sites. I don't know anything about Blurb or Createspace, but Lulu.com is a POD-company that has a pretty good publishing record.



However, there's still a lot of consternation on exactly WHAT it represents and many people still wrongly suggest that it's nothing more than a vanity-press outfit.



Ignorance and bliss by the hardliners knows no bounds. :0)



Traditional publishing may have its allure, but your odds of getting in are roughly 1 in 900,000. And many writers spend an inordinate amount of YEARS trying and trying to get in the front door--and spend that time getting frustrated and angry. (Guilty! :0) )



Like the article suggests, print-on-demand technologies are advancing faster and faster, and the quality of the books are now almost indistinguishable from traditional publishing.



If you can't get in the old-fashioned way, then self-publishing, and e-publishing may be the way to go.



But do your research thoroughly before committing yourself. Make sure that your book is in the best shape it can be. This will save you the headache of having to produce a substandard product.



Edit:



Perisperone Cat still believes that you have to go cross-country to sell your book out of your car--if you self-publish.



I'm not exactly SURE if she understands that these days, POD technologies now lets you order whatever number of books you wish, but have no backlog of unsold novels in a dusty old warehouse somewhere in Mobile, Alabama.



And unless your e-books are collecting dust in cyberspace, why worry about the same?
I know from personal experience that an author can only sell books if they get into the bookstores. If a publisher won't go that extra mile and do that, you might as well print out the books on your home computer and sell them yourself in person.



I have had four publishers. One (Hard Shell Word Factory) has made my books available in several stores, through Amazon, and through Fictionwise. Sales are pretty pitiful, though, because we are talking half a dozen bookstores and NOT the hundreds of stores that carry mass market paperbacks.



Another has gotten my books on Fictionwise and Amazon, but you can't order them from any bookstore because they won't give the distributors the 40% discount they are entitled to.



Another publisher also got my books available on Fictionwise and Amazon. Sold quite a few on Fictionwise and none through Amazon.



Another publisher never got into POD. They folded before they got there.



These were all royalty paying publishers. I didn't pay anything to get the books published which means I was ahead about $10,000 right there between the 7 books. Unfortunately, I didn't make even $1,000. That's a fact of life when you do POD.



Try real hard with the traditional publishers before you go this route--and run away from any publisher that suggests you pay for publication.Do you know anything about these on-demand publishing companies?
Two people in my writer's group have used Lulu, but not for sales: They each wanted to have ONE nicely bound book that they wrote.

One was personal poems that was given to someone as a gift, and the other was just because he wanted to finally have his book on his bookshelf instead of in a file.



They both got what they expected and are happy with it.



The previous answers are all great, and I will star this question so that I can refer back to these answers.



As to the comments about Ms Hellecat, well....if you know what to expect from her, you can just skip over her answer, right? It does seem to be a crusade for her, but just think how dull the world would be if we all saw things the same way.
The are good PODs and terrible ones, in terms of giving you exactly what you pay for and not misleading you about likely sales, your talent, marketing, final cost, and quality.



Lulu, for instance, has a pretty decent reputation as a self-publisher. They're clear about what you get for your money and don't blow butterflies and rainbows up your butt about your brilliance or how great sales will be. (I haven't heard anything either way about the other two you mention.)



That said, there are very, very few times self-publishing is the right decision FOR FICTION. If you happen to have a clearly identified and fully reachable niche market for your fiction, you might be modestly successful, but to be frank, the only fiction I know that's succeeded in this way is fetish erotica. (Got any interest in women's feet, or diapers--and a network of people who do, too, and have shared their emails or mailing addresses with you?) The authors may sell 500 copies rather than 50.



Either way, that's about a tenth of what a "real" publisher might call modest sales.



Self-publishing of non-fiction again relies on a niche market for sales, but may be more successful in identifying and marketing to the niche. I happen to know someone who's done fairly well with a tarot book, and someone else whose book on industrial archeology is doing well, too. The tarot person does readings and teaches. The industrial archeology author has a popular newsletter and organizes conventions at the national level.



But let me repeat: self-publishing fiction, whether you end up with boxes of books in your garage or a website and blog that generates no sales at all of your POD novel (but doesn't get in the way of the lawn mower), is likely to result in sales only to your friends and family and perhaps yourself. Nearly all POD novels sell under 100 copies, most closer to 50--about the number of friends and family the author has.



This doesn't mean the novel is bad, although it might be. It means that the author's marketing efforts have almost no effect on sales. Bookstores and libraries usually won't accept POD books even if they're free--and those are the points of sale authors need to crack.



I can't help noting that those who staunchly defend POD as a viable choice for fiction never seem to name their own successful POD books or give sales figures for them. Their arguments would certainly carry more weight if they did.
Your books will never make it onto bookstore shelves. The only way they can be purchased is if someone orders one and it is actually printed for them digitally. That means that unless YOU are willing to pay large amounts of money promoting your book so that people know about it and order it, you can expect to sell about 2/3 as many copies as you have family and friends or roughly 100 copies. People don't surf Amazon looking for interesting titles. It would be virtually impossible for a complete stranger to just happen across your book on Amazon.



This is in clear violation of "Uncle Jim's Law" - "Money should flow TOWARD an author - not away from them." To that I will add "Persi's Law" - "If you believe in yourself and in your book, you owe it to yourself to spend at least twice as much time trying to sell it traditionally as you did writing it."



Traditional publishing is the only way for your book to make it to bookstores. In the recent history of self publishing, only nine books have made it onto the best seller list. Wayne Dyer and The Celestine Prophecy. Both authors crossed the country selling books out of their cars at huge expense to both of them. You are an author, not a bookseller.



I radically oppose self publishing and on demand publishing and I am not alone. If you visit Preditors and Editors, Absolute Write Water Cooler and other writer beware sites, you will regularly see these POD and vanity presses on the top ten worst publisher lists. In the case of Publish America, Absolute Write has over 57 thousand complaint posts listed. The others aren't far behind.



My best advice, don't do it. Pax-C