Talking sense on Print on Demand

Over at Shelf Awareness today, there's a very good article about Print on Demand by Robert Gray, who's been talking to Ken Arnold, who's a chap who's setting up a new publishing venture and who knows exactly what he's up against.

"I suspect you are right about the low-bar syndrome as a precondition for bookseller and reviewer suspicion of POD publishers. And the market has been flooded with self-published and subsidized merchandise. An easy response to the sheer quantity is to reject an entire category that has proved to be too often full of defective goods.

"On the other hand, he notes that university presses and other publishers already take advantage of POD's economy of scale to keep titles in print, "and that seems to be a real solution to a problem that's been around a long time. Hittite grammar is not a popular subject, but a few people need it. Entire areas of scholarly research are moribund because there are no publishers who can afford to carry the results of academic research."

And, as we see in genre fiction, PoD is an obvious way for authors to give their own out of print titles a new lease of life for their dedicated fans.

I'm keeping a copy of the whole article and a note of the archived url for the next time some hopeful aspiring writer emails asking for my advice about getting reviews and/or publicity for their first self/subsidy/vanity published novel.

I got one of these just this week. It does feel brutal to reply that their biggest problem is going to be the near-zero credibility of such efforts, referring them on to Absolute Write, Preditors & Editors and Writer Beware so they don't have to take my word for it. But in all honesty, I just don't see an alternative.