Publishers Weekly Just Doesn’t Get It: On-Demand Publishing is Becoming the Norm Among Traditional Publishers

Thanks

Even Amazon uses LSI for most of their new titles these days. Eliminating the cost of warehousing will soon bring the cost per run down. The days of offset are rapidly declining.

Some interesting, and well thought out, points. The publishing industry is changing.

Now it's not up to the publishers what gets published. Walker and I both have books self published.

Leah,

I agree that self-publishing is a viable alternative for some authors, and the efficiency of on-demand printing is as good for self-published titles as it is for standard titles. However, a publisher puts a mark of quality--their imprint--on a title when they put it in their catalog, allowing booksellers and readers to feel comfortable with the quality of the book.

I am not saying that “self-published” equals “poor quality” necessarily, but there are so many bad apples in the “self-published” barrel that the truly worthy self-published titles suffer for lack of a trusted seal of quality.

David,

Methinks you are protesting for no reason.

The statement you are fretting over is factually accurate. It IS typically used by self-publishers and online publishers. i.e. publishers like you and me that maintain virtual offices and mostly conduct business online. That is not a judgement statement. It is merely a factual statement.

POD is FAR from the norm for the mainstream publishing industry. It is not cost effective for publishers that still rely on the brick-and-mortar retail model. The fact that some publishers use POD technology in a limited manner (such as allowing Amazon to fill orders using its own POD service) does not mean POD is the norm.

Indeed, for a botique press like mine, POD is a much more viable option that using an offset press.

Also, keep in mind POD is only "greener" if you are in fact ONLY selling directly to consumers or selling with no-returnability. If you are selling to brick and mortar shops, they still expect returnability. And since most POD providers still are not using recycled paper, this means POD combined with the traditional retail pipeline is less green.

Yes, there are plenty of quasi-reviewers that will happily take your ebooks to review. But newspaper and magazine reviewers, as well as most of the well-established book review sites, still expect a print book.

While you are accusing PW of painting POD with too broad of a brush, you are in fact doing the same thing with your own sweeping statements. Not to mention that, though some of your points are valid, they are lost behind your own snide language which is far from how one "traditional" publisher would communicate with another.

Sorry, but POD is Not the norm. I have read some of the worse edited books via POD. For a slap down of a couple hundred bucks anyone can publish a book nowadays. There is no editor involved, no advances and quite a few times an "author" will be lucky if they even sell 10 books.

I will stick to my bigger publishers, at least I know I get an advance check, paid quarterly and if there is a problem, my agent is my go-between. (and my books aren't filled with basic spelling errors and missing pages or empty pages.)

Yep, I rather have that 2-5 thousand check in my hand before the book is fiinished to feed myself then a measly 1.00 that PA gives it "authors".

Nellie,

Yes, POD is easy enough for anyone to do it, and there are many subsidy and vanity presses using POD, but they also use traditional printing mthods.

 

And as to those pubsliehrs who pay advances on royalties, those "big" publsihers you like, they are using on-demand printing, whether you are aware of it or not.

I am not sure why you think editing and printing are somehow related. Many a traditionally printed book has bad editing. The quality of the writing and the editing is in now way tied to the printing process. To say it is, well, is poor writing on your part, an erroneous, poorly researched statement that is not logical. Yet you had no problem putting that out on teh internet, did you. That just proves, you can't equate the manufactuirng method with the editing process. THey never have been, and never will be related.

Don't confuse the POD manufacturing process with any publishing business model. On-demand printing is the future of all publsihers. The numbers involved in teh accounting don't lie. It's cheaper and less riskier. If you want big pubslihers to keep paying large advances, you had better hope that they catch on fast, in order to stay competitive.

 

But again, there are a lot of bad apples because POD has made publishing more accessible to everyone, not just major publishing houses. And so the overall editorial quality of the average publsiher is declining. PUblsihers who respect tehmselves and the industry will have to keep working hard to promote high editorial quality. THis won't change, now or in the future.

 

What I am trying to get across is that it is wrong to make the assumption that publsihers who use the POD manufactuirng process, like Oxford University Press, Simon & Schuster, and  Flying Pen Press should not be equated the same as PublishAmerica. LuLu.com or iUniverse, as you so clearly have done. It shows poor research and old-fashioned thinking.

And in the thousands of books we have distributd, I ahve never found a missing or empty page. I have with traditional publishing, but so far, Lightning Source has tuend in 100% printing quality, and truts me, I check daily and I check thoroughly.

Now, explain to me why a writer who can't differentiate between the manufacturing process and the editing process, and hasn't bothered to research the difference before publishing her work n the internet, deserves $2000 to $5000 on trust that she will write a book on time and to the high standards that Flying Pen Press demands. I only pay pre-writing advances to writers I can trust to work that hard and deliver on deadline without any issues, and to be frank, authors of that caliber tend to stand behind tehir work, not asking for payment until delivery of the work and subsequent approval by me and my editors. That is one sign of a quality professional, that they don't cause their editors to worry about having been ripped off by a missed deadline or less-then-professional research.

Editing has a big thing to do with a printed material.

May I ask how long have you been in the business? How many books have you had published? and I mean by publishing houses also.

Me: childrens books (random house), horror (Leisure), Romance (Leisure Romance)

Poetry (over 200 published worldwide, zines, professional magazines like Red Book)

Over 400 published reviews worldwide (books)

Booksignings and readings: 50 so far. Will be doing signings at Fango next yr with my new book.

Screenplays: (from a published book) one that is with a movie house right now (Indie horror which I support) and in process of writing a new one.

I also work with the horror movie industry and my newest book pertains to horror directors, actresses, screenwriters and producers.

My first published piece was in 1979, my last 2009.

So, I must disagree with you, been in the business for a long time. I also have worked as an editor, a copywriter and a ghostwriter.

My career is writing. My job is running a store.

I don't make money like King or Koonitz....but I don't worry about not finding checks in my mailbox every quarter.

Nellie,

I've been in publishing and journalism since 1987.

I have more than 1,000,000 words published in magazine and newspaper articles. I have been editor at four periodical publications: General Aviation News & Flyer, Rocky Mountain Air Traveler, Stapleton Innerline, American Cabby Magazine. Of those, I was also co-publisher of Rocky Mountains Air Traveler and publisher of American Cabby Magazine. I have edited more books than I can count, primarily novels. I was the senior Writer for Virtual Marketing, working on article placement for billion-dollar companies. I also edited white papers and the like for them. Now I am the publisher of my own book publishing company and also editor-in-chief, with a contracted staff of six other editors. And that is pretty much my publishing resume.

In all, I have about 350 paid magazine articles to my name.

And I am glad you posted your resume, so that there is context in this discussion. But the fact remains: on-demand printing is a manufacturing process, not an editing process nor a business model. And with as much experience as you had in the  publshing industry, you should know that. And it is also a fact that on-demand printing, like all on-demand manufacturing, is a more efficient process than mass production and as such it is appealing to any industry where cusotmers make a one-time sale of any model of product, as in books. And in an industry where the shipment from primary warehouse is directly to such cusotmers more often than not, it is ever so much more efficient. The bigger the comapny the more it makes sense.

Your statement--"Editing has a big thing to do with a printed material"--is dead-on accurate. That is my primary job as a publisher, to make sure the text is of high quality. But words are not the physical book and no matter how good or how bad the writing, it has absolutely nothing to do with the printing process. The ink does not care if it is Shakespeare or a kindergarten love letter. I can publsih Mark Twain on a web page, on stage, by Guttenberg press, handwritten manuscript, web press, silk screen, electronic press, or a stick in the dirt. Regardless, the editing is not affected.

Your original statement in your first comment--"Sorry, but POD is Not the norm."--followed by your ramblings of the problems of a subsidized or vanity press, implies that all ocmpaies that use on-demand printing are fly-byu night operations, byt he sheer fact that they use this new technology. My point in the article is that the technology is available, it is better, and the industry is finding it more economical and efficient a printing process and that is is entirely wrong to blatantly say in a Publishers Weekly article that POD is essentially for self-pubslihed and short-run books when in fact it is for the industry at large and the big houses are using the technology as well, and in large runs. Especially for large runs when time counts because among its other efficiencies, it doesn't take two weeks to set up a print run but rather, two minutes.

And according to Bowker--the publisher of "Books in Print" and the U.S. agency for ISBNs (International Standard Book Numbers), POD is now the norm, and mass production is the exception. Perhaps by a slight margin, but that is now the state of book publishing. Keeping in mind that most self-published books have no ISBN and are not listed in Books in Print, you have to assume that most self-published books are not part of that statistic.

One more thing. Your job is running a store, you say. In Walmart, a large percentage of the goods they sell are produced through manufacturing-on-demand and distributed with RFI chips or individual bar-coded sorting. It's a Walmart mandate. It is also one of the reasons that they can undercut all the smaller stores in pricing and availability, without sacrificing product quality.

I would invite you to go to the Lightning Source facility in La Vergne, Tenn. and watch the books come off the conveyor belts. I think you will be amazed at how many are the same titles you would normally buy, read and give good reviews to.

Regardless of how long you have been receiving royalty checks, you still have the responsibility as a writer to do thorouch research before putting words into print, even when posting a comment anonymously.

Here is a link to an IBM report on Manufacturing on Demand, for further research:

https://www-07.ibm.com/au/innovationindex/pdf/Manufacturing_innovation.pdf

I am confused. You appear to want to argue against the fact that "The on-demand and short run segment is the method typically used by self-publishers”, but instead appear to concur that this IS the case, but argue why it shouldn’t be.

 

“this is the only printing and distribution model Flying Pen Press employs, and we have 13 titles”

Okay. But this country sees on average 200 titles published a day. How does the 13 titles done by Flying Pen Press (presumably one of your better examples) make Publisher’s Weekly’s insistence that on demand is the “typical” method used a “gross understatement”? If they had said it was the “only” method used, you might have an argument. But does 13 titles against tens of thousands make it a “gross understatement”?

 

“Let's break the myth that is holding back the industry.”

Woah, isn’t this a contradiction? I mean hear, you are saying something is holding the industry back. If so, then the statement that On Demand isn’t “typically” used by traditional publishers is an accurate one – something is holding the industry back. If the first statement is a “gross understatement” – which is to say LOADS of publishers are using on demand, then can you argue that something is holding the industry back?

 

These can not both be true.

 

Since the bulk of your essay is about why On Demand is the future, why it is important, I’m going to assume that THAT is the central thrust of your essay, not that 13 titles doth a gross understatement make.

Also...

"POD is now the norm, and mass production is the exception".  I think that depends on how you define norm, and if you look closely I think you'll see that's NOT what they say.  What they say is the number of POD titles exceeds the number traditional titles.  The operative word is titles.  The number of books printed, the number of books sold (which is what, by most people's factoring, IS the industry - the sales, not the number of titles) is FAR outstripped by "traditional" publishing.

 

Now I'm sure there are many reasons for this, and how this statistic is calculated.  But I think, with both number of books printed and number of books sold, so long as "traditional" outstrips POD, you're going to have a hard time selling the idea that POD publishing is the norm, and I think you are misquoting Bowker to say that they claim that POD publishing is the norm.  I am not aware of them making this claim.

Come to think of it.....

"On-demand, primarily through Lightning Source, has become par for the course for traditional publishers. For instance"

Logicaly, your "For Instance" should be a traditional publisher who goes through POD.  But the example you gave is not of a tratitional publisher.  Your argument would be streingthened if you found traditional publisher using POD (and there are those who are switching to POD - as a printing method).

Of course, you may think of Flying Pen Press as a traditional publisher, and that is your right, but I think most in the industry would disagree, so if you're going to use them as an example, you may want to explain what makes them traditional (know your audiance).

 

That is, if you want to get this published in publishers weekly.  If not, who cares.

Let's see, we look at submitted manuscripts, select a few according to our editorial standards, which are very strict, set the book to type, send the book to the publsiher, sell teh book through major wholesalers to teh book trade, including major bookstores and we pay author royalties on those sales. Isn't that traditional?

Well, let me rephrase then.  An established traditional publisher (and before you remind me how established you are, let me say established within the industry.  If I go to a writer's conference there are probably 10 to 12 publishers or imprints everyone there - everyone - has heard of.  Established in that sense).   To argue gross understatement, a more established publisher might suit your argument better. Again, 13 titles does not "a gross understatement" make.

Granted, we have not been around long, only two years. However, tehre are more than 30,000 "traditional" publsihers in this country. The "established" publsihers, as you call them, haev downsized in incredible numbers, while most of the smaller publsihers have grown considerably in the last twelve months.

There has been a tremendous paradigm shift in pubslihing, and the old guard of publsihing is having a difficult time with shifting ot the new say of publishing. However, they are now quickly catchingon to the fact that print on demand is a more efficient, lest costly, less risky method of publishing, even as they lose authors to smaller and newer companies and to self-publishing endeavors.

I take pride that Flying Pen Press is not an "established" old guard publishing company, because now is the time for innovation and fresh ideas, ideas that make it easier to bring better quality books to more readers, faster and cheaper and more ecology minded.

“I take pride that Flying Pen Press”

As well you should.

 

What I was saying, however, is that I am not convinced that, to make the point that the statement “on-demand and short run segment is the method typically used by self-publishers as well as online publishers” is a “gross understatement” Flying Pen (which is YOUR business. My god man, how many people can say they EVER owned a business that succeeded in ANYTHING. Of COURSE you should be proud) would be a sufficient example.

 

You state that they haven’t published your reply yet. I was simply pointing out a few reasons I could think of that might lead to difficulty in your getting your essay published (for example dual themes when you really should have one; contradictions like saying both that the industry is moving forward rapidly AND being held back, saying that “According to Bowker… POD is now the norm” (that is NOT what they said, but this admittedly was not in your article but your interpretation of it, as I explained earlier)).

 

I suspect you have a GREAT DEAL to be proud of (and since 4 out of 5 businesses go belly up in 3 years, and you look like you’ve been around a lot longer than that are surviving this economy, congratulations, I am impressed). But that is neither here nor there.

 

I stand by my argument that 13 titles does not a gross understatement make (and since this is the thrust of your essay, I don’t think this is a minor point I’m harping on).

 

You can not BOTH take pride that you are not a traditional publisher and then fault people for thinking your not.

 

The only point I am trying to make is that –whether or not your essay is correct or not, you (in my opinion) fail to make any of the points you appear to be trying to make, and I suggested ways to strengthen it. If you do in fact intend for publication in publisher’s weekly, quoting a small non established press (whether it’s yours or not, whether you love or hate it) as proof that they “Publishers Weekly Just Doesn’t Get It” when it comes to trends in a massive industry is, I’m afraid, just not convincing.

 

In fact (as I pointed out), if you’re interested in actually getting into publishers weekly (and I’m not at all convinced you are) I see a great number of reasons they wouldn’t publish this essay (all structural – I’ve never said your ideas are bad, your press is dumb, or you shouldn’t be proud. My issue is the essay itself, which strikes me as blatantly contradictory). But I’ve already pointed all that out. I would say that in reguards to this essay, your pride may have… contributed to a lack of focus and more angst than might otherwise have allowed for a focused message.

 

In any case, I wish you the best of luck, and well done with the business man. That stuff isn’t easy – and nobody knows how hard it is unless they’ve tried it, and most don’t have the guts to. So kudos, and I wish you all the success in the industry.