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What you need to know about print-on-demand book publishing
Part 3: An insight into self-publishing a book
This is the third part of a series about how we self-published a book. This part is about how to get your book printed, and demystifying print-on-demand services.
Please don’t be scared by the length of this article. If you’re thinking about self-publishing a book, this article could save you a lot of time and money!
If you want to self-publish a book, essentially you have two options:
- Find a printer to print a large run of books, store stock (p.s. boxes of books take up a lot of space), sell the books yourself, then pack and post all the orders yourself. The upside is you’ll have more control over the quality of the book — depending on your budget, you can work with your printer to choose the materials for the book. As you’d be selling the books yourself, you can create your own bespoke storefront, which can be more profitable, you have more marketing tools at your disposal, and you get valuable data you can use to sell more books (I’ll go into all of this later in this series). The downside is it’s a big investment to print a large inventory of books upfront, it’s risky (you might not sell all the books), and packing and posting hundreds of books is a lot of work!
- Use a print-on-demand service. A print-on-demand service prints individual copies of your book as orders come in and ships them to the customer for you. The upsides are you don’t stock any books yourself (so there’s no risk if it doesn’t sell), and the selling, packing, and posting parts are all taken care of for you (depending on the service you use). The downside is what you gain in financial safety and convenience, you lose in quality control, analytics, and profit margin.
At this point in the process, we’d put so much effort into writing and designing the book (see parts one and two), we really just wanted the best possible print quality we could afford. I assumed this meant we would likely go with option 1 (see above), even though it was undoubtedly more work, more up-front cost, and higher risk. And then life/fate/the universe stepped in and made our decision a lot more complicated…
