Self Publishing via PoD

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Permalink Reply by James 'Grim' Desborough on October 26, 2009 at 2:52am

Margins are tiny if you want the books to remain affordable. If you're in the US I'd suggest going via Createspace instead as that'll get you onto Amazon and seems like a better deal. Lulu seems to be slightly better quality though.

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Permalink Reply by Zakharov Sawyer on October 26, 2009 at 1:12pm

I hadn't heard of Createspace, I'll have to check it out.

I think what I may end up doing is creating a guide that has pros\cons for the different services from our perspective to help other people. Do you have any personal experience, James?

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Permalink Reply by michael kotschi on October 26, 2009 at 5:59pm

I haven't published anything yet, but one POD outfit that I'm looking into is KA-BLAM

Though they basically cater to the comic book crowd they have published some rpg material.
The cost for ten 52 page comic sized books (6.625 x 10.25) is $28.10. For that you get a color cardstock cover, and b&w interior with a Ka-Blam ad on the inside back cover. That is before shipping. Now I don't really want an rpg manual in comic size, but they also print in digest size for a little less and supposedly up to 8w by 10.5h for the same price as the normal sized comics.

Like I said I haven't published anything yet, but as soon as I have something complete I'm gonna run it through them.

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Permalink Reply by Zakharov Sawyer on October 26, 2009 at 6:09pm

Another one I haven't heard of! We should put together a list! Any others you guys know of?

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Permalink Reply by Jonathan Jacobs on October 26, 2009 at 6:47pm

In my limited (very) experience with Open Game Table - which is published through Lulu - I would say it was a fairly good one. I've been very satisfied with the Lulu prints of OGT - and compared to the Lighting Press version (which is distributed through Studio2); I don't see a difference in the quality.

A quick note about the math of it all... and why it might matter to you.
Are you looking to publish something small for just a select group of people? Or looking to create something that a retailer would/might be interesting in selling as well? The former type of print product can be printed cheap, with zero to small margin, and still get bought by a fair number of people. The later type of book should be priced higher, in line with other retail products, because retailers want to make a 50% return on books they buy.

Small/Limited POD Printing
Cost of Printing + Margin (if any) = POD Price

Retail Book
(Cost of Printing + Distributor's Cut (5-10% retail) + Author Margin ) x 2 = Retail Price

For example, I got a few complaints from people when I priced OGT at $22.95 (about average for a retail gaming book @ 140 pages) - but once you cut the price by 60% (retail markup, distribution costs, etc) and then remove the cost of printing the publisher is left with a very slim margin. But I decided to go with this pricing model because I wanted the book to go into retail distribution (it was the whole point of the anthology in fact - to bring non-blog readers to our blogs by way of the retail store). If I had printed the book and set the retail price to a hair above the POD printing price (let's say $9.95/copy), the book would have never been picked up for distribution because retailers would have never been interested in selling it. And then the only people buying it would have been... well... people who heard about it on the net; which sort of defeated the whole purpose.

I guess what I'm trying to say is
1. Lulu good. IMHO.
2. Think ahead about where you want to sell it (only through POD? through Amazon? or through retail channels as well?). Price accordingly.
3. Don't expect to make any money.

Sry for rambling...

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Permalink Reply by Zakharov Sawyer on October 26, 2009 at 7:49pm

Don't apologize, that was very insightful!

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Permalink Reply by Dale C. McCoy, Jr. on October 31, 2009 at 7:53am

I use Lulu, simply because more than 1/2 my customer base is in Europe and Lulu has a facility in both Europe and the US. So shipping for both is (relatively) reasonable.

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