POD Publishers

With Print on Demand Publishers, you pay a fee and they store your novel on computer. It is then for sale on sites such as Amazon etc. and when someone buys a copy it is printed and sent out. This negates any risk for the publisher as they don't have to risk losing the sizeable investment that traditional publishing requires to launch and market a new book. In fact as the author has already paid a fee which completely covers their costs, there is no risk for them at all and any commissions they take from sales are generally a bonus for them.
POD publishers started to get popular about 5 or 6 years ago as the www became more and more accessible. There were one or two flagship publishers who were doing it in the form of an author’s cooperative, and it seemed to make sense: Reclaiming the publishing power from the large publishing houses and their business orientated mindsets and giving it back to the author.
CitRon Press was by far the most notable and successful. They charged a fee of £400 to join the cooperative and if they didn't publish your novel they refunded the entire fee. They had the backing of many famous authors (Martin Amis, Iain Banks etc.), and what made them stand out was the fact that they actually had supply deals with all the major high street book-store chains. Waterstones was full of stands of their books at one time. They would only publish writing which they considered to be of a certain standard and so had trouble finding a constant supply of authors. Their books were produced to a high quality but still did not quite look and feel like books published in the traditional manner, and they were more expensive. They also went overboard on marketing and when push came to shove couldn't sell enough to keep going. They went bankrupt in 2000 after 4 years in the business and the publishing revolution died.
Nowadays there are thousands of POD publishers who have learnt from their mistakes and done away with principles and quality altogether in order to make profits. 99.9% of them will publish anything regardless of any kind of quality or coherence so long as the fee is paid.
Most of the POD publishers offer packages which give you a certain number of author copies of your novel (normally 20, 50 or 100), which you can then sell yourself. And if you manage to sell them all you can then purchase further copies at a reduced rate. The problem is that generally the recommended retail price of each copy is higher than that of a traditionally published novel and this along with the fact that the book will be of a noticeably lower standard than a traditionally published one makes it fairly difficult to sell (apart from to friends and family of course). It is extremely rare almost unheard of for a book published by POD to ever make its author back the initial cost charged by the publisher - despite what the sites will tell you about authors published by them who have gone on to become best selling authors.
Packages offered also include cover design (you can do it yourself if so inclined, and marketing packages etc. The ones that do have some sort of marketing and distribution network are fairly inadequate. That means to sell your novel you need a lot of time to distribute the novel yourself. None of the major bookstore chains will ever take a book published in this fashion, although sometimes you can persuade your local branch to take a few copies on a sale or return basis on the novelty of it being by a local author.
If you just want to see your work in print as a real book you can hold and put on the shelf to be proud of (a temptation that most writers find hard to resist) then POD is an option. If however what you really want is to write more novels and hopefully make a career or semi-career out of your writing then they're not really an option. This is because when you get an agent or publishing deal they will spend months and months with you helping you to edit and improve the manuscript before it is actually published to make it the best piece of writing it can possibly be. It's in their interest to do this because the more copies of it that sell then the more money they get to make. So they will really tell you how it is warts and all to help you improve your work before publication.
Many of the POD type publishers tend to have no editorial staff at all and will simply print your novel as you give it to them. These type of publishers that do have editorial staff to help you work on your novel do tend to be a bit more concerned with basic grammar and spelling errors, more a kind of proofreading and telling you what you want to hear because you're paying them.
If you should decide to go for this type of publishing then my advice would be to check out all the similar POD sites. Speak to a good selection of the authors (and not just the ones they suggest - pick your own from their lists) before signing a contract or handing over any money. And keep an eye out for 'renewal fees'in the small print of any contract. This is an annual fee to keep your book in print. Although they all claim to give you an open contract where you retain all rights a lot of POD publishers do have 'time clauses' hidden in the small print which means you can't publish your work with anyone else until a number of years elapse. This means that even if a traditional publishing deal comes along you may not be able to take it, so keep an eagle eye out.
For more information see http://www.sfwa.org/Beware/printondemand.html

Please see our other articles:

The Next Big Thing: A Brief Guide To The Publishing Industry
and The Submission Process For Aspiring Novelists

Getting an Idea for a Book

Tips for a Successful Book

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