Fern Reiss has an article up on her site titled Five Things Your POD Subsidy Publisher Won’t Tell You. Unfortunately, it is full of sweeping generalizations and does not provide an accurate comparison of the two different types of self-publishing. Here is the background information on her supposed facts.

Fern Reiss wrote: “Nobody reviews our subsidy books.”

This is not true. There are scores of people and organizations online that review our “subsidy” books. But the larger implication she makes is that trade press reviews are the only way a book can achieve any kind of critical mass with the book-buying public. That is absolute baloney. Our current top-selling author consistently moves hundreds of books a month through the web and through Ingram and has never had a single trade review.

Fern Reiss wrote: “Bookstores don’t carry subsidy books.”

Bookstores don’t carry most of the books put into the market, regardless of who published them. There simply isn’t enough shelf space. But Fern is correct in that a traditionally published book has a better chance of being stocked in a store.

However, there is an assumption built into Fern’s statement that is incorrect - that is a book needs to be on a bookstore shelf to sell. Not only does our seven years of POD bookselling experience show this is incorrect, novelist and author advocate MJ Rose shows, using stats from Publishers Weekly, that the best the average midlist author can hope to achieve is distribution through 25% of the brick-and-mortar stores.

If your goal is to have your book on a bookstore shelf, POD is definitely not for you. But if you are looking for a way to sell books, you should consider POD.

Fern Reiss wrote: “Your book won’t look great. Almost everyone in the publishing industry can spot a POD subsidy book a mile away…”

Again, this is baloney provided a professional: 1.) edits the manuscript; 2.) designs the cover; and 3.) formats the book. POD books will look unprofessional when authors who have no design experience try to do the design work themselves, or when they hire someone who has little or no experience.

Fern Reiss wrote: “Since we own the ISBN, we control the book.”

I’ll concede there is some truth to this statement. But it is not by design of the POD publishers. It is because that is the rule as defined by the US government - the overseer of the ISBN system. The ISBN belongs to the organization that purchases it and ownership cannot be transferred to another individual or organization. If POD publishers could sell you individual ISBNs, they certainly would. But the rules forbid it.

That said, there should be no reason why you can’t purchase your own block of ISBNs and still use a POD publisher. At least that is the way we do it at BookLocker. We are happy to provide an ISBN to authors at no additional charge, but we also let them use their own if they wish.

According to attorney Mark Levine’s The Fine Print, a book that reviews the major POD publishers, BookLocker is the only POD publisher on his list that allows this.

Fern Reiss wrote: “You’ll pay through the nose. To self-publish a 200-page softcover book might cost about $2 a copy. To POD subsidy publish the exact same book will cost between $5 and $15 per copy.”

While there is a point to be made here, Fern isn’t doing it very well. She is comparing apples to oranges. When she says it costs “$2 a copy” what she means is it costs $2 per copy to print. That’s it. The printer puts the books in a box and ships them to you. She doesn’t add in the ISBN costs (more than $200 for a block of 10), or the formatting and cover design costs. Simple subsidy book printers don’t provide the turnkey ability to actually deliver the book to a paying customer. How an author gets the book out of his or her garage and into the hands of customers is up to the individual authors to figure out.

Professional POD publishers handle all the back-end and drop-shipping for the author, from setting up a page for the author’s book in their online store to processing the customer’s credit card, to printing and then shipping the book directly to the customer.

Plus that $2 price is if you commit to buying a certain quantity upfront, most likely a very large quantity. Before POD technology became available, authors wanting copies of their books for $2 each were forced to pay thousands of dollars up front and then to warehouse the books themselves. Many of the subsidy publishing companies and printers that do not produce books using POD technology still force authors to pay thousands up front and then offer few if any services beyond the printing of the books. If they do offer other services, those services are charged separately, far above the $2 originally quoted per copy.

What Fern neglects to mention is that when you use a POD publisher, you are getting a much deeper level of service. For an upfront setup fee, and a percentage of each sale, you are buying into a turnkey process that: 1.) offers the book to customers for purchase, 2.) collects the customer’s money, 3.) arranges for the printing of the book and delivery directly to the customer, 4.) provides real-time posting of royalties/commissions to each author’s online account and regular payments to authors, 5.) ensures the book is listed on Amazon.com, BarnesandNoble.com, and numerous other online bookstores, and 6.) puts the book into the traditional bookselling system via Books in Print, so customers can order the books from their favorite brick and mortar bookstore.

At BookLocker, that upfront cost is $392. There is no way an author with a “$2-per-copy” self-published book, could set up a similar system for that little amount of money.

All this being said, there are good reasons to look critically at companies offering POD publishing. Namely, you want to deal with a company that takes no rights (to your book text OR your cover), lets you terminate the relationship instantly and easily, and charges fees that are low enough for you to make back your investment with minimal book sales.

If an author has the resources to do their own sales and fulfillment, then a POD publisher adds little value. But the reality is most authors don’t have this ability, or don’t want to devote the time and money that it takes to sell and distribute books directly to customers.