A couple times a year we go through our major competitor’s offerings, just to make sure our service is still competitive. Angie (my wife and business partner, for those of you who don’t know) completed that review yesterday. She wrote an article for today’s WritersWeekly newsletter on the fees charged by iUniverse, xLibris, Authorhouse, and Lulu.

My observation after reading Angie’s results are that our competitors seem to be inventing new ways to screw authors.

You have to understand, we all use the same back-end company to do the printing and drop-shipping (Lulu prints some books in-house). In other words, the books printed by iUniverse, xLibris, Authorhouse, and Lulu come off the same printing machines, sit on the same loading docks and get put into the same delivery trucks as BookLocker’s books.

Furthermore, we certainly aren’t as big as those other companies (though we are no slouch either - we’ve published print books for more than 1,000 authors). So, in theory, they should - if anything - be getting a lower price for everything from the printing company due to their volume. And yet, they are all charging higher setup fees than BookLocker, as well as inventing fees for things for which BookLocker doesn’t charge extra.

I should be thankful that our competitors are handing us this gift - putting such large margins on their services that we will never have the fear of being undercut on price.

It is a bittersweet victory, however.

First, the price difference puts some doubts on BookLocker’s offerings because people question how we can do it for so much less than everyone else.

And second, since these guys are the more visible companies in the POD services industry, they fuel the argument from the naysayers who claim that all POD publishing companies exist to suck money out of the pockets of gullible authors.

What is so sad is that POD publishing doesn’t have to be a scam to make money. POD publishing is an excellent way to test a book’s viability in the marketplace without investing a lot of cash - one of the biggest problems traditional publishers have when investing in new authors. It spreads the risk more equitably between author and publisher during that uncertain time when the market is developing for a book.

At least it could do these things if a savvy traditional publisher ever hooked up with a savvy POD services company.

If any savvy traditional publishers want to talk, email me. ;->