We’ve built up quite a list of articles, so I decided to post links to them here:

• Upselling Authors On Inflated Copyright And LCCN Registration Fees
  
• Inflated Shipping Charges?
  
• List Prices, Royalties and Author Discounts
  
• Upselling Authors On Expedite Fees, Photos/Images, Indexes, Endnotes, And More!
  
• Hard Core Sales Tactics of Some POD Publishers
  
• “Free” POD Services Can Be Very Expensive!
  
• Does Your POD Publisher’s Homepage Tell Everyone You Paid to Have Your Book Published?
  
• Tempted by “Free” Author Copies Offered by Your POD Publisher? Don’t Be Fooled!
  
• How Many Books Sales Needed to Recoup Your Investment?
  

The only thing I don’t understand is what happens when if the book is picked up by a print publisher? Does it then move out of Booklocker’s ISBN and into that of new publisher?

My situation is a bit different: I wasn’t even thinking about using a POD who claims to sell a single ISBN #–I already own an ISBN since the 80s when I self-published four books the old-fashioned way under Freelance Publications. So my concern was whether to use one of the leftovers or not. I can see now that wouldn’t work since ISBN indicates book source, and I certainly don’t want to get into filling that role again!!! Your long explanation of the role of the ISBN is very illuminating.

If a book we publish gets picked up by an traditional publisher, then our ISBN gets retired – essentially set to “out of print” – and a new ISBN gets assigned by the traditional publisher.

This is the case, though, no matter who owns the initial ISBN. So in other words even if the ISBN belongs to the author, it will still get replaced by one from the traditional publisher.

The only caveat to watch out for is that the old ISBN, and thus the old book information, is forever in the Bowker system. So when the traditional publisher releases the new version of the book, they should make it clear to customers the book is a new edition. They can easily do this by changing the cover graphic and calling out the edition in the book description.

The reason the old ISBN information is still kept in the system is so companies like Amazon.com can sell used versions of the book, if they exist.

This sometimes confuses authors who terminate their relationship with POD companies like us. They will take the book off the market, then later see it is still listed on Amazon.com. But even though the book is still listed there, it doesn’t mean Amazon.com can actually get a new copy to sell. If you try ordering the book, Amazon.com will take your order, then email you later and say they can’t get the book anymore.

I did an interview with Tom a while back on our business philosophy.

They quickly wrote me a public apology, which you can view here. And they promised to change the review.

Well, I was surfing around last week and it is still not changed, 10 weeks after the promise was made.

I think the review is more apropos to them.

There’s been a lot of talk online about how owning your own ISBN is a benefit. An ISBN, for those who don’t know, stands for International Standard Book Number, and is essentially a product ID. You need one to sell a book through a retail channel, such as a bookstore.

The conventional wisdom is that a self-published author needs to actually purchase an ISBN for his or her book. In other words, the author actually owns the ISBN. In fact, one POD service company is touting the ability to sell single ISBNs directly to authors.

The ability to purchase single ISBNs from this POD service company has been heralded by some as a great, liberating event for self-published authors. Previously, an author had to go directly to RR Bowker, the only agency allowed to sell ISBNs, and buy at least a block of 10 numbers (though rumor is you could by single ISBNs if you knew who to contact).

The purpose of an ISBN is to identify the supplier of a book. The actual owner of the ISBN and the owner of the book do not have to be the same entity, even though historically in publishing they have been. An author who self-publishes and retains all rights still owns and controls the book, regardless of who owns the ISBN.

So the premise I put forth is that, if an author goes to a POD service company, he or she does so for the purpose of that company doing the order fulfillment. And if that is the case, then there is no benefit for the author to own the ISBN. It is just a number for facilitating the ordering process, which the author has by default elected not to be part of.

Before I get into the details of my reasoning, here is a tutorial on the relationship between a book’s ISBN and the traditional book distribution system.

BookLocker uses Ingram, the world’s largest book distributor, to distribute its books. The ISBN record at Ingram for a book shows BookLocker as the supplier of that book, and it does so even if an author used his or her own ISBN. (Booklocker.com is one of the only POD publishers that allows authors to use their own ISBN if they choose to do so.) This is logical, as Ingram needs to know who to go to when they need more copies of a book. And since it is our job to deal with Ingram, BookLocker is who they come to.

There is also a directory called Books-In-Print, which is put out by RR Bowker – the United States ISBN agency. And ISBN record in Books-In-Print lists only the publisher, not the supplier. And the “publisher” in Books-In-Print is whoever bought the ISBN from RR Bowker. The founding assumption of Books-In-Print is that the owner of the ISBN is both the publisher and supplier of a book. This was, of course, true for many years as there were no other publishing options for an author. It is not true today, as it is now possible to separate the two roles by using a POD service company.

Another important point – if the POD service company owns the ISBN, it creates the records at Ingram and Books-In-Print. If the author owns the ISBN, he or she only creates the record at Books-In-Print, not Ingram (this will be important later, when I explain how to take a book out-of-print).

So, the information to take away from the explanation above is that there are really two database records for a book if it is published through a POD service company that uses Ingram – one at Ingram and one at RR Bowker.

How does this play out in the real world?

Most bookstores order from Ingram. (Borders is an exception. They also will order from Ingram, but tend to also contact publishers directly through their listing in Books-In-Print.) When a bookstore calls Ingram for a book, Ingram goes to the supplier listed in the ISBN record. If that same bookstore looks the book up in Books-In-Print instead, the order gets routed to whomever the publisher is (AKA the owner of the ISBN) because that’s the contact information in Books-In-Print.

Now, when you remove a book from the system, that book’s ISBN is essentially “decommissioned”. It cannot be reused, even if nothing in the book or on the cover has changed. If the supplier changes, the ISBN must changed. However, the ISBN record isn’t deleted. It’s changed to say “out of print” or “unavailable.” Remember a few paragraphs back when I explained that if the POD service company owns the ISBN it creates the records at Ingram and Books-In-Print? Well, when you remove a book, the POD service company changes the ISBN record in both places. When the author owns the ISBN, the POD service company can only change the ISBN record at Ingram. The author has to change the record in Books-In-Print. This is how a book can be listed as both “out-of-print” and “in print” at the same time. It depends on where the party ordering the book looks.

Moreover, Amazon.com, BN.com and most of the online bookstores get their book information from the ISBN record at Ingram, NOT from Books-In-Print. So if a book is out-of-print in Ingram’s database, then it is also listed as out-of-print in every store to which Ingram supplies books.

Here is my reasoning as to why using your own ISBN, when you are also using a POD service company, is a mute point…

Let’s assume you are an author, using your own ISBN. You take that ISBN to a POD service company and set up a book with them. A year later, you decide you want to leave and form your own publishing company. The only way you can keep that book’s ISBN active when you publish the book through your new company is if you:

a.) don’t want to sell through Ingram or any of its partners (Amazon.com, BN.com and most of the online bookstores)

b.) you only use a traditional, offset printer; or a POD printer not associated with Ingram.

The reason is that the ISBN is now dead in the Ingram system (remember, the POD service company had to decommission the ISBN when you left).

Furthermore, if you try to submit that ISBN into Ingram’s system, or the system of any of Ingram’s partners, you’ll create a conflict that causes the old book information to reactivate and/or prevents the new book from appearing. (There can only be one record associated with an ISBN, and, per our example, you already created a record when you signed up with the POD service company a year ago.)

Basically, unless you are willing to give up most of your sales outlets, you must assign a new ISBN.

Now, this specific POD service company who is selling individual ISBNs to authors claims the author can take the ISBN with them when they leave. How can they do this, given what I just explained above? The sources I asked said there is a process whereby the author “proves” he or she owns the ISBN, and thus is allowed to keep the ISBN active in the Ingram system. However, this source also stated the process is far from perfect. Getting Ingram’s partners to change what they need to change is very difficult, and in some situations it may never get changed.

So the moral of the story is: if you are going the pure self-publishing route – forming a company, hiring a printer, negotiating with a distributor, and fulfilling customer sales yourself – then you absolutely need to have ownership of your ISBN. But if you are having your book printed by a POD service company – a company you go to specifically to handle all that backend stuff – don’t bother spending the extra money. If you ever leave, you really need to assign a new ISBN anyway.

TopTenReviews.com

I remember giving this interview, but I can’t believe what this guy wrote. In particular, this:

“But, the downfall of Booklocker.com is its complete lack of additional publishing and marketing services and the fact that we could never talk to a live person. Not once. All communication had to be made through email. It was hard enough to get the information we needed for this review, we can’t imagine what it would be like to try and publish a book with these people.”

What a load of bull. I keep all emails I send just for cases like this.

On 11/10/2005 I received this email from their reviewer (I’ve blotted out his contact info for privacy):

FROM: *****@toptenreviews.com
TO: help-request@booklocker.com
SUBJECT: HELP REQUEST – none

11/10/05 5:56:27

I am a reviewer for TopTenREVIEWS and am creating a review site on Online Book Publishing services.

Booklocker is a site we’d like to include in our review and I’d like to speak with someone in your company to receive further information and make sure I have all of the right information, so that I might present the most accurate picture of your business.

Will you please contact me either by phone directly or send a telephone number which I can use to contact you?

Unfortunately, I will not be available on Friday, Nov. 11th.

Thanks so much,
B**** C********
(***) ***-**** (I work from home)
*****@toptenreviews.com
TopTenReviews.com

————–

I, as always, promptly replied to him. I told him I can’t do a phone call, but if he emailed me the questions, I’d turn them around in a day. I did.

Three days later he writes me back and says the following:

From: “B**** C********” <*****@toptenreviews.com>
To: “‘richard at booklocker’”
Date: Mon, 14 Nov 2005 09:45:17 -0700

Richard,

Thanks for your prompt response on this.

B****

Notice what it says there – “Thanks for your prompt response”.

It is true that we don’t take phone calls. But we do answer our email promptly. We don’t leave anyone hanging.

So TopTenReviews.com lied in our review. And for what end, I don’t know.

I do know that on 11-30-2005 at 2:00 PM Eastern Time, I received another email from TopTenReviews.com – this time from a VP:

DATE: 2005-11-30 14:00:46
FROM: ****@toptenreviews.com
TO: help-request@booklocker.com
SUBJECT: HELP REQUEST -

Hello,

Does Booklocker offer an affiliate program? We are interested in promoting and selling your products from our review site. Can the appropriate person please contact me directly.

Thanks,

M*** E*******
Vice President
www.toptenreviews.com

****@toptenreviews.com
1-801-***-**** (Direct Office)
1-801-***-**** (Cell)

The guy wanted us to pay a referral fee for people he sent to us. As a policy we don’t pay out referral fees, or accept referral fees for anything we recommend. We want all our business practices to be transparent to our customers.

I can’t help but wonder if we got a bad review because we wouldn’t pay.

If you want an honest assessment of POD companies, I’d suggest getting Mark Levine’s book, “The Fine Print“.

Disclaimer: We sell the ebook version of it for him on our WritersWeekly.com site, but Mark placed it with us after he wrote the book and ranked our service. And he gets no special deals or consideration.

NOTE: This is for our black-and-white interior program only (with color covers, of course). We don’t yet offer color-interior POD publishing to authors in Europe.
Our submission form is HERE.

Also, if you are a small European publisher looking to break into the US market, we’d love to hear from you. Chances are we can get you into Ingram’s US distribution system faster, cheaper, and easier than if you approached them directly.

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. ;->

Here’s the problem, though – it is freaking hard; not only to write fiction, but to also sell it.

And while I would never bemoan an author’s attempt to use POD to launch a fiction career, there are easier ways to make money with POD.

Steve Weber points out a great idea on his blog – using the quick turnaround advantage POD has over traditional publishing to capitalize on current events.

Specifically, Weber references a project of specialty publisher Black Dog & Leventhal to quickly get a book out on Barack Obama.

But an even more compelling strength of POD is its ability to reach narrow markets at a low-cost. While RVing, my wife and I once met an author who had built an entire publishing business around writing and publishing his own versions of Radio Shack’s various product manuals, since the originals were so poorly written. This is a perfect application for POD – a market far too narrow for traditional publishing, but still large enough to make some money.

If you look around, you’ll find hundreds of such profitable book ideas.

Dehanna Bailee has a great explanation as to why that isn’t the case in traditional publishing. Money starts flowing out the authors’ pockets the minute they start querying agents.

I’d add that traditionally published authors give up all rights to their work (POD authors don’t, or shouldn’t anyway). And that value is undetermined at the time those traditionally published authors sign their contracts. So a traditional publisher might be getting a steal if they paid next to nothing for the manuscript.

That is not to say there are plenty of unscrupulous POD companies. There are. But if you keep your setup costs low, keep all your rights, and can easily get out of any contract, you can use POD to test the market while you shop the book around to traditional publishers. Then you’ll know the book’s value before you enter negotiations to sign away the rights.

Here was the situation – this author (not yet a BookLocker author) spoke with her local Borders manager about stocking her book when it came out. The manager told her he could put her in contact with the buyer for all the Borders stores, but the books would have to be returnable for Borders to consider stocking them.

I promptly told this woman that if her primary method of marketing this book was through bookstores, she should forget POD publishing. The economics just don’t work out.

It made me take pause and realize that many authors simply don’t understand how the money flows in POD publishing.

Here is how POD publishing works when it comes to bookstore sales. A bookstore collects money from a customer, takes out their percentage, then sends the remainder to the distributor/printer (Ingram in our case). Ingram takes out the printing costs and their piece of the sale, and sends what’s left over to the POD publisher, who then gives the author his or her cut of the sale.

When a bookstore “returns” a book, the money goes back to the bookstore from the distributor/printer – leaving no funds to pay the printing bill. The distributor/printer, in turn, takes the money they just paid out to the bookstore from the POD Publisher.

It is never a good situation when a business owes money. But it’s doubly bad when the business has no idea how much money they are going to owe or when it will come due. (Remember, bookstores can return one book, a hundred books, a thousand books; and at any time). This economic uncertainty is why POD books are, generally, non-returnable.

To mitigate the uncertainty of returns, some POD publishers offer programs whereby an author can pay a deposit, and then list his or her book as returnable. If the bookstores return the book, the cost of the printing comes out of the deposit.

BookLocker does not have such a program, and never will. We just don’t believe in the concept of returns. It is a system unfairly weighted in favor of the bookstores. Just because bookstores don’t understand their markets well enough to predict demand doesn’t mean our business (and our authors) should have to operate at risk – especially for an outlet that generates a very small part of our overall sales.

Most of our sales are direct to the public, or are through online stores like Amazon.com or BarnesandNoble.com. When we do sell to bookstores (and we still do, everyday), it is on a special order basis.

Update: Here are some links to other articles we’ve written on the issue.

Why All Books Should Be Non-Returnable By Angela Hoy

Why All Books Should Be Non-Returnable – Part II By Angela Hoy

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.

It talks about some comments a Kent Larson made to one of Bob’s previous posts on self-publishing.

Kent wrote:

1. There are a lot of companies that prey on self-published authors, selling them services that, they say, will get their books sold or better known. Some of the so-called “Print-on-Demand” publishers (really vanity publishers that use POD) are particularly agregious.

He is right that many POD companies have a business model where selling services is their primary revenue generator. It gives companies like BookLocker a bad name by association. We’re trying to provide an inexpensive alternative to the traditional publishing route, with an emphasis on “inexpensive”.

We can put a book into the marketplace in six weeks (usually much less) for a setup and original cover design fee of $392, and small percentage of each sale. We take care of everything necessary to package the book, to sell the book online (through our site and all the major online bookstores), and to distribute the book through Ingram so brick-and-mortar stores can order it. And we do all that without taking an author’s rights, or restricting their ability to negotiate a traditional contract or walk away from us at any time.

There is no way someone wanting to self-publish could get all those benefits on their own at a lower cost. (Just securing the minimum-sized block of ISBNs is $270.)

However, there are definite caveats with our model which I haven’t been able to resolve to my satisfaction (though I’m trying to come up with ways every day). The most glaring is marketing. Our model really requires an author with the aptitude for self-promotion. We shy away from offering specific marketing services because we have a ethical problem with the “double-dipping” issue – getting paid to perform a service which results in sales that we also get a piece of.

Also, a good marketing campaign is a custom endeavor. Anything custom is by definition expensive because it requires an expert. (The services other POD companies are selling as “book marketing” are weak efforts at best.)

That being said, the BookLocker model, as defined now, works. We sell tens of thousands of books each year. And those are books sold to the public, not authors buying their own books.

Our model works because, among other things, the costs to get into the market (setup/service fees) are very low and the commission we pay authors on sales is high. The benefits of using a POD company starts to decline precipitously as you raise those setup/service fees.

Kent wrote:

2. All self publishing has a poor reputation in the industry. Booksellers often assume, without reading, that any self published book isn’t worth reading, let alone stocking in their stores. Self published authors usually have to do quite a lot of work to overcome this disadvantage.

A lot of self-published books are crap because there is no vetting process. This is because most every POD company publishes everything submitted to them. They have to. Otherwise their revenue stream – selling services to authors – dries up.

BookLocker, on the other hand, does not. We reject most of what is submitted to assure the quality of what we do publish is above average. This is one of the reasons, I’m sure, that we regularly process orders from bookstores.

But Kent’s comment implies something that isn’t true – namely, that the book has to be “stocked” in a bookstore in order be a commercial success. That is just not true. Most traditionally published books aren’t stocked in bookstores.

In addition, consider that at least half of the books on the shelves of any large bookstore chain will never sell copy one. They are there simply for decoration. Bookstores can afford this type of interior design because they don’t have to pay for those books. They can return those books to the distributor for credit.

Our sales to brick-and-mortar stores represents a fraction of our total book sales to the public. Most sales are online through BookLocker.com, as well as Amazon.com, BN.com and all the other online bookstores. Of course, you could argue that is by design. And it is. But also realize that the online customer base for books is enormous – certainly large enough to support self-published books.

But here is the elephant in the room no one wants to talk about – the traditional publishing process sucks. Many manuscripts go unpublished every year not because they are bad, but because traditional publishers don’t know how to find the book’s market in a cost-effective manner. That is where POD publishers like BookLocker can provide a real service, as long as the return on investment is good. And the return on investment is good if, and only if, the upfront costs to get into the market are kept low.