No Fake Books · 26 May 2001
Last year an author contacted me with tales of dissatisfaction and disrespect in the relationship with her publisher. She’d decided that her next book would have a better chance if she published it herself, and sold directly to her established market over the Web. Being all for independent publishing and niche markets and the Web, I agreed to help with design and production.
Having signed up for the ‘independent publisher’ program at a certain heavily funded dot com behemoth just getting off the ground, she was optimistic about the promise of print-on-demand books: reasonably good margin, no warehousing, distribution or retailing worries. Just send them electronic files and wait for the cheques to come in. And the hype the company splashed around did seem impressive, if in fact they could do it.
It was a debacle from day one. Orders were lost; incorrect sums were collected from customers; the ordering page on the site would kick customers off and force a browser restart if you didn’t live in one of fifty States; for ages the book was listed as out of print (!) in the company’s own online catalogue. Several times, these allegedly on-demand books would take two months to make it out the door.
And when I finally saw a copy, it was, as a physical object, an aberration. A POD book is essentially this: a coarsely laser-printed wad of paper bound within an inch of its life by half a pound of adhesive and an even more coarsely colour laser-printed cover (solid colours mottled, continuous tones broken up into chunky screen dots), laminated with crappy Saran Wrap that curls the cover outward.
After a year of this nonsense we’ve given up. Through the combination of an Old Economy offset printer and an Old Paradigm distribution house, the author’s books are now arriving safely into the hands of those who pay for them, who in turn get to curl up with something that isn’t the publishing equivalent of a cheap plastic toy.
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