Self-Publishing: Print On Demand (POD)

By: A.D. Sterling

What is Print On Demand anyway?

Print On Demand (POD) services allow you to list your book for sale and will only print a copy when someone orders one. This is a great solution for self-publishing, especially if you can’t afford to do a big run of books.

The POD services I opted to use so far are:

Amazon KDP

Amazon KDP is possibly the easiest service for listing your book. The downside is that they only print paperback books, so if you’re interested in having a hardcover version you’ll have to have it printed elsewhere. When you list on Amazon your book is obviously only available for sale through Amazon’s website. You can, however, purchase your own copies at the discounted author cost to distribute yourself.

You can opt to have Amazon KDP distribute your book, but I wouldn’t recommend this. 1) They use IngramSpark for distribution so you’re paying both a portion of your sales and 2) In order to enable this feature I would have had to list my book at a higher price just to make a profit, which I didn’t want to do.

IngramSpark

IngramSpark offers POD for paperbacks as well as hardcover. The major advantage to IngramSpark is that they distribute through a bunch of other channels like to retailers, libraries, and schools. Formatting your files for IngramSpark is more challenging, so if you intend to list your book here I would recommend formatting your files to their specifications and using that file for Amazon KDP.

Barnes & Noble Press

Barnes & Noble also offers paperbacks as well as hardcovers. The advantage I saw with listing with B&N is that my book will be listed on their site whether they purchase my book through IngramSpark or not. The downside is that they required a unique ISBN for the same title & format, which is frowned upon as it’s confusing when it’s the same book with a different ISBN. I’m not sure yet if it was worth listing here, but I decided to give it a go and see what happens.