POD Covers and POD....

[alfreda89]

Everyone, I am about to plunge into the world of custom artwork for my Alfreda novels. (Yes, I have pretty much decided not to submit them to NYC. The agent will get other things from me, but I do not expect a house to offer me a contract I could sign.)

This is not going to be cheap, and apparently I need to decide up front which group I'm going to work with for the POD version. The templates vary. The artist can make a print cover and then create the ebook cover from it, but the reverse doesn't happen easily, if at all. So -- this is your chance to express yourself.

Have you tried any of the POD suppliers? Create Space? Lightning Source? Lulu? I'm going to search for quality vs.cost vs. distribution options. I want acid-free paper. We're talking three books that I hope convention vendors will be interested in trying out, that I hope might make their way into bookstores. But I also realize that sales online, even of print, may be all that will happen, since trade paperback books are so much higher in price (last I checked) than mass market books.

I'm interested in your experiences and opinions, if you would like to share them. You can contact me by message, if you want to comment privately.

I want to hear your war stories. I can only afford to do this once -- screwing up will set me back years and money I don't have to spare. So, anyone who has time to share their story? This is the moment.

And yes, I will share conclusions. An Excel spreadsheet will be born!

Thank you.

Comments

[davidlevine]

I have been happy with lulu.com. It took me quite a while to figure out how to output a PDF on a Mac that would work properly... the secret is to use PDF-X rather than plain PDF.

I found Lulu easy to use and there's zero up-front cost... you just upload your files, set the price, and whenever someone buys a copy (through lulu.com or amazon.com) you get your cut. You can set the price to any value above the cost (they are up-front about how much of that is the cost of printing and how much is their profit) and you get the difference on every sale. You can also order copies yourself, at cost... I always keep a few in the trunk of my car.

Selling through lulu.com and amazon.com is free, but you can also have the book listed in the Ingram catalog for $75. Getting any kind of print-on-demand book into brick-and-mortar bookstores is hard, though, because the cost of producing the book is high... you have to either price the book much higher than a comparable traditionally-printed book, sacrifice your own profit, ask the store to accept a much lower discount (profit margin), or some combination of the 3.

"Lulu uses FSC certified, lead-free, acid-free, buffered paper made from wood-based pulp."

[mouser.livejournal.com]

I've used Lulu for a specialty notebook, a monochrome cover but I had messed the shadings. If you do the POD, make sure you get a copy BEFORE you release it to the public!

The physical copy of it pleased me - as a note book I've beat it to hell and it's still got decent binding.

[msagara.livejournal.com]

I have done one POD title, available through Lulu.com.

I paid for a cover that could be used for the ebook version, if it came to that; the designer did both the wraparound and the ebook version. But we used stock art, and the cost was 300.00. I also paid someone to typeset, which was more - 2.00 a page.

But.

I didn’t do this with the expectation that I would actually *sell* many copies. And I haven’t.

My book was a short story collection. I had released the shorts in ebook format, one per ebook. But print readers asked if there would be a print version available. The short stories are connected to the (continuing) universe published by DAW books; the shorts appeared in various anthologies, all but one of which are out of print. I reprinted as ebooks on my own, and people started to ask, on my web-site, if there would be a print version.

I think I’ve sold 30 copies to date (not including copies I ordered for my own use.

I *knew*, going in, that the print version would be a money sink; that the ebooks would pay for the costs of producing a POD version I could personally live with. I didn’t expect, ever, that POD would pay for itself. It’s possible that I should have gone for CreateSpace, because I think that *would* have appeared on Amazon, and I might have sold a few more copies - but I doubt I would have sold a *lot* more.

The book *can* be ordered from Ingrams, so in theory, the book can be ordered by bookstores. But. Well.

If you want a POD version for the print readers you have, that’s fine. I did, because the people who were asking were also people who have pretty much read all my books in print, and I felt guilty not making a print format version available for them.

But it’s in no way a money maker. It’s a money sink. The ebooks have done more than well enough to cover the cost of the print version -- but the print version will never even pay for itself. I could have skipped the typesetting, which was the most expensive part of the process - but I actually wanted interiors that looked, to me, like a print book; it’s one of the things that I really notice the lack of in POD books.

[estara.livejournal.com]

Maybe Andrea Höst could highlight her experience if you asked her via Goodreads message, as she isn't on LJ? She does have some awesome Julie Dillon covers, she always offers her books as POD, too AND she did - from what I understand - the work on her stockphoto covers (for And All the Stars and The Touchstone Trilogy - the current covers) herself.

Also, shouldn't the BVC people have some singular experience with that. Oh right, and since I see MSW posting below, she did get those spiffy covers for her short stories.

Another person who offers ebook conversion is independently published author Moriah Jovan (no idea how long her waitling list is). I can personally vouch for the beauty of her ebooks at least. http://b10mediaworx.com/b10mwx/

I bet this link will put me in the spam folder again, heh.

POD covers

[elizabeth k. burton (from livejournal.com)]

There is another option, you know, to doing it yourself. :-)

[pameladean]

I have not done this yet, though I can see it looming faintly on the horizon. I just wanted to wish you luck.

P.