The reasons POD books less likely to succeed

The price of shoes being what it is, I'd rather just shake my fist. While that never produces the desired effect, it does get a lot of laughs.

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Member: Mystery Writers of America; Private Eye Writers of America
website: www.dickstodghill.com

Admin Number of posts: 7227 Registration date: 2008-01-11 Location: UK

Shelagh wrote:

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Self-Publishing Book Distribution & Marketing
Step four of the self-publishing process

Searching for the perfect book distribution channel for your self-published book is not unlike searching for the Holy Grail. Unless you have a marketing plan and a fair amount of money behind you, and in many cases, access to media and traditional bookstore distribution, sales will be a disappointment. This is not to say you won’t be successful. It’s just to say that you are going to most likely be swimming against the tide trying to distribute and market books in a traditional manner. The one thing that I am absolutely positive of is that there is no easy way to sell books and there is definitely no one place you can “throw money” and expect your books to disappear. Your success is going to be directly related to the effort you put in to selling your book, no matter what programs you select. If you don’t want to put in the time and effort to market your books, don’t buy too many copies. 100 books sold are better than 1000 books in your closet.

http://www.selfpublishing.com/step4.php5

Once the POD book is available, the book has to sell fast to attract a publisher/literary agent:

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"Just writing and self-publishing a book in itself isn't what's going to impress a publisher," said Andrea Hurst, president of Andrea Hurst Literary Management. "If a writer tells me that they self-published a book that sold 3,000 copies in two months, I'd take a look at it. That's what publishers are looking for: the highest sales numbers in the shortest time. But if this book has been out for two years and only sold 3,000, it's old. Publishers won't be interested in that. Books get old fast."

First-time authors may be inspired by stories about books like "The Shack" or "The Celestine Prophecy," which were rejected time and again by publishers but which hit it big after their authors took matters into their own hands. Once that happened, publishers were more than eager to work with them."

http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2008/10/6-ways-authors-can-succeed-by-self-publishing-books298.html

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Shelagh Watkins
http://shelaghwatkins.co.uk/

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Libraries only buy hardback copies.

Perhaps in the UK. In the US they will buy paperbacks.

Shelagh's last post gets around to something about POD publishing. There are sort of two "tracks".

One is trying to establish a self--published book enough to get it picked up.
The other is trying to successfully market the self-published book in it's own right.

POD has some problems there (high wholesale cost a big one) but it can be overcome and is less significant with certain titles.

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Okay without crossing the bounds of Marie's patience I will say this...

Marie and I almost signed on with a small press self publishing house. But it wasn't going to be a deal were we had to pay nor did they us. They were going to print, bind and individually number all of the series books for our kick butt series.

They would print 300 copies of collectors edition copies, but problem was there was no distrubution. You can have the best book in the world written but without distrubution your not going anywhere. You want to make money, you need this. Same case for motion pictures. Its just a very bad problem for these self publishers and/or vanity presses.

Distrubution is the key, not exactly the book, the idea, or even generally the audience.

Did I forget to post it??? LOL