Print-On-Demand

 

In the old days, an author had to rely on traditional publishers to see their book made available to the public.  An author would submit a manuscript to several publishers in hopes that one, at least, would find it attractive enough to spend money editing, proof-reading, typesetting, and printing in order to produce the first edition.  This cost could be several thousand dollars.  The publisher would typically call for a first print run of 10,000 copies as a bare minimum, and it would be the publisher's task to get them sold as a way to recoup the initial cost that sometimes included an advance-on-royalties made to the author.  As a result, publishers were very picky about which books they would publish.  Aspiring authors from that era all had tales of 'papering their walls with rejection letters'.

Within the past half-century or so, 'vanity presses' have appeared on the scene.  These are businesses that will publish your work for a fee — sometimes an exorbitant fee.  As a rule, they care not whether your work is good or bad because you are paying the up-front costs and handling the job of selling your work.  In the early days of vanity presses, a contract might deliver 1,000 copies of the first edition — usually the only edition — and what the author did with them was the author's business — literally.

Since the computer revolution the entire face of publishing has undergone a sea change.  Word processing has made it possible for very many people who would not otherwise have gone to the effort to produce a text and to have it published by either a vanity press or a new arrival on the scene, the independent publisher.

Both 'vanities' and 'indies' are able to print-on-demand (as are the traditional publishing houses), and this has reduced the cost of getting a book to market so substantially that the number of published works has exploded due to the drastic lessening of the financial risk.  The same thing happened when Gutenberg introduced the printing press to Europe in the 1500s.

"Print-on-demand" means that a largely-computerized publisher has the ability to access the formatted text of a book along with its cover, among other things.  When a buyer orders a copy of the book, a transaction is sent electronically to the printer that causes the production of a fully-formed book.  The inside text (usually black-ink-on-white-paper) is printed on one printer, the cover (usually color and on a heavier stock) on another, and the shipping label on a third.  At the end of the production line, automated binding equipment gathers the pages, wraps them in the cover, slips the finished product into a shipping box, and affixes the shipping label.  The completed package is handed over to the local postal service or an overnight shipper and is in the hands of the buyer in a few days.

The era of having 10,000 copies of a book printed and held in storage pending the arrival of orders from retailers or wholesalers has largely ended.  Only ink, paper, and cardboard shipping boxes are kept in inventory and can be reordered as needed.  When a retailer such as Barnes & Noble decides they want 200 copies of a work in stock, the only difference in the processing is that only a single shipping label is printed.

Ingram, headquartered in La Vergne TN, is probably the world's largest printer-on-demand and can have a book printed — right now — in any of several countries on several continents.  They are not alone.

As a result, any aspiring author who wishes to put in the effort can become a published author for what would have been considered 'peanuts' in an earlier age.  Amazon, for instance, will convert your Microsoft Word document or Adobe PDF to a Kindle-formatted version free.  You just have to agree to sell it via Amazon.