Old school vanity publishers get a bad rap because they charge a great deal of money to publish your book, and promise success -- through expert promotion and placement -- that they never deliver. You do, however, get boxes of books delivered, and that's an upside that POD publishers do not offer. You pay the POD publisher to publish your book, they don't do any marketing or publicity for you and tell you front and center they won't be providing any such services, and you don't actually get any books.

Even though POD companies tout very low prices to publish your book, as low as $99, the real price is hidden in all the add-on "options." Want to design and submit your own cover? Extra money. Want someone at the POD company to design your cover? Extra money. Want an ISBN number? Extra money. Folks, all the add-on items are actually essential elements in the creation of your book. $99 bucks to publish a book sounds great, but remember, you get what you pay for.

Once all these add-on items are added up, you are paying closer to $500 or $1,000 bucks to publish your book. But that's just for services. Remember, the concept of Print-On-Demand is that books aren't printed until someone orders a copy, and that includes you. In order to get copies of your own book, you have to order them. That means forking over more cash. These POD companies have the nerve to actually acknowledge as part of their packages: "One Author Copy." What about a copy for Mom, you stingy bastards?

Worse yet, you have to pay very close to retail for copies of your own book, after that generous "One Author Copy." The discount for authors ranges from 20% to 40%, but it's usually closer to 20%. That means just to send out review copies, you've got to fork over a great deal of money.

Reviewers are famous for saying, "No, I can't seem to find the copy of the book you sent. Could you drop another one in the mail? Thanksgoodbye..." That's easy when you've got boxes of books to pull from. But with POD, it can get very expensive.

And hopefully you'll have some copies on hand, because if not, you've got to place an order and wait for your books to be delivered. And reviewers aren't going to wait around.

Keep in mind that in order to get even the slightest amount of press attention, you'll have to send out between 50 and 100 review copies of your book, and most likely more. If the cover price of your book is $12.95, and you get a 30% discount, you'll have to shell out $453.25 to order just 50 copies of your book. And who knows what the shipping costs will be. Please, please do the math before you even consider going the POD route. Once you do the math, even conservatively, you'll see that POD is BS in the hot, humid summer sun.

But reviewers will most likely not review your book anyway (though that won't stop them from requesting multiple copies).

Before we leave this crazy cost analysis, let's use the same example -- $12.95 cover price and a 30% discount -- to figure out how much it would cost to buy 500 copies of your book. Hang on to your jaw, folks: $4,532.50. FOR A MEASLY 500 COPIES OF YOUR BOOK!

POD companies actually lose money on producing your book -- the $99 plus even the add-on fees don't cover the costs of the work involved in getting your book POD ready. They make their money when copies of the books are ordered. Unfortunately, the people who are ordering books are usually the authors themselves. It seems kind of shady. No. It is shady. Not a scam, but shady.

Once you've bought your copies, the POD publisher has recouped its costs and made some bucks off of your orders. It has absolutely no incentive to help you actually sell copies of your book to the public. That's why it offers very little in the way of marketing services. It's already marketed to you, the sucker, I mean, the author.

Proof of this is not just speculation. iUniverse.com laid off all the people in its New York office that actually worked on helping authors promote and sell copies of their books. How do I know? I was one of them. I was hired in spring of 2000 to build up iUniverse.com's Author Toolkit. Five months later I was shown the door, along with several others who were working in one way or another to actually help iUniverse.com authors write better books and sell more copies of those books. Maybe you're thinking, "Oh, I get it, this is sour grapes." Hardly. Just go to the iUniverse.com site. The proof is in the pudding, or in this case, the iUniverse.com homepage. It's less about selling authors' books than it is about promoting some kind of digital management content system. Can't actually figure it out? Neither can I, and I used to work there. I have no idea what iUniverse.com does, other than sell a crap product to ready-to-be-duped, wannabe authors. Xlibris.com is no better, and might even be worse. It bought Inkspot.com, a well-known and beloved website that was a great resource for writers -- one that had been around for years and had built up a solid audience -- and then shut it down earlier in early 2001. For a while, it kept up the archives, so even though new content wasn't being published, it was still a very useful resource. But now, go to Inkspot.com and you get a "Page not found" notice. Thanks Xlibris.com! You're the best. By the way, where's that picture of that staff member on the homepage? She probably asked to have it taken down -- too many e-mails sent to her complaining about crap results and crap service.

Fact: I once ordered a book from Xlibris.com, and it took two months to arrive. No joke. I had to send several emails and everything just to get the book. Print-On-Demand my ass. Folks, if you don't heed my advice regarding POD publishing, before you go with a particular POD publisher, order a book, any book, from its online catalog, and make sure it arrives in due time. Test the services you are about to buy.

Bookstores will not stock a POD book. The main reason is because POD books are unreturnable to the publisher, a condition that goes against the grain of how the book business currently works (bookstores can return unsold books to publishers).

The unreturnable term is the deal killer, but the other main reason why bookstores won't carry a POD book is because the discount pricing structure offered by POD companies is nowhere close to that which is offered by traditional publishers.

This is especially difficult if you arrange an event at a bookstore. Bookstores usually order 30 or more copies of a book for an in-store event, knowing that if the event is a bust, they can return the books. With POD books, that's not possible, making events with POD published authors less likely.

Quality for one-off printing is totally inconsistent, and usually poor. The actual printing of POD books is done by different printers all over the country with POD capability. This leads to problems with not only shoddy production of the actual POD books, but poor packaging (which leads to damaged books) and worse, erratic shipping timetables.

I can't stress this enough: delivery of POD books is downright awful. It might arrive within two weeks of being ordered, but it might take two months. It might be "Print-On-Demand," but that doesn't mean delivery on demand.

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*Whenever an article appears criticizing POD publishers, some hack who has published his book through a POD publisher writes in defending this new form of publishing. Look, I'm a hack too. I know how hard it is to get published, and doing something is better than nothing. Hopefully your POD experience is just a minor step in your publishing career. But the reality is, it's not a good publishing option -- for all the reasons I laid out above. So unless you only paid $99 to get your book published through a POD publisher, and you've sold more than 1,000 copies of your book (not counting books you yourself bought), don't bother writing in. I don't want to hear it.

*With regard to the future of POD, I don't really want to hear about that either. Lord help me if some stooge blathers on about POD machines in airports.

*The only thing POD is good for right now is for books that have gone out of print but don't quite have enough demand to trigger a reprint. POD makes it possible to keep these books readily available, without having to spend a lot of money or deal with inventory.

*POD is a bad option, as outlined, but publishing your book exclusively as an e-book is even worse. Might as well print it on a roll of toilet paper. More on that later...

*What is the solution for the person who wants to self-publish his or her own book: Find a printer and have your book printed up. There are short run printers out there, who will print as few as a couple hundred copies, or you can go right to the printers who handle books for the big publishers. In the end it might cost more to actually print up say 1,000 copies of your book, but the return on your investment will trounce the crappy results you'll get from spending your time and money on POD.

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