SELF-PUBLISHING 101: What’s Self-Publishing, Print-on-Demand and All the Rest?

Some of the terms bandied about can be confusing, so here’s a quick primer:

• Traditional publishing – What most people think of when imaging themselves as authors: A New York publishing house will purchase their books, give them advance payments, handle the editing and all other aspects of book production, get the books into the bookstores and launch marketing campaigns to spur sales.
• Self-publishing – Do-it-yourself publishing in which the author acts as the publisher, handling the writing, editing, book design, printing, distribution, marketing and all other aspects of book publishing. The author may do it all, hire individual people or companies to handle various items, or enlist the services of a self-publishing company to handle most of the chores.
• Vanity publishing – The old term used for self-publishing. It was used in a negative way, implying the books were so uninteresting or poorly written that their authors had to pay to have them published – and no one wanted to read them anyway – so it was all an exercise in vanity. That was undoubtedly true with many vanity press books, but then again, many famous writers used the vanity press. For example, Lewis Carroll published Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and other works through a vanity press; while books by Mark Twain, Zane Grey, Upton Sinclair, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Rudyard Kipling and other famous names were vanity press productions.
• Subsidy publishing – An alternate term for vanity publishing.
• Print-on-Demand (POD) – A combination of printing technology and business process that has dramatically lowered the price of printing books a few at a time – or even one at a time. Books no longer have to be printed in lots of thousands at a time to be profitable. Instead, POD costs are low enough that books can be printed a few at a time and still sell and produce a profit for the publisher and/or author.

Keep reading the “Self-Publishing 101” blog entries to learn about individual self-publishing firms, contracts, POD, DYI self-publishing and more.

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