Insanely Low-Cost Self-Publishing

Last night attended a St. Louis Publishers Association meeting at Mira, a midtown-St. Louis digital-printing company that sustains itself on self-published books. I kid you not. Cut to the chase: Here is their pricing chart for the printing of paperbacks (pricing is per book, from a print-ready PDF file; full-color cover with gloss lamination, b/w interior and perfect [glue] binding):

Across: Book Quantity Down: Number of pages in book	25	50	100	250	500
50	3.00	2.75	2.50	2.00	1.80
100	3.93	3.61	3.29	2.88	2.47
150	4.80	4.49	4.09	3.67	3.16
200	5.84	5.36	4.88	4.39	4.02
300	7.75	7.11	6.47	5.67	4.92

My meaning is: Don’t be tempted, or let your friends be tempted, by a self-publisher who wants $3,000-$8,000 to publish your book. Save your money and publish it yourself. Mira and other competing printeries in the area also have design and editing services; bizcards, posters, banners, etc. are printed there too. If you are or want to be self-published (hey, poets) or small-press, the world is now your oyster.

Publish-On-Demand Wins A Round

File this under Publishing's a Business: A publisher with a new and favorable book about Barack Obama is offering it first through Publish-On-Demand (P.O.D.), exclusively through Amazon.com. This is because it can -- and it wants the book available to readers before next week's Democratic convention. Now, so far, that's just good business -- for the publisher, for the readers, and for Amazon. Barnes & Noble, among other bookstores, is P.O.'d because brick-and-mortar stores wouldn't get Obama's Challenge for another two weeks, when it's yesterday's news and sales will be limp. So it'll be selling the book online, but not in stores. Read the story with all its juicy numbers and quotes in The Wall Street Journal.

The B&N spokeswoman says that by pre-releasing the book through Amazon, the publisher did not allow "an even playing field -- which is common practice in book publishing." (Authors, if that statement leaves you speechless, place here an emoticon of your choice.)

But unless the publisher made a contractual agreement regarding the book's availability, it's just business.