How to Publish a Book Using POD

Depending on the POD vendor you choose and subsequent choices you make, some or most of the following tasks can (or will) be done for you by the vendor for a fee.

Choose a POD Vendor
Become a Business
Obtain Book Identifications and Listings
Set Up Your Distribution Channels
Design the Book
Create the Front Matter
Set Your Cover Price
Create Your Cover
Check and Correct the Galley
Register Your Copyright
Promote Your Book

NOTE — You can read these POD Publishing pages and study one or more of the many POD Publishing books now available, but you can't really make any decisions, or know which alternative is "best" or even most cost-effective for you, until you know what your goals are for your book. Your subsequent choices will be very different — and much clearer and easy to make — once you know whether you want mainstream acceptance, bookstore shelf sales and book reviews, or just readers likely to buy it online, or you're publishing a memoir for extended family and friends. All valid goals, but the higher you aim, the more you need to find the money to pay for the necessary quality.

Step 1: Choose a POD Vendor

This is the single most important choice you have to make.

See POD Vendors — Compared & Analyzed for more information and analysis. When choosing a POD vendor, a crucial factor is which catalogs they add your book to, see Step 4: Set Up Your Distribution Channels for more information.

There are two very different kinds of POD vendor:

POD Printers. With this kind of POD vendor, you are the publisher. You pay the POD printer for printing and shipping each book, and for those book setup tasks that you don't do yourself. There are no royalties because you receive the revenues from each book sold minus the bookseller's discount, printing and shipping costs. Lightning Source is an example of a POD Printer. Some POD Printers may offer limited, fee-based book promotion services, but the basic assumption is that as the publisher you are responsible for promoting your book.

POD Printers make their money by printing books.

The advantage of using a POD Printer over a POD Publisher are:

Initial costs are lower
You have greater control over your work (look, cover price, etc)
Depending on choices you make, you might receive more money from each book sold
You own the book's ISBN number and digital files which means you can easily shift to another POD Printer anytime you want.

POD Publishers. This kind of POD vendor acts as the publisher of your book and pays you royalties on copies sold. Xlibris and iUniverse are examples of POD Publishers.

POD Publishers make much of their money by selling services to authors, for this reason they are sometimes referred to as "author services" companies. Unlike mainstream and small press publishers, POD Publishers charge you fees for many of the necessary book preparation tasks that print-on-paper publishers handle at their expense. Most POD Publishers also offer fee-based book promotion services.

Some POD Publishers contract out the actual printing and shipping of book orders to a POD Printer such as Lightning Source. Since they mark-up those costs to provide their profit, their printing and shipping charges will probably be higher than those of a POD Printer.

The advantage of using a POD Publisher over a POD Printer are:

They provide more assistance
They do more of the book preparation work for you — for which you pay them
They act as publisher so you don't have to set yourself up as a business

CAUTION — Some POD Publishers make their money not by selling books, but by selling over-priced, useless, shoddy, or unnecessary "services" to authors and by tacking on extra fees and hidden charges.

Step 2: Become a Business (Optional)

POD Publishers. A business identity is not necessary or required if you use a POD Publisher. Some POD Publishers allow you to use the name of your own business or press if you wish.

POD Printers. When you use a POD Printer you are the publisher. Therefore, you need — and the POD printer may require — some business identity. In other words you need the name of the press or business that is the publisher of your book.

At a minimum, you can simply create a name such as "Purple Prose Press," use your home address, and fulfill your state's "Doing-Business-As" requirements.
Or you can be more elaborate. For example, you could take additional steps such as obtaining a business license, incorporating, and so forth.

Note that both POD Publishers and POD Printers handle sales tax for individual books sold to readers through online or real bookstores. But if you purchase a box of books that you resell to readers, you are legally responsible for collecting and remiting the tax on those sales. (It's been rumored that some self-published authors blithely ignore this requirement and fail to remit sales tax to the proper authorities. Surely this base canard must be the work of vile gossip mongers. Real writers — good, pure, and true of heart, each and every one — would never so shirk their civic duty. And if by some evil chance one or more ink-stained wretches did fail to heed the better angels of their nature, surely they could not long endure their ensuing sleepless nights wracked with guilt and remorse.)

Step 3: Obtain Book Identifications and Listings

ISBN Number - Essential
Bar Code - Essential
Books In Print listing - Essential
Standard Address Nunmber (SAN) - Optional (recommended if using a POD Printer)
Catalog in Publication data (CIP) - Self-published books are rarely eligible
Preassigned Control Number (PCN) - Optional

ISBN (Essential)

The International Standard Book Number (ISBN) is the key identification number. This is the number that all stores and websites use. All inventory, sales, royalties, and income are controlled by the ISBN number. An ISBN number looks like: 978- 0-9778000-0-8

Starting January 1, 2007 all ISBN numbers are 13-digits (they used to be 10-digits).

POD Publishers. POD Publishers provide you with an ISBN number and register it as part of their basic publishing package. BUT they own the number — not you. There are two significant implications to this:

Whoever owns the ISBN is the publisher of record. Each ISBN contains a publisher ID number. Books published by POD Publishers and bearing their ISBNs are not taken seriously in the book trade. You may get your local bookstore to stock your book because they know you and you're a "local author," but you're not likely to get a distributor or shelf space elsewhere. On the other hand, if bookstore trade acceptance is not your goal and you want to sell mainly through the web and personal promotion, then that is not an issue.
Since the POD Publisher owns the ISBN, if you ever want to use a different POD Publisher, or publish the book on your own (either through POD or traditional printing) you will have to obtain a new and different ISBN number. This could result in an online store such as Amazon listing your book twice with sales channeled through different publishers depending on which link the customer clicks on.

POD Printers. Since you are the publisher, you must purchase and register an ISBN number from the ISBN Agency. ISBN numbers are sold in blocks — the minimum block you can buy is 10 numbers. As of January 2007, a block of 10 cost $270 (which is only $27 each if you use all 10, but normally you only need one or two per book).

Buying and registering an ISBN number is a three-step process:

Buy a block of ISBNs from the ISBN Agency at: www.isbn.org. Buying ISBNs from the website requires using a credit card (alternatively, you can print out and mail in the forms with a check).
The ISBN Agency website is somewhat confusing. As of early 2007, what you need to do is click on "English Language Forms" under "Order ISBNs." This takes you to a screen labeled: "Application for an ISBN Publisher Prefix." The prefix is the part of an ISBN that identifies the publisher. ISBNs of all books issued by a given publisher start with the same prefix. Click on "Continue your application process on our secure server." You will then be stepped through the process of setting yourself up as a publisher with the ISBN Agency and ordering a block of ISBNs. Your block of ISBNs will be emailed to you in the form of a "logbook" which is simply a text file that can be opened by any word processor.
The U.S. ISBN Agency is run by the Bowker company. Buying ISBNs automatically adds you to Bowker's Publisher Authority Database (PAD)
Register as a user with Bowker at: www.bowkerlink.com. Choose "Books in Print" and then click on "Register." This is free.
Once you've registered as a user with Bowker, you then register a book title (or edition) to a particular ISBN at: www.bowkerlink.com. This is free.
1. Choose "Books in Print."
2. Login with the Username and Password you got when you registered with Bowker in the step above.
3. Click on "Add Title."
4. Fill out the forms. There are three required forms (Main, Pricing, Authors) and some optional forms.
5. When you finish filling in the forms, click "Finish and Save."
Filling out these forms automatically adds the title to the "Books In Print" catalog that bookstores use.

Bar Code (Essential)

POD Publishers. Your POD Publisher should provide your bar code and put it on the back cover of your book as part of their basic publishing package.

POD Printers. Bar codes can be bought from the ISBN Agency or directly from Bowker. This can be done while buying your ISBN numbers, but it's better to do it separately from Bowker at: www.bowkerbarcode.com, after you've gotten your ISBNs and registered your title. Bar codes cost around $25 each and they are emailed to you as an attachment in a TIFF-format image file. When you create your book cover, you paste the bar code image on the back cover.

Books In Print Listing (Essential)

POD Publishers. Your POD Publisher should take care of this as part of their basic publishing package. (Check to make sure that they do this.)

POD Printers. This is automatically done for you when you register a title with Bowker as part of buying your ISBN number described above.

Standard Address Number (SAN)

A Standard Address Number (SAN) is a publisher ID number that the industry uses for identification, contact purposes, and financial transactions. A SAN keeps your publishing business from being confused with someone else's publishing business. A SAN looks like: SAN 850-2730, and would normally be included on a book's copyright page immediately under the publisher address.

POD Publishers. Not needed if you're using a POD Publisher.

POD Printers. Recommended if you're self-publishing with a POD Printer.

A SAN can be bought from ISBN Agency (Bowker) for $150 at: www.isbn.org.

Electronic Catalog in Publication (ECIP)

As of January 1, 2007 the Electronic Catalog in Publication (ECIP) program replaced the older, paper-based Catalog in Publication (CIP) system. The ECIP program provides catalog data about a book for use by libraries. As a general rule, self- published books are not eligible for ECIP. (Most self- published books use Preassigned Control Numbers as explained below.)

POD Publishers. Check with your POD Publisher, but it is unlikely they provide ECIP.

POD Printers. ECIP is only available to publishers who have published books by 3 different authors. In this case, "publisher' means the business-entity publishing your book, not the POD-Printer.

Preassigned Control Number (PCN) (Optional)

The purpose of the Preassigned Control Number (PCN) is to enable the Library of Congress to assign control numbers in advance of publication to those titles that may be added to the Library's collections. The publisher prints the control number in the book and thereby facilitates cataloging and other book processing activities. The PCN links the book to any record which the Library of Congress, other libraries, bibliographic utilities, or book vendors may create. Obtaining a PCN for your book is optional but recommended (particularly for non-fiction).

POD Publishers. Some POD Publishers provide PCNs, others don't. For those that do, it may be included in one or more of their publishing packages, or they may charge an extra fee (iUniverse, for example, charges $75 for obtaining a PCN for your book).

POD Printers. You have to obtain the PCN for your book from the Library of Congress (LOC). PCNs are free, but you have to send them a copy of the book once it's published.

To get a PCN:

Go to the PCN website at: pcn.loc.gov
Click on "Open New Account," then click on "Application to Participate" and fill out the form. This registers you as a publisher with the LOC.
Go back to the PCN home page and log in as a publisher.
Click on "PCN Application" and fill out the form.

Step 4: Set Up Your Distribution Channels

To over-simplify, "distribution channel" refers to how readers buy your book. There are five basic ways that POD-published books get to readers:

Bookstore shelves. Your book is added to book distribution catalogs such as Books In Print and Ingram. A bookstore orders copies of a book, readers see it on the shelf and buy it. Note that few bookstores will order and stock POD published books.
Bookstore order. Your book is added to book distribution catalogs. Readers go to (or call) the bookstore and ask them to order it for them. The POD vendor prints and ships the book to the bookstore, and the customer picks it up at the counter.
Online booksellers. Your book is added to the catalog of an online bookseller such as Amazon.Com. Readers find your book listed on the website and order it. The POD vendor prints and ships the book to Amazon, Amazon then reships it to the customer.
The three bookstore and online channels distribution described above are set up by adding your book to the various catalogs. This step should be done for you by either your POD Publisher or your POD Printer. See Catalogs below for more information.
POD vendor website. The POD vendor adds a page describing your book to the vendor's website. Readers purchase your book from that page. The POD vendor prints the book and ships it direct to the customer. Most POD Publishers provide a website where your book is sold as part of their publishing package. Few POD Printers provide such websites.
Author website. You set up your own website to promote and sell your book. Some POD vendors will provide you with "backend" HTML code. In essence this is a "Buy Button" that you put on your own website. When readers click on the "Buy Button," the order is processed behind the scenes by the POD vendor and the book is printed and shipped directly to the customer. If the vendor does not provide backend code, you can have a link on your site that takes potential buyers to your book's page on the vendor's website. Alternatively, you can set up your own online store, in which case you will have to obtain books from the POD vendor and ship them yourself to customers.

Catalogs

The most important catalogs are:

Books in Print (automatic as part of ISBN number)
Ingram
Baker & Taylor
Amazon.com
BarnesandNoble.com
Borders.com
Bertram (if you intend to sell in British Commonwealth)

To some degree, some of these catalogs overlap. Adding your title to catalogs should be included in the vendor's basic package or setup fee (that is, there should not be an extra charge for adding titles to catalogs).

Before choosing a POD vendor, find out which catalogs they guarantee to get your title added to. Different vendors promise to get your book listed in different catalogs, so you need to compare one vendor against another (see Table 1).

Step 5: Design the Book

Book design refers to how your final printed body pages will look. It includes page and margin size, fonts, titles, headers & footers, images, paragraph indentations, and so on.

The book design options available to you vary according to the POD vendor you have chosen — different vendors offer different options. Generally speaking, book design (and cover design) options fall into four broad categories:

TWWGY (Take What We Give You). For some POD Publishers, you send them your manuscript as a computer file (usually in Word or RTF format), they design the book, and you take what they give you. Maybe they ask you to choose some parameters such as page size, maybe they don't. There may be extra charges for photos, illustrations, diagrams, charts, graphs, etc, or limitations on how many can be included. The advantage of this approach is that it is usually the cheapest; the disadvantage is that you have little (or no) control over how your book will look.
Templates. Most POD Publishers now offer you a choice of templates. You send them your manuscript as a computer file (usually in Word or RTF format), and they format it to look like the template you choose. Some POD Publishers allow you to customize some aspects of the template, others don't. Templates should include some provision for photos, illustrations, diagrams, charts, graphs, etc, but there may be extra charges or limitations on how many can be included. The template approach is usually a bit more expensive than TWWGY, but you have more control.
Author Input: The vendor designs the book based on some input from you the author. This can be good or not-so-good depending on how much input you have, how easy it is to work with the vendor's book designer, and how many iterations and changes they are willing to go through without charging you extra fees.
Design it yourself. Most POD Printers require you to design your own book, and some POD Publishers allow you to do so. Typically, the POD Printer (or Publisher) gives you a choice of page sizes, and within the page size you choose you can do what you want. You send the POD Printer (or Publisher) a finished book as an Acrobat PDF file. Which means that you have to produce the PDF file.
This is the most costly and/or most labor-intensive design option, but it gives you the greatest control and you can include as many photos, illustrations, diagrams, charts, graphs, etc, as you want. From the point of view of ending up with a book that looks like you want it to look, this is obviously the best option. But designing a book is more complicated than simply using a word-processor, and it usually requires high-end publishing software.
In the opinion of most self-published authors, common word-processing software — such as Microsoft Word — is NOT capable of doing adequate book design or PDF file creation. Therefore, you have two choices:
- Do it yourself. Obtain and learn how to use desktop publishing software such as InDesign or Quark XPress (or the older, but still quite adequate, FrameMaker or PageMaker). While at first glance this may seem intimidating, anyone who can learn to use word-processing software can learn to use destop publishing software.
- Hire a book designer. Learning to use book software is not the same thing as knowing how to design a professional-level book. Book design is a highly specialized skill. An author who knows how to use book software can produce a minimally-adequate book design, but to get maximum design quality you need to hire a professional to design your book and convert your word-processor files into PDF.
  (See also Create Your Cover for additional design discussion.)

POD Publishers. A few POD Publishers use the TWWGY approach. Most provide Templates. The best provide templates that you can customize or have some input on. Some POD Publishers allow you design your own book and provide them with a finished PDF file.

POD Printers. Most POD Printers require you to provide them with a finished PDF file (meaning you have to design the book yourself). Some POD Printers provide some file conversion or design services at additional cost. Some POD Printers can scan and covert printed-on-paper books.

Step 6: Create the Front Matter

Some kinds of front matter such as dedications, acknowledgments, citations, and so on are really part of the book's content and are therefore the responsibility of the author.

POD Publishers.

Title & copyright pages: Normally, the POD Publisher creates and provides these as part of their basic publishing package.
Table of Contents & Index: A POD Publisher should be able to provide a TOC (but some might not be able to do so) at no extra charge. A POD Publisher may, or may not, be able to provide an index and there may, or may not, be extra charges for doing so. If an index option is available, is it an automatically-generated keyword-index or are the citations created by hand? Can (must?) the author create the index by hand, and if so, using what software?

POD Printers. As a general rule, you are responsible for creating all your front matter and index. At a minimum, on either your title page — or more commonly a separate copyright page — you must include:

Copyright notice. Copyright notices can be as simple as "Copyright © 2007 by Jane Doe." All rights reserved. Or they can be quite elaborate and legalistic with stern warnings of dire retribution for all who might trespass against your rights.
The book's ISBN number. 10-digit ISBNs are no longer acceptable, you must use the 13-digit ISBN.
Name and address of the publisher (that is, the business entity publishing the book, not the POD Printer).
Optional: A website URL and/or a SAN number.
Optional: Library of Congress Preassigned Control Number (PCN).
Optional: Suggested catalog entries.
Optional: Disclaimers as such as: "This is a work of fiction, it's not really about my next door neighbor Freddy Kruger the infamous serial killer. Any resemblance to any real people (living or dead or whatever) is purely coincidental."
Optional: Name and website URL of cover artist if you used one.

Step 7: Set Your Cover Price

The cover price is what a customer pays for a single copy of your book when buying it direct from you or a bookseller (not counting sales tax). If a customer buys it from an online store, or has a real store order it, shipping & handling charges are usually added to the cover price.

But what the customer pays is not what you as the author get. The POD vendor gets some of the money for printing and handling the book. The bookstore (online or real) gets a share for selling the book. And (hopefully) you as author get either a "royalty" or a "profit."

So the cover price has to be set high enough that you make some money after the POD vendor and bookstore take their share. The higher the cover price, the more money you will make on each copy sold. BUT readers consider price when buying a book. If you make the price too high, few readers will buy it. So you have to balance the cover price, setting it high enough to make some money for you, but not so high that people won't buy the book.

Bookseller's Share. The bookseller's share is usually calculated as a "discount" from the cover price. That is, they buy the book from the POD vendor at less than the cover price. The difference between what they pay for the book (the "discount"), and the cover price that the reader pays, is the bookseller's share. The traditional standard discount (bookseller's share) is 40%. Some POD vendors try to get authors to agree to higher discounts, but writers should resist that, and insist on the traditional 40%.

So, for example, if the cover price of a book is $20, and the bookseller's discount is 40%, when a customer orders the book on Amazon.Com the customer pays Amazon $20 (plus shipping and salestax), Amazon pays the POD vendor $12, and keeps $8 as their share.

POD Publishers. Some POD Publishers set the book price for you, but most set a minimum price that provides their and the bookseller's share but allow you to set a higher cover price if you wish. So when choosing a POD vendor you need to find out who determines the cover price (you or them), what the bookseller share is, and what your royalty will be.

In essence, the POD Publisher subtracts the bookseller's discount and the author's royalty from the cover price and keeps what is left. The POD Publisher will make sure (insist) that what is left is enough to cover the cost of printing and shipping the book plus their profit.

POD Printers. POD Printers calculate a per-book charge that you pay them for each book sold. This per-book cost is usually composed of the following elements:

Per-Unit charge (AKA "Book" or "Setup" charge/fee)
Per-page printing charge (X cents per page times the total number of pages in the book)
Per-Book shipping/handling charge
Commission or profit (this might be included in the per-book or printing charges, or it might be a separate charge).

The POD Printer sells the book to the bookseller for the cover price minus the bookseller's discount, deducts their per-book charges, and forwards the remainder to you. Of course, they will make sure that the cover price minus the bookseller's discount is enough to cover their per-book charge. So before setting your cover price, you need to know exactly how much the POD Printer is going to charge you for each book. You then have to set a cover price that is high enough so something is left for you after the bookseller's discount and the POD Printer's per-book charges.

See Follow the Money for examples of how this all works.

Step 8: Create Your Cover

Before creating your cover, you need to have decided on your cover price and obtained your barcode. (Of course, you also need to know your title, author name, publisher name, back cover text, and so forth.)

Cover design — and interior book design — influence willingness of bookstores to stock the title and reviewers to review it. It is professionalism of design and production qualities that might get a self-published book stocked in stores; but amateurism in design is the kiss of death the moment it rolls off the press. However, professional designers do not come cheap. A profissional cover designer, for example, might charge from $1,000 to $2,000.

There are two main tasks involved in creating the cover:

Cover Design & Artwork. Most POD Publishers and Printers allow you to have a color cover. The back cover needs to include the barcode and cover price, publisher name & address, and any back cover text or artwork. Normally, the spine contains the book title, author, and publisher name.
Creating the PDF File. Normally, the front cover, back cover, and book spine are combined into a single PDF file.

POD Publishers. To a degree, the book design options discussed above (TWWGY, Templates, etc) also apply to creating your cover. However, most POD Publishers will create your cover for you. The cost of doing so might be included in their basic package or it might be an extra charge. This might (or might not) include having an artist do some cover art. Typically, if some artist help is provided, the initial cost includes a limited amount of the artist's time. If you need the artist to revise the art, extra charges are incurred. Some POD Publishers allow you to supply your own cover art.

POD Printers. Most POD Printers require you to supply your own cover file. This means you have to supply the cover art, either doing it yourself or hiring an artist.

In order to produce the cover PDF, you need to calculate the spine-width based on the number of body pages. The POD Printer should provide you with a table or formula for calculating spine-width from page-count. You obtain the page-count from the final book content PDF file created with your desktop publishing software. When calculating spine-width from page-count, note the following:

You have to count ALL the pages including title, copyright, Table of Contents, and index.
Many POD Printers print in signatures of 4-pages each. This means that your book's final actual page-count has to be divisible by 4, and extra blank pages will be added to the end to make it divisible by 4. So, for example, if your manuscript has 397 actual pages, 3 blank pages will be added to the end to make an even 400.
Keep in mind that the page-count of your manuscript as shown by your word-processor will probably be significantly different from the final page-count of the book once it has been desktop published for conversion to PDF and printing.

The cover PDF file consists of three side-by-side panels:

Back cover. Normally, this is the left-hand panel.
Spine. This is in the center.
Front cover. Normally, this is the right-hand panel.

Since the front and back covers are each the width of the book, the total page-size of the entire cover-layout is twice the width of the book, plus the width of the spine. For example, if the book page size is 6x9 inches, and the spine is 1 inch thick, the page-size of the cover file layout is 13x9 inches (6+1+6=13).

Step 9: Check and Correct the Galley

After sending (uploading) your book files to your POD Publisher or Printer, they will normally return either a printed book or a finished PDF file for you to review. In printing jargon this is called the "galley."

If they created the final PDF files for you, they will charge you for entering revisions and corrections. The same is true if you created the files but you want them to make the corrections. Before choosing a POD vendor, you should compare revision costs.

If you supply the POD vendor with ready-to-print files, you have to make any corrections yourself and send the vendor the revised files.

Step 10: Register Your Copyright

In theory, copyright registration is optional because the law says that by creating the work you automatically own the copyright whether it's registered or not. But in the real world you need to register your copyright because registration makes it much easier to defend your copyright and collect damages if it is infringed.

To register a book copyright, obtain and fill out the forms from www.copyright.gov. The cost is $45 plus you have to send 2 copies of the finished book to the Library of Congress.

POD Publishers. Some POD Publishers include copyright registration in their basic package, other will do it for you for an extra charge (AuthorHouse, for example, charges $170). If you have the POD Publisher register the copyright, make sure that the copyright is in your name, not theirs.

POD Printers. You are responsible for registering your copyright.

Step 11: Promote Your Book

If no one knows or hears about your book, no one will buy it. Since POD published books — as a general rule — are not stocked on bookstore shelves, promotion is essential. Some POD vendors provide a webpage which describes your book and from which customers can buy it. But that is only useful for readers who already know about the book and go to the webpage looking for it.

Book promotion is a huge topic beyond the scope of this POD Publishing piece. Some POD Publishers offer promotion services for additional fees. How useful such services are depends on the particulars of your book, of you as the author, and how you plan to promote and market the book. Before purchasing promotion services from a POD vendor, compare the vendor's price to how much it would cost you to do whatever it is on your own.

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