That cannot be emphasized more strongly. I once knew someone who went through a publisher who demanded that he buy a thousand copies at $10 each. That’s $10,000 and a garage stuffed with books. That so-called publisher need not do anything more. It had already made a large profit selling his book to him.

That’s not the only scam. More recently, a friend contacted me about a daughter whose now-departed father’s books had fallen out of print. She wanted to bring them back on the market. When she contacted a mid-level, traditional publisher, it told him that she’d have to give it a $10,000 in advance for each book it put back in print.

I told my friend that was absurd in today’s publishing world. Those books could be scanned and a page-by-page facsimile brought out via POD for a few hundred dollars, even if all the work was contracted out. Even the cost of using OCR to create a new text and reformatting the result into a new book could be kept to a few thousand dollars, particularly if the daughter handled the proofreading.

There’s also another factor that shouldn’t be forgotten when bringing back long out-of-print books. Today’s online used book market is incredibly efficient at linking seller to buyer. A new book that can’t be sold for less that $15 plus shipping may be available used for about $8, including shipping. It is hard to compete with that.

There’s another factor. If you get stuck with a sorry buy-and-distribute-as-the-author publisher, you’ll be the one who’s forced keep restocking (from your garage) the shelves at Amazon and the like. The shipping costs will be a nuisance and cut into your income. From the book management side, print-on-demand means publish-and-forget. There’s no worrying about inventory. The book prints when it sells.

In short, unless you’re a successful author whose books are guaranteed to sell thousands of copies, you’re better off with POD. And if your books do take off, Ingram has a mechanism in place to print copies using traditional means. Above a couple of thousand copies, traditional printing becomes significantly cheaper than POD. But you need assured sales to justify the larger upfront cost of printing in bulk and storing until sold.

–Michael W. Perry, co-author of Lily’s Ride

Of course, authors should abide by certain rules and must definitely avoid publishers that require them to purchase and store numerous copies of their books.

– WritersWeekly Reader

Wonderful explanation! I hope the person writing this question heads your sound advice.