iUniverse – iMock
on August 4th, 2010Publishers are squeezing out even the most respected authors, as wallets tighten and print runs drop. More and more creators are turning to self publishing.
When I was a self publishing tadpole, self publishing meant printing thousands of copies to distributor order. Total newbies who didn’t understand how the business works lost big bucks printing what they thought distributors would order in the future, only to find their prose books/comics/graphic novels taking up space in the garage and attracting nothing but hordes of silverfish.
Print on Demand seems like the perfect solution. Print on Demand allows you to print exactly to order, even if that order is as low as one copy at a time. The cost per copy is much higher than printing in bulk, but there is little or no risk.
I’ve spent many exhausting hours trying to convince people that printing 2,000 copies when you don’t have any up front orders will not save you any money, even if unit cost is lower. Printing 2,000 copies over 500 copies will give you a discount of 50 cents per unit. However, you still spent $2 per copy for orders you didn’t get.
A friend of mine who would not take my advice printed $12,000 worth of books and six years later is still five figures in the hole on her project.
You minimize risk with POD, but all Print on Demand services are not created equal. Some which started out as printing services have grown into vanity presses which charge fat fees for tasks you can easily perform yourself.
Let’s take a look at iUniverse.
My friend Arlene Harris is an award-winning author who has a long-term interest in Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables. She spent years researching and writing sequels to the book, three of which she self published through iUniverse.
When she first went to iUniverse, the up-front POD fee was a reasonable $100. Later it increased to $300. Now the minimum package fee is nearly $600, and the contract appears to be a co-publishing agreement with term rights clauses, and high prices for basics that are easily performed for free.
Arlene decided to take her business elsewhere. She sent iUniverse a short letter of termination in response to their upselling more of their (IMHO) expensive packaging services to her.
Thanks, however I am not about to call you and get upsold services I do not want. Any messages you have, unless they are sales messages, can be relayed through this email address. If they are sales messages, kindly refrain from sending them. I’ve wasted enough money with this company and am not about to throw more money after it.
Arlene C. Harris
From iUniverse, a finger-wagging tour de force of patronization (emphasis within text is mine.)
Hello Ms. Harris,
I wish there was something I could say to pacify your hurt feelings. But seriously, you need to take time to ponder about what you have done so far to market your book because I don’t see anything about it that’s remotely significant or serious.The authors that have made significant strides in promoting their book rightly deserve what they reap because they take action instead of complaining and blaming others for their failure.
We are here to help but if you don’t like our gesture, we will as you say, kindly refrain from doing it.
However, we are here to serve everyone without prejudice so we will continue to be available to you in case you’ll need our help someday.
With kind regards.
Jed Michael “Luck happens when opportunity meets preparation!”
Marketing Consultant
Perhaps iUniverse will require something from me to pacify their hurt feelings after I post this review of their services.
Let’s examine a few, shall we?
The $599 “Select” service package includes:
One on One Author Support!
I guess that’s supposed to be priceless. But, you know, this is what salesmen are for.
Non-Exclusive contracts!
It’s nice that what is essentially a printing and packaging service would allow you to go elsewhere for your business, but exclusivity shouldn’t even be an issue for this sort of thing.
Volume Book Discount for Authors!
Well golly gee whiz, no kidding. Volume discounts for wholesale purchases!
You do realize this is standard practice for just about any business on the planet. Buy a lot, get volume discounts.
Custom Cover!
The sort of cover design just about anyone with a computer can do these days.
Worldwide Distribution!
I hope you realize this doesn’t mean much. Your book gets worldwide distribution the minute you put it on a blog.
Just because some salesman presents your book to a distribution company – crammed in with all the other self published miscellany in their catalogue – this does not in ANY WAY OBLIGATE THE DISTRIBUTOR TO PLACE AN ORDER FOR THAT BOOK. This Worldwide Distribution “service” is worthless.
But don’t despair! That’s just a few of the TOTALLY AWESOME GOODIES you get for your $600, none of which you cannot do for yourself without paying $600. I didn’t see diddly squat in the $600 package that was worth the price unless you are a complete computer deficient, which means you would not have the skills to even format your material sufficiently to send it in to iUniverse.
A quick examination of their a la carte menu reveals jaw dropping prices for extras.
The Copyright Registration Service:
It’s not standard with your $600, so if you don’t upgrade to one of the more expensive packages – nearly $4200 top tier, discounted down from nearly $6,000! What a sale! – you have to pay an extra $170 for this.
Or, if you have even one iota of internet savvy, you can just go right here to the US Copyright office, download the form, fill it out, and pay the $35 fee, saving yourself a whopping $135 for five minutes of effort.
The Library of Congress Control Number:
It will cost you $75 at iUniverse. Here’s a post that explains exactly how to get one for free.
The Social Media Setup:
A laugh-and-a-half. They will charge you to create your Facebook, MySpace, yadda yadda, all for only $799! I didn’t pay diddly squat for “social media” because almost all social media is FREE! But iUniverse will only set you back $799 for this free stuff!
Everybody who managed to figure out how to set up your own Facebook page in 15 minutes, raise your hand!
OK, would you pay $799 for that service?
Lo, the hordes cry “Hell, no!”
Website Set up
But you will want to be a thoroughly modern author, so add $399 for a website!
A website made from a FRICKING TEMPLATE!!!
The fine print says they give you a web design template and then YOU set up the website. So what the hell are you paying $399 for? You still have to do the work! You can get a free WordPress blog with customizable template instead!
But wait! More fine print!
“The template layouts, header images, and operating software are the property of American Author and these cannot be transferred in the event of cancellation.”
If you decide to leave, you can’t really do a whole lot with your website without a redesign.
So, just go with WordPress, OK? Sheesh.
But don’t forget that iUniverse adds a $29 a month hosting fee! Which is EXPENSIVE.
For crying out loud, for less than half what iUniverse charges for one website and “social media”, webgoddess DC McQueen made custom WordPress designs for ADistantSoil.com and ColleenDoran.com. Her price covers hosting as well as tech support, and my sites have far more features.
iUniverse also touts the fact that you can use their service to set up Paypal payments to take orders for your book! Wowee!
This task is not rocket science. ANYONE can do it. There’s no reason to pay someone for this.
The Book Returns Program:
OK folks, this is absolutely ridiculous. I told a publisher friend of mine about this (a real publisher, a big one) and I think he peed himself laughing.
iUniverse charges you $699 to tell booksellers they can return your book if it doesn’t sell.
Returnable books is standard in publishing, except for the comic book direct sale market. Why on earth anyone would charge you $699 for this service I cannot fathom.
Except they want to make a buck from your ignorance.
First off, you guys gotta realize that once booksellers see your book coming from iUniverse, they know it is self published and are far less likely to stock it. Booksellers know Vanity Press when they see it. OK? Let’s just get that out of the way right now.
Scour the shelves of any retail bookstore outside the direct market, and I defy you to find five copies of anything self published. I’m not saying it never happens, I am saying it is sort of like, I dunno, having a meteor hit your house.
I have rarely seen a single copy of a self published book in a bookstore outside of the direct market. Big bookstore chains are not going to order your book in any kind of quantity that will necessitate returns because they probably won’t order 50 copies of anything you self published. If you’re not coming to the gate through Harper Collins, or Simon and Shuster, or Harlequin, you’re not getting through the gate.
Returns happen when stores order in quantity to fill the shelves and to hold on reserve in warehouses for reorder. This is unlikely to happen with print on demand books.
Moreoever, returns are not what you think they are.
iUniverse doesn’t tell you this, but returns can be:
A) a return of the complete book
B) a return of a damaged book
C) a return of the book cover alone to show proof the book wasn’t sold. The rest of the book is destroyed, which means you paid to print a book you can’t sell to someone else. iUniverse graciously absolves you from having to pay for the destroyed book that is unlikely to ever get ordered in the first place.
D) Affadavit returns. The client swears the books were destroyed and you do not get them back to sell to someone else. And ditto about the non-ordered, we-swear-destroyed book for which you are paying $699.
What a deal!
iUniverse sells services to total newbies who do not understand the most basic aspects of publishing. They charge you a lot of money for things you do not need.
Unlike most of the people reading this, I have been a successful self publisher and have sold over 300,000 copies of my works via self publishing, not to mention all the books my name is on that I didn’t self publish.
I would not purchase iUniverse services.
Arlene is not “…complaining and blaming others for their failure.”
Arlene simply does not want to be upsold goods and services when she does not get value for her money.
And Jed Michael, I’m a successful author as well as a successful self publisher.
You’re a Marketing Consultant selling overpriced goods to ignorant hopefuls.
I think that’s cruel.
If Jed Michael is a Marketing Consultant and a salesman for the company’s services, I’ve got to say that he sucks at it. Insulting the departing customer is NOT the way of getting them to remain or even make half-hearted recommendations for your services!
I went with BookSurge (now CreateSpace) for my POD. I did pay for a number of services when I was setting up my book, some of which I might be inclined to repeat with future projects, but some of which I would not again need to “hire out”.
The biggest one I paid for was having them do the actual page layout. This one I did not mind to pay for (although I had to do all the coding for the two different fonts I was using in the text), because the manuscript was 442 pages long. I would have gone crazy doing the work to do that much of it. And I’m pleased with how it came out. But I will probably do it myself in the future.
BUT I paid for a big publicity package. Parts of it were fine — the custom printed postcards, bookmarks and business cards, with the book cover on one side and the sales text on the other. BUT, it might be possible to have these done by a local printer for the same count (500 of each) for a lower price. Research is required on that. The package included a 1 hour phone consultation about marketing ideas, and this also was not an entire waste, even though much of what he had to suggest I had already done (set up my own website, blogging, and presence in various social media). The useless part of the package was the Press Release service — the release HAD to be composed according to their template, so there is precious little way for you to give it your unique spin and sales hook. On top of that, in spite of the fact that they ask you for four specific periodicals you would like it to go to, there’s no guarantee that they will send it to those places (there’s no indication that my request of the PR going to Writer’s Digest, Creative Screenwriting, or the Writer’s Guild’s own magazine was honored). And when I looked over the list of several hundred recipients (I think it was something under 800), it went to things like gardening magazines and local newspapers, and publications that have NOTHING to do with the area of my book. It certainly did NOT go to any major publications, even ones about books in general! NOT. WORTH. THE. MONEY, that.
Also, even though going POD you cannot expect to be carried in bookstores, there are a couple of glitches to watch out for. Some stores will not even order a small number of copies if it is not “returnable.” And most POD companies won’t offer that (because suddenly they are entirely only a printer and not the publisher). ALSO, (something to watch out for in dealing with CreateSpace) some stores won’t even order copies when a customer requests it because CreateSpace is an Amazon company, and Amazon is a competitor distributor (this is B&N policy).
The way around that is to use the POD service only as your printer, and to be your own publisher. That does mean spending the money to purchase an ISBN and bar code on your own for the book, and to create an imprint name. But, in the long run, that might not be a bad idea. I’m actually planning on doing that myself for some future projects — because I might be dealing with a second POD company for specific projects that I want to have a hard cover, something CreateSpace no longer offers. Having my own imprint means that my work will have a unified presentation, regardless of which company does the printing. (Although, I do have to check into the options on having the books from the second company listed on Amazon – I don’t think it’s a guaranteed part of the second company’s offerings.)
But this stuff isn’t brain surgery. Research and planning, and knowing your own limits, these are important. But seriously, if you are going to approach it as a business (and you should!), you should be considering these matters anyway.
Oh, and the custom cover thing? Take a careful look at the offerings done by their service. Most that I’ve seen are rather generic (I’ve even seen repeats of cover photos of landscapes). If you want to stand out, you need to have a strong idea of what you want the book to look like on a store shelf. (Even if you don’t end up in stores, you want that pick-me-up-and-look-at-me appearance. I’m happy to say that my instincts served me well — I wanted a friendly inviting cover and title, stuck to my guns, found an artist who delivered exactly what I wanted. I would NEVER have gotten that through their service.
This is a fantastic response. Thanks for taking the time to give this valuable input.
Well, this has been a very interesting read. o.o; I really don’t know much about self publishing or print on demand, though both me and the co-creator of my comic really want to publish the first volume when its done (and after its been touched up a bit.)
As far as how to do so… I hadn’t heard of iuniverse or createspace, but I heard of lulu and it was one of the places I was looking at.
(Also, we’ve considered going with a local printer owned by family friends of hers, but it seems like a bad idea, especially after having read through some of your blogs.)
Do you know any particularly good POD sites? Or is the problem more with the ‘special services’ of them?
Sorry I don’t have my own experiences to share. ^^;
oh hai there! XD
yeah, the funny thing was that I had been dragging my feet about leaving (because the checks were still coming in quarterly) but I was definitely going somewhere else with book 4. Until I got that letter. You know that old adage about how much work it takes to keep a customer versus how little it takes to lose one? Right there, yep! Now I’m pulling the three I have and doing whole new editions with better design and lower cover price
I’m required to send an actual snailmail letter to get my books discontinued; that’s going out this weekend (seriously, took me forever to get it done. But I’m glad it is, now I can redo it the way I wanted it done in the first place)
And oh lord don’t start me on the custom covers. Seriously XD I sent them pictures, sketches, references, and it still looks Photoshop Disaster worthy.
One thing I’m really looking at is going the “own your own imprint” idea and buying a small block of ISBNs and just going from there. I mean when I started the project I didn’t think there’d be much of a market for literary sequels (yeah, ha ha, thank you mr. hindsight) but I’m glad I got it out there when I did. I’m just sorry for a lot of reasons I didn’t get it done sooner; Solomon Grundy’s still half dirty
My publicity package for that third volume was the ugliest POS ever created. Seriously. I’m still digging through my disks to see if I kept it.
Aurora, Ka-Blam has been building a good reputation for comics POD. They are primarily focused on that type of printing, but they will print text. They are, in fact, the second company I’ve been considering dealing with – since they have a casewrapped hardcover option (AND arty endpapers if you want to do them!). Since so much of their business involves full color interiors, the price options are better than with the POD companies that focus mostly on text only.
Arleen, if you set up your own imprint, in addition to the ISBNs, you also have to purchase (from a different provider – though I have no idea why) the matching bar codes. ISBNs can be bought in blocks of 10 (I think the price was $250 for 10) or individually. Bar codes can be bought in blocks of 5 (don’t have that cost at hand right now).
Moving a book from one POD to another, though, would require new ISBNs, because the original ISBN, if bought through your POD company, points to them, not to you. That’s another reason to set up your own imprint. You can be surer that all business matters come back to you and not your printer.
@scribbler: exactly why I want to get new ISBNs. I know that once the books go out of print with IUniverse that the current ISBN dies with it. Along with the current PDF files used to print them. So why not do the whole thing from scratch in a manner that I’ll never have to deal with not owning the proofs for printing?
So … you think Jed Michaels will be as foolish as Chris Mohawk?
Just FYI – hoards are what dragons sit on; hordes are what Mongols and silverfish invade in. (An example of why spell checkers are not a complete replacement for proofreaders – which leads me to wonder if any of the POD companies offer proofreading services. _That_ might be something worth paying for, if they do a competent job.)
Oh no! BWAHAHA! Thanks mstein! Me writer!
FYI, I checked out a few of their “editors choice” selections. A couple of those books look pretty good.
However, not one is selling in the top 1 million at Amazon.
Which means they aren’t moving many copies.
Okay… I work for B&N, but they don’t pay me to speak for them, so this is all personal experience.
1) Working at one of the largest B&N stores in the country, we would get the occasional reprint/POD title, almost always non-returnable. If a customer wanted the book, they had to pay in advance. Sure, they could always return it, but most times, a customer wouldn’t order the book.
2) We are drowning in a see (ha!) of POD titles. Thanks to Google and high-speed scanners, MILLIONS of ISBNs/EANs are flooding the market, mostly old public-domain books. Then there are the e-book editions…
Silverfish? More like an algae bloom tsunami.
3) Most websites keep a few copies of POD titles in stock for next-day shipping. With new high speed printers at independent bookstores (Espresso book machine) or warehouses, it becomes easier to serve customer desire.
I foresee a day when you can enter a bookstore, order a POD book, go have a cup a coffee, and then pick up the book ten minutes later. Or go browse the coffee table books which POD can’t master. Or download a few digital e-books that you see on the shelves.
4) Donna Barr, creator of the Desert Peach (read. now.), uses POD to publish everything from her company, A Fine Line Press. She has a storefront on Lulu.com. (And digital files!)
5) Bowker is the ISBN/EAN agency for the U.S.
$125 is the basic package, one barcode. The package seems reasonable, especially given that most retailers receive information directly from Bowker (owner of Books In Print).
https://www.myidentifiers.com/
6) I now work in the data section, and process lots of small press titles (that is, from established publishers). Also, our Small Press department is just down the hall, and I don’t know how they can tolerate some of that stuff. Occasionally, they’ll put titles on the freebie shelves, and yes, you can judge a book by its cover. Or just the spine. Or by the laser-printed, MS Word-designed layout inside.
We keep POD simple here… most of what we deal with is via Ingram’s Lightning Source division. But we’ll order from just about anyone, with a few restrictions.
7) The Science Fiction Writers of America have a nice fact sheet:
http://www.sfwa.org/for-authors/writer-beware/pod/
Actually, that “Writers Beware” section should be bookmarked! (“Atlanta Nights” by Travis Tea… ha!)
9) From what I’ve learned, it seems that all POD printers can handle just about any file or print run. Some specialize, like Ka-Blam.
10) Tangential comment: Word Press now has an “anthologize” plug-in, allowing bloggers to select blog posts and format them into an e-book.
Torsten, that is a wonderful post. Very informative. Thanks so much for contributing.
I’m going to keep this post at the top of the blog for a few days.
It’s so insulting that they’re going to doubt your intelligence and make you pay 800 for “social media” because they’re hoping you don’t know what that is, or don’t want to bother to learn, but on top of that they’re only charging you a measely add on of 400 for an entire website. Remember folks, you get what you pay for. And if you want a crap templated site then $400 added on is a good price.
Seriously.
Spend the $800 on website and tech support, not on Facebook.
There’s nothing in their copy that says anything about serious tech support, so when you get hacked by a bunch of yahoos from Turkey, you won’t have DC McQueen to pick up the mess for you.
The company which runs graphicnovelreporter.com also manages websites for authors. I have no idea what they offer or charge, but it’s a private company run by expert bibliophiles.