POD Publishers

Although POD “publishers” such as AuthorHouse, iUniverse, Xlibris and Lulu have gained in popularity, these author services firms are not the best choice for an author who wishes to publish his or her own book. Most of these firms use LightningSource to print, so you can go direct and get the best printing price yourself.

If you do want to consider a POD publisher, make sure and look for the most favorable contract terms, which should include:

1.	This agreement should be non-exclusive. 2.	The author should have the right to terminate the contract with 30 days notice. 3.	Since the author pays the up-front costs, the author should retain all rights of ownership and so the POD publisher should not pay the author “royalties”. Instead, the author should be entitled to not a portion, but the entire sales price minus the cost of printing. 4.	Again, since the author pays the up-front costs, the author should expect to be able to obtain usable cover and interior art files if he or she decides to terminate the agreement. 5.	The cost of printing should not be marked up more than 20%. A slight markup is reasonable to cover the production costs. The book printing cost calculation for LightningSource in the previous paragraph is a good way to gauge what the true printing cost is for the author’s book.

Tanyab 05:54, 10 November 2008 (UTC) | www.publishing-store.com