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Interviews With Top POD Publishers Reveal the Dark Side of the 'Pay to Be Published' Industry
Published: Wed, 24 Aug 2005, 12:32 EDT
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By Aria C. Munro
Staff Writer, Publishers Newswire
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NEW YORK, NY - August 24 -- Today Publishing Basics Radio released a series of interviews with the nation's top Print on Demand (POD) publishers. The seven part series includes interviews with the CEOs of iUniverse and Author House, the top two POD publishers in the country, as well as the former finance VP of XLibris, the third largest. When combined, the podcast interviews paint a revealing picture of an industry slanted more toward selling books and services to authors versus selling books to the public.
While all of the nation's top POD publishers have sizeable sales staff selling services to authors, they have few or no salespeople devoted to selling the books they publish to distributors or to the public. Publishing Basics Radio found that the average number of books sold per POD title is less than 200, and of these books sold, half were sold to the authors for their own use. The series also revealed that because of the economics of POD publishing and industry conventions, most POD published books can't get into major bookstores.
"The POD publishing industry has managed to convince potential self-publishers that this new form of publishing is somehow different than the much maligned vanity publishing. But what we found was clearly vanity publishing in a different set of clothes," said Ron Pramschufer, host of Publishing Basics Radio.
Rounding out the series are interviews with attorney Mark Levine, who talks about how to read the small print in POD publishing contracts, and Jan Nathan, Executive Director of the Publishers Marketing Association, who gives a conventional publisher's view of the POD industry.
WBJB Publishing Basics Radio (www.wbjbradio.com) is podcast weekly at www.WBJBRadio.com. The show's subtitle, "Where weekly we help authors navigate the self-publishing minefield," sums up the spirit of the show and its producers. Listeners can subscribe to the show at either the WBJB website or through iTunes. The show is also available to be Nanocasted on other publishing web sites.
Publishing Basics Radio is hosted by Ron Pramschufer, a 30-year veteran of the printing and publishing industries. His straight talking, no nonsense interviewing style falls somewhere between Colombo and Bill O'Reilly.
Publishing Basics Radio is produced by Emmy Award winner, Errol Smith of Jackstreet Media and sponsored by www.selfpublishing.com. and the Affiliate Nanocasting Network (ANN) www.theann.com
To listen to this series go to http://wbjbradio.com/series/pod.php.
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