Thanks, this was incredibly helpful! My husband and I are currently considering going the Ingram Spark route, but my ears perked up when I heard about Bookmobile. What would your top recommendation be for printing a POD book of high quality while keeping costs manageable?
A very good article! No printing method is fully devoid of quality issues now and again and some (many) aren't issues at the printer at all. It's also good to note that some of what looks 'off' to people when they compare POD to off-set books are just printing differences, but not necessarily true quality issues at all. Not all differences affect the actual quality of the book it's sometimes just a perception based on what we're used to seeing and a general bias for/against one printing method over the other.
POD CAN be of decent quality (though I doubt it's very often indistinguishable from offset). but the reason people like the Lit Hub writer are mistrustful of them is that they too frequently ARE obviously crummy, lesser versions. As you write, that may be entirely owing to choices made on the publisher's end and not the POD technology itself, but it's so common that it's perfectly logical for readers to assume that a printed-on-demand book will probably be of crap quality.
WIth offset or even printing digital in batches, I assume there's a certain level of quality control that's just absent in POD. The POD version of my own Big 5 novel had a misaligned cover that cut off part of the text of a blurb on the front cover. I only caught it after a book store ordered 30+ copies for an event I did. Pathetic and embarrassing! Besides that, the image on the cover was less sharp and the material felt flimsy and cheap.
Speaking purely as a reader and "consumer" and not as an author or "literary citizen," what annoys me most is that when you order a book online or through a bookstore no one tells you that the book you ordered is going to printed on demand. Again, I'm sure POD books can theoretically be good quality, but based on previous experience with them if given that information I'd much rather track down an original, offset-printed used copy.
Question: I know it's not exclusive to POD, but is there a word for that indent that runs along the spine on the front cover of some paperbacks? What's the deal with it?
This all makes sense. And it, along with other comments here, might speak to the quality of the POD printer. There are a variety of such businesses and maybe publishers should start being more selective. KDP/KEP seems to be getting called out a lot in these comments, not so much LSI. And I updated to give props to Bookmobile who does great work.
No one will know, when ordering, if a book will be POD or not. They all have the same ISBN.
As for that line, I know what you are referring to and it’s not a POD thing b/c it’s also on the books that Belt’s current printer has for offset. I think it’s something to do with the bindery machine they use. Maybe printers reading these comments might help us out here!
I know there's no reason they'd want to even if they could, but couldn't publishers signal through the Ingram listing or Amazon page that a book is currently available only as POD?
No. The warehousing and shipping and stocking situation is too complicated for that. Sometimes a book will be POD one day and not the next, depending on tons of factors.
For instance: Amazon orders 20 copies of Amazing Romance Novel and stores it in their warehouse. 21 people order it the next day. The publisher has set up POD in case the warehouse runs out of copies. 1 person gets a POD copy.
The only thing a publisher could do is not set up POD files for titles. Which would mean Amazing Romance Novel would be out of stock. And BOY would authors be mad then (trust us!)
It is interesting to know the behind-the-scenes workings of POD and the hierarchy of how it's done. Maybe I'm not savvy enough but my POD books from KDP look good to me.
Thanks, Anne! This is interesting. But I do have to push back -- I CAN tell when a book is POD. The cover feels different, for a start -- likely because POD doesn't have the range of options for covers (so yes, the publisher does tell the printer what to do, but from a more limited range of options --- I imagine the same goes for quality/colour of paper etc). The colour is often slightly off too. And as far as I know there are no options for eg spot UV and embossing. Without the specials, it looks cheaper, as well as feeling cheaper.
I know this both as a bookseller, as an author who knows full well it's obvious which of my books are self-published, and as someone who works in publishing -- we use POD as a backup option in case our stock runs out. I walked into a shop recently, saw a pile of books, and knew instantly they were the POD version (something had gone wrong in the system, as we had not run out of stock) -- and I was right.
Yes you make good points. Some of this can be attributed to self-publishing authors who don't hire professional designers. Publishers also need to not use colors/specials for their larger print runs that their POD printers can't accommodate. We are using only standard trim sizes, colors and lamination now for this reason.
It is also true that POD versions often are sold when there is stock--this happens to us a lot too. Sometimes it's because the warehouse can't get the books there quickly enough, but sometimes there seems to be no publisher-based reason--LSI GAP keeps fulfilling orders for some books of which we have tons of inventory for instance. It's like there's a button in their system that keeps being pressed when it should be turned off.
I appreciate this post, Anne. We have a ton of POD titles at She Writes Press. Historically we've only printed POD with Ingram. We are just now in the past few months experimenting with KDP. What I most notice about POD is that there are inconsistencies, of course, bc the books are printed to order. So you will get books off by a small margin, which you note below. Or we will get a notice from a buyer or the author that the color is off, which is probably because the toner was low. The vast majority of our POD books are indistinguishable from other books. We get very very few complaints, but then occasionally shit happens. But shit happens with offset too. I like your theory about there being more pirated books, more AI books, just in general more schlock out there. That term comes to mind—the AI "slop." This is clearly oozing its way into publishing and has been for a long time. It's not that POD is crap, it's that some authors and publishers who are using POD are being lazy and uploading crap files. We work hard to cross every t with POD. I will never stop being a fan of POD for the kinds of books we do. It doesn't make economic sense to warehouse books that are 6, 7, 8 years old. So POD allows books to stay in print. I feel like POD has LONG been discriminated against among booksellers, and unfortunately the rise of whatever is going on is resurfacing that discrimination. But to your point, most people really do not know, cannot tell. And POD is better for the environment too. Thanks for this great post.
Great article! It can be confusing to understand the nuances of the relationship between publishers and printers (even for those of us who work in publishing, but outside of the production process), but your explanation is succinct, clear, and compelling.
My biggest quality issue with KDP POD is the quality of the paperback covers, especially the matte. They have a certain look to them that is an immediate giveaway, they scuff very easily, and the print tends to be low quality as well (though likely more due to incorrectly sized PDFs provided by the author/publisher, I do suspect). I say this as someone who publishes with KDP - if I was getting more paperback orders (my readers tend to favour ebook) I would look at a different solution, but for the small number I sell the effort isn't worth the payoff.
I wonder if glossy might be the better choice for KDP POD then. By "print" being low quality do you mean the ink?
For self-publishing authors, having a professional designer would probably correct at least some of the issues people erroneously attribute to Amazon or KDP, as you point out. It's not easy to create a well-designed book; you need expertise.
More often they have a kind of blurry quality. So that's why I assume it's a file size issue - although it could be a file type issue, too, with colours becoming indistinct (I know there's a technical term for that, but I can't remember it!).
Glossy is definitely better. And even with a lot of experience in graphic design and publishing a magazine, it takes me iteration after iteration to get the paperback covers lined up properly with their ever-changing size recommendations, which seem to go up and down every time you submit the file!
The blurry issue could easily be a resolution issue in the uploaded file. There are lots of different ways to mess that up. The softer colours of matte vs gloss can also give the impression of it being blurrier than they actually are simply because gloss can get richer and crisper colours. Still, as someone that also uses KDP, it would be nice if they gave us more than just matte and gloss to choose from. Most of the time what I want would actually be semi-gloss or satin.
I think what some people ascribe as 'low quality' isn't so much low quality so much as it simply being different than they've become accustomed to. It's easy to attribute flaws to something different than we're used to that might actually have very little to do with those differences after all. I worked in a library for eight years and we had all sorts of quality issues with non-POD books all the time and some far worse than anything flung at KDP (like the spines splitting or coming unglued in brand new books; I'd say that's a lot worse than scuffing or even edge curling).
Yes, as others have noted here, many errors people attribute to POD are errors in the files that the publisher uploads. This is particularly an issue with self-published books.
And thanks for reminding us that offset printing also comes with a risk of human-created errors or poor printing processes!
But I would argue we need to more towards *fewer* options rather than more. Given everything the printing business is going through (other than POD) and the need to use different printers even for the same title (again not just for POD), I argue publishers should shift to fewer more standard trim sizes, stock, color, and lamination. Some of the mistakes in POD come from a file set up for one of the above that POD doesn't support, and the publisher not making the necessary adjustments.
Yeah, there are human/tech errors in both corners. It's just easier to call them out on POD as there seems to be a general bias against it same as there is with indieauthors vs traditionally published authors. On more than one occasion I have encountered offset print books that were improperly trimmed on one of the corners and, rather than correcting it and trimming off the missed parts, they just dog-eared the pages to hide them. Or books where several chapters were missing and the previous chapters reprinted. These are actual print issues and quality issues. Differences in paper stock and not having all the same bells-and-whistles are just printing differences, but not inherently a quality issue.
In some things I think fewer options would be good, but, in other areas, I really would love more. Someone further down in the comments here mentioned the lack of 'special' features on the covers as being a quality issue. That's not a quality issue (if it were, they wouldn't be considered special features to begin with), but it is a nice option to have to really give your covers a visual lift. People are just so used to seeing these kinds of things or a particular paper thickness/colour that the lack of/difference in them is jarring and they misattribute it as a quality issue. There are things about both glossy and matte covers that I don't like so an option that is in-between them would be wonderful. However, yes, I agree that more alignment between what offset and POD offer would go a long ways to fixing the misconceptions and mistakes made in/about POD. I think that would likely take an adjustment on both sides: the one standardizing things more and the other stepping up to offer some of options that are missing.
If people only knew how much time and trouble it takes to create a file that meets trim size requirements? Belt just had to resize about 20 backlist books that were off by 1/4"
I've stopped trusting Amazon as a seller of books. Period. In the digital realm I was sold what I believe was an illegally oubkished book ( the language in the introduction was " off " - I literally had the paperback, loved the book and was returning to a buddy ..but wanted the digital copy. The digital copy has had that odd Yoda like syntax ( a good day i wish upon you ). I was shocked that this knock - off ( IMO ) got past Amazon filters. Closer scrutiny showed numerous versions of that title for sale on Amazon. In the book realm, ststopped buying because online because of the above " poor quality " ( uneven pages on the right side in one case' and no packing protection in the other..like, none. The book just bounced around during shipping and arrived in what retail would call " distressed leather " condition. This is not a comment on " why it's not the publisher's fault ". It's a comment on the realities facing the buyer of a Cdn $ 40 title ( paper ) or $15 ( electronic ). I now buy books at our local Toronto bookstore - " Book City ".
Always check the publisher in the Product Details when buying from Amazon. For instance, on the best selling edition of *Great Expectations* today the publisher is "Independently Published" --this is a cheap knock-off edition, not an authorized one by reputable house. This is a HUGE problem of any "classic" *especially* ebooks, which are flooded on Amazon with terrible editions by crappy fake publishers. As for the shipping; that's odd; Amazon usually packs well, even if they don't vet their vendors at all. But you may have inadvertently bought from a 3rd party instead. Another thing to always check is "sold by/shipped by" information for the product. But of course just staying away from Amazon completely is fine. It just has absolutely nothing to do with POD printing.
The wrong paper color is what I see most often in POD. Stark white is bad. After this unconventional and unattractive fonts, and too much space between lines. You want your book to have a Big 5 look. They know what they're doing. We don't : )
All of that is simply the author/publisher/designer making poor choices though. Not actual print quality issues. And lots of reasons why those choices get made: lack of experience, research, DIYing with insufficient skills rather than hiring out, confusion, being in a hurry, etc. Unfortunately, it can give a bad name to something that really isn't at fault at all.
Fantastically detailed and helpful. Thank you.
Thanks for this! I read that piece too and thought a few things in it were off the mark (especially the "fast fashion" comparison)
right? it's the opposite of fast fashion--printing books only upon an order, much less wasteful than an offset print run. It's bespoke!
Thanks, this was incredibly helpful! My husband and I are currently considering going the Ingram Spark route, but my ears perked up when I heard about Bookmobile. What would your top recommendation be for printing a POD book of high quality while keeping costs manageable?
Hire a professional designer. That's much more important.
A very good article! No printing method is fully devoid of quality issues now and again and some (many) aren't issues at the printer at all. It's also good to note that some of what looks 'off' to people when they compare POD to off-set books are just printing differences, but not necessarily true quality issues at all. Not all differences affect the actual quality of the book it's sometimes just a perception based on what we're used to seeing and a general bias for/against one printing method over the other.
POD CAN be of decent quality (though I doubt it's very often indistinguishable from offset). but the reason people like the Lit Hub writer are mistrustful of them is that they too frequently ARE obviously crummy, lesser versions. As you write, that may be entirely owing to choices made on the publisher's end and not the POD technology itself, but it's so common that it's perfectly logical for readers to assume that a printed-on-demand book will probably be of crap quality.
WIth offset or even printing digital in batches, I assume there's a certain level of quality control that's just absent in POD. The POD version of my own Big 5 novel had a misaligned cover that cut off part of the text of a blurb on the front cover. I only caught it after a book store ordered 30+ copies for an event I did. Pathetic and embarrassing! Besides that, the image on the cover was less sharp and the material felt flimsy and cheap.
Speaking purely as a reader and "consumer" and not as an author or "literary citizen," what annoys me most is that when you order a book online or through a bookstore no one tells you that the book you ordered is going to printed on demand. Again, I'm sure POD books can theoretically be good quality, but based on previous experience with them if given that information I'd much rather track down an original, offset-printed used copy.
Question: I know it's not exclusive to POD, but is there a word for that indent that runs along the spine on the front cover of some paperbacks? What's the deal with it?
This all makes sense. And it, along with other comments here, might speak to the quality of the POD printer. There are a variety of such businesses and maybe publishers should start being more selective. KDP/KEP seems to be getting called out a lot in these comments, not so much LSI. And I updated to give props to Bookmobile who does great work.
No one will know, when ordering, if a book will be POD or not. They all have the same ISBN.
As for that line, I know what you are referring to and it’s not a POD thing b/c it’s also on the books that Belt’s current printer has for offset. I think it’s something to do with the bindery machine they use. Maybe printers reading these comments might help us out here!
I know there's no reason they'd want to even if they could, but couldn't publishers signal through the Ingram listing or Amazon page that a book is currently available only as POD?
No. The warehousing and shipping and stocking situation is too complicated for that. Sometimes a book will be POD one day and not the next, depending on tons of factors.
For instance: Amazon orders 20 copies of Amazing Romance Novel and stores it in their warehouse. 21 people order it the next day. The publisher has set up POD in case the warehouse runs out of copies. 1 person gets a POD copy.
The only thing a publisher could do is not set up POD files for titles. Which would mean Amazing Romance Novel would be out of stock. And BOY would authors be mad then (trust us!)
It is interesting to know the behind-the-scenes workings of POD and the hierarchy of how it's done. Maybe I'm not savvy enough but my POD books from KDP look good to me.
Also: RIP McNaughton & Gunn!
I work for the Ann Arbor library where we have a small publishing imprint. We used to send a lot of our authors there for printing. They were great.
POD is good these days, but I would probably push back on “indistinguishable.” Then again, I’m also probably an exception based on what I do 🙂
This was a great walkthrough!
Thanks, Anne! This is interesting. But I do have to push back -- I CAN tell when a book is POD. The cover feels different, for a start -- likely because POD doesn't have the range of options for covers (so yes, the publisher does tell the printer what to do, but from a more limited range of options --- I imagine the same goes for quality/colour of paper etc). The colour is often slightly off too. And as far as I know there are no options for eg spot UV and embossing. Without the specials, it looks cheaper, as well as feeling cheaper.
I know this both as a bookseller, as an author who knows full well it's obvious which of my books are self-published, and as someone who works in publishing -- we use POD as a backup option in case our stock runs out. I walked into a shop recently, saw a pile of books, and knew instantly they were the POD version (something had gone wrong in the system, as we had not run out of stock) -- and I was right.
Yes you make good points. Some of this can be attributed to self-publishing authors who don't hire professional designers. Publishers also need to not use colors/specials for their larger print runs that their POD printers can't accommodate. We are using only standard trim sizes, colors and lamination now for this reason.
It is also true that POD versions often are sold when there is stock--this happens to us a lot too. Sometimes it's because the warehouse can't get the books there quickly enough, but sometimes there seems to be no publisher-based reason--LSI GAP keeps fulfilling orders for some books of which we have tons of inventory for instance. It's like there's a button in their system that keeps being pressed when it should be turned off.
I appreciate this post, Anne. We have a ton of POD titles at She Writes Press. Historically we've only printed POD with Ingram. We are just now in the past few months experimenting with KDP. What I most notice about POD is that there are inconsistencies, of course, bc the books are printed to order. So you will get books off by a small margin, which you note below. Or we will get a notice from a buyer or the author that the color is off, which is probably because the toner was low. The vast majority of our POD books are indistinguishable from other books. We get very very few complaints, but then occasionally shit happens. But shit happens with offset too. I like your theory about there being more pirated books, more AI books, just in general more schlock out there. That term comes to mind—the AI "slop." This is clearly oozing its way into publishing and has been for a long time. It's not that POD is crap, it's that some authors and publishers who are using POD are being lazy and uploading crap files. We work hard to cross every t with POD. I will never stop being a fan of POD for the kinds of books we do. It doesn't make economic sense to warehouse books that are 6, 7, 8 years old. So POD allows books to stay in print. I feel like POD has LONG been discriminated against among booksellers, and unfortunately the rise of whatever is going on is resurfacing that discrimination. But to your point, most people really do not know, cannot tell. And POD is better for the environment too. Thanks for this great post.
"shit happens with offset too" is a line I wished I had put in this post after I sent it!
Also another data point for "it's not the tool it's the people who are using the tool" as someone put it to me offline.
Great article! It can be confusing to understand the nuances of the relationship between publishers and printers (even for those of us who work in publishing, but outside of the production process), but your explanation is succinct, clear, and compelling.
My biggest quality issue with KDP POD is the quality of the paperback covers, especially the matte. They have a certain look to them that is an immediate giveaway, they scuff very easily, and the print tends to be low quality as well (though likely more due to incorrectly sized PDFs provided by the author/publisher, I do suspect). I say this as someone who publishes with KDP - if I was getting more paperback orders (my readers tend to favour ebook) I would look at a different solution, but for the small number I sell the effort isn't worth the payoff.
I wonder if glossy might be the better choice for KDP POD then. By "print" being low quality do you mean the ink?
For self-publishing authors, having a professional designer would probably correct at least some of the issues people erroneously attribute to Amazon or KDP, as you point out. It's not easy to create a well-designed book; you need expertise.
More often they have a kind of blurry quality. So that's why I assume it's a file size issue - although it could be a file type issue, too, with colours becoming indistinct (I know there's a technical term for that, but I can't remember it!).
Glossy is definitely better. And even with a lot of experience in graphic design and publishing a magazine, it takes me iteration after iteration to get the paperback covers lined up properly with their ever-changing size recommendations, which seem to go up and down every time you submit the file!
The blurry issue could easily be a resolution issue in the uploaded file. There are lots of different ways to mess that up. The softer colours of matte vs gloss can also give the impression of it being blurrier than they actually are simply because gloss can get richer and crisper colours. Still, as someone that also uses KDP, it would be nice if they gave us more than just matte and gloss to choose from. Most of the time what I want would actually be semi-gloss or satin.
I think what some people ascribe as 'low quality' isn't so much low quality so much as it simply being different than they've become accustomed to. It's easy to attribute flaws to something different than we're used to that might actually have very little to do with those differences after all. I worked in a library for eight years and we had all sorts of quality issues with non-POD books all the time and some far worse than anything flung at KDP (like the spines splitting or coming unglued in brand new books; I'd say that's a lot worse than scuffing or even edge curling).
Yes, as others have noted here, many errors people attribute to POD are errors in the files that the publisher uploads. This is particularly an issue with self-published books.
And thanks for reminding us that offset printing also comes with a risk of human-created errors or poor printing processes!
But I would argue we need to more towards *fewer* options rather than more. Given everything the printing business is going through (other than POD) and the need to use different printers even for the same title (again not just for POD), I argue publishers should shift to fewer more standard trim sizes, stock, color, and lamination. Some of the mistakes in POD come from a file set up for one of the above that POD doesn't support, and the publisher not making the necessary adjustments.
Yeah, there are human/tech errors in both corners. It's just easier to call them out on POD as there seems to be a general bias against it same as there is with indieauthors vs traditionally published authors. On more than one occasion I have encountered offset print books that were improperly trimmed on one of the corners and, rather than correcting it and trimming off the missed parts, they just dog-eared the pages to hide them. Or books where several chapters were missing and the previous chapters reprinted. These are actual print issues and quality issues. Differences in paper stock and not having all the same bells-and-whistles are just printing differences, but not inherently a quality issue.
In some things I think fewer options would be good, but, in other areas, I really would love more. Someone further down in the comments here mentioned the lack of 'special' features on the covers as being a quality issue. That's not a quality issue (if it were, they wouldn't be considered special features to begin with), but it is a nice option to have to really give your covers a visual lift. People are just so used to seeing these kinds of things or a particular paper thickness/colour that the lack of/difference in them is jarring and they misattribute it as a quality issue. There are things about both glossy and matte covers that I don't like so an option that is in-between them would be wonderful. However, yes, I agree that more alignment between what offset and POD offer would go a long ways to fixing the misconceptions and mistakes made in/about POD. I think that would likely take an adjustment on both sides: the one standardizing things more and the other stepping up to offer some of options that are missing.
If people only knew how much time and trouble it takes to create a file that meets trim size requirements? Belt just had to resize about 20 backlist books that were off by 1/4"
I've stopped trusting Amazon as a seller of books. Period. In the digital realm I was sold what I believe was an illegally oubkished book ( the language in the introduction was " off " - I literally had the paperback, loved the book and was returning to a buddy ..but wanted the digital copy. The digital copy has had that odd Yoda like syntax ( a good day i wish upon you ). I was shocked that this knock - off ( IMO ) got past Amazon filters. Closer scrutiny showed numerous versions of that title for sale on Amazon. In the book realm, ststopped buying because online because of the above " poor quality " ( uneven pages on the right side in one case' and no packing protection in the other..like, none. The book just bounced around during shipping and arrived in what retail would call " distressed leather " condition. This is not a comment on " why it's not the publisher's fault ". It's a comment on the realities facing the buyer of a Cdn $ 40 title ( paper ) or $15 ( electronic ). I now buy books at our local Toronto bookstore - " Book City ".
Always check the publisher in the Product Details when buying from Amazon. For instance, on the best selling edition of *Great Expectations* today the publisher is "Independently Published" --this is a cheap knock-off edition, not an authorized one by reputable house. This is a HUGE problem of any "classic" *especially* ebooks, which are flooded on Amazon with terrible editions by crappy fake publishers. As for the shipping; that's odd; Amazon usually packs well, even if they don't vet their vendors at all. But you may have inadvertently bought from a 3rd party instead. Another thing to always check is "sold by/shipped by" information for the product. But of course just staying away from Amazon completely is fine. It just has absolutely nothing to do with POD printing.
Pod lowered the barrier so many independent publishers could put out books. Not everyone puts out books like she nailed a stake through his head
https://marlowe1.substack.com/p/the-witching-snakes-pt-1
The wrong paper color is what I see most often in POD. Stark white is bad. After this unconventional and unattractive fonts, and too much space between lines. You want your book to have a Big 5 look. They know what they're doing. We don't : )
All of that is simply the author/publisher/designer making poor choices though. Not actual print quality issues. And lots of reasons why those choices get made: lack of experience, research, DIYing with insufficient skills rather than hiring out, confusion, being in a hurry, etc. Unfortunately, it can give a bad name to something that really isn't at fault at all.
The publisher chooses the color of the paper. The designer does the fonts, and the spacing. POD has nothing to do with any of that.
I was talking about self publishers. You have to make all those decisions.
I enjoyed reading your post today.