PODs, Not What You Expect

Sometime in the dregs of winter, I made a bad decision about one of our spring titles. I looked at the printer quote, saw the breaks in the costs of doing an initial print run of 1,500, 2,000, or 3,000 copies, and erred on the side of caution. "We can always do pee oh dees if it sells out quickly," I explained to my quizzical colleague about the low print run I ordered.

Pee oh dees is how I pronounce PODs, the acronym for Print On Demand.

Print on Demand pretty much explains itself: instead of ordering a batch of books from a traditional offset printer, you have books printed upon receiving orders. You pay more per copy than you would with a traditional printer, but you take on less financial risk, paying for one copy at a time as it sells, instead of thousands up front.

Many of you may now be imagining a terrible looking book, the kind that screams, "ugh, this is clearly self-published," or, "yuck, CreateSpace." A book that might have a solid yellow cover with the title in thic…