So you wanna know about Print on Demand publishing. Keep reading!
If you are an author, you know how difficult it is to convince a traditional publisher to invest money in your book towards editing and designing, printing, publicity and eventually, selling the book. It may take years before any traditional publishing house agrees to publish your book and even then, the main party making any kind of income from the sale of books will be the traditional publishing company. From the income generated by the sale of your book, the traditional publishing house typically gets to keep about ninety percent! Of course, they will justify this by saying that they will need to cover the expenses involved in publishing the book, like staff expenses, cost of printing, publicity and marketing, office bills, and so on. This is when the hard reality of the traditional publishing world hits you. Unless you churn out a huge bestseller, the money you make as royalty is not going to be good enough for you to be able to do the one thing you have been dreaming of—saying goodbye to your day job to continue writing. Well, even if you use Print on Demand, you may not get to do that.
Which brings us to the topic of our discussion. What if you were told that there was a way in which you could act not only as an author but also as a publisher? By self-publishing, you will get to keep the entire income from the sales of your book to yourself! What could be sweeter than that? Nothing, if you have a bit of experience in publishing like typesetting, cover design, getting books printed, distribution, and so on.
In the self-publishing business you, as the author, have to invest the money and also manage all aspects of the publishing process from editing to actual sales. You can decide what form your written word has to take. You may choose to go in for a traditional form of the printed and bound variety or the more recent, non-traditional form of ebooks that can be bought and then easily downloaded through your website.
Whatever form you choose to publish your book in, you will need to first start a publishing company. If you start as a sole proprietor, you may not have to worry too much about complex legal formalities or tax issues. But, being a publisher is not a risk-free business. Similarly, getting your book printed is also not too difficult – you merely need to contact a local printing firm to do that. You may then feel compelled to ask—if self-publishing is so easy, why don’t I just do it?
Writing a book is not difficult—writing one with content attractive enough to make thousands want to read it is difficult. Even assuming you have written on a topic of great current interest, and many people have already expressed a desire to read it, marketing and then selling your book so that there is more visibility and more people buy your book takes some doing. You will, therefore, need to know what to write about so that people will want to read your book, how to give it a catchy title, get a good cover designed, and finally how to run a successful marketing campaign. Print on Demand publishing takes some of the pressure off.
As a Print on Demand publisher, Harmon Press does not run marketing campaigns like a traditional publishing house. You get to market and sell your own book. After all, it is your book and you are probably going to be the best person to sell it. We do, however, offer all authors some tips on marketing their book.
Please be warned that becoming your own publisher will require you to invest your time and money. And since there is risk associated with any financial investment, there can be some risk associated with the business of publishing. While you could be immensely successful and make tremendous financial gains, you could also end up losing what you have invested.
So why not let Harmon Press take the risk. You only have to invest in 50 books at 50 percent off the suggested retail price and pay for your manuscript to be proofread. We take take the risk of making our money on the selling of your book. You don’t have any overhead. We use print on demand technology to print your book one at a time or a thousand at a time.