Getting your book printed is easy. I just did a blog post about Print On Demand technology called ‘You must be *THIS TALL* to Publish‘ which gives a glossy overview of the process.

Like I said, getting your book printed is easy. But getting it to the people, you are gonna need some help. For marketing and distribution of books today, Amazon.com is the King – and according to Writers Weekly, the King just laid down the law:

Thou shalt have no other POD service providers before me.

Now if you want to release your POD book on Amazon, it must be printed on *their* POD service provider, called BookSurge. Of course, the whole POD industry is in an uproar because Amazon realized they could in-source the POD publishing themselves. Um:

• No.
• Fucking.
• Shit.
• Sherlock.

Let’s see, people step up and start offering POD, and a route to Amazon for independent authors. They start making a bazillion dollars, proving a huge ROI. Amazon says, “Thanks for verifying there’s a market, now we’ll do it ourselves. Blow us.”

The only surprise here is that anyone is surprised.

You can listen to Amazon.com corporate execs blow smoke up your ass here. They claim it’s all about making the process faster which is complete and utter bullshit. PODs can take the order from Amazon and drop ship direct to the customer, so ‘making the process faster’ is a flat-out lie. But there’s no lie about how much $kaching$ Amazon is going to make.

Be careful, some people are mistakenly proclaiming that this means you have an “Exclusive” agreement with Amazon, (meaning you can’t release your book through other POD publishers or other distribution methods) which is NOT true. Mark Jeffrey at the Huffington Post, for example, clearly DID NOT read the entire release from amazon which can be found here.

The agreement is Non-Exclusive, meaning you can still send your POD works through other POD presses, but if you want to sell those copies through Amazon, you will have to have a minimum quantity (as few as five copies) printed and sent to Amazon for stocking through Amazon’s “Advantage Program”. You can also release POD through Amazon/BookSurge, AND through as many other POD or traditional publishers as you like. You just can’t tie Amazon orders to your POD publisher anymore. You wanna do POD on Amazon? You gotta use BookSurge, and you are going to pay whatever they want.

Sounds evil, but it’s just a smart business move for Amazon to eliminate the middlemen. A clever businessperson would have seen this coming. Another clever businessperson would see this as the opportunity to step in and take the place of the ‘Old’ Amazon business model. Those people who were riding the POD gravytrain and just got put out of business because they put all their eggs in the Amazon basket can shut the fuck up and take this time of unemployment to take a class on simple business economics and market trend analysis.

Art Is Resistance
-Zero

Posted in Publishing, Ubersuck