What Is POD?

POD or Print on Demand is the new technological way forward to book publishing and is the system that many small publishers and self-publishers are using to produce their books.

The Print on Demand system is exactly what it says. It print's on demand. So, say you wrote and published a book with a POD publisher you pay only for the amount of books that you have published. This can be from as little as one copy to as many as thousands. This is ideal if you want to test the market with your new book. However, you do have to be careful which POD company you choose to handle your book otherwise you might end up paying thousands of pounds to a company claiming to be a POD company, when they are no more a publisher than you or I.

With traditional printing, you paid a set price for the amount of books you had published and they were all published in one block on a litho printing press. POD published books are produced and then stored on computer. Whenever someone orders one of your books from a shop, the POD company is notified and duly print one copy off. Although this ensures that you are not left with a shed-load of books to store, because of the expense of POD equipment, one copy can cost more, resulting in lower profit to the author.