by Gianni Truvianni

Created on: December 07, 2008   Last Updated: May 02, 2009

An article arguing the pros and cons of having one's book published by a self publisher and the things writers should watch out for if they do not wish to end up getting cheated.

Self publishing offers writers specially not very famous ones; such as myself a chance to get their work published by using their own money, which in essence comes down to somebody paying a publisher to publish his or her book. This creating a situation in which the publisher is left with little if any choice weather or not to publish the books they are paid to do so regardless of their quality of perhaps lack of which. All of this being in sharp contrast to before where, it was the publisher who decided which books got published or not and not always based on any real criteria, other then personal taste or just a premonition of which books would or perhaps would not sell.

Of course publishing a book, is for the most part very expensive, as it requires or at least it used to; typesetting and for several thousands of copies of the book in question to be printed with absolutely no guarantee that any were going to sell. This because the cost of printing was so high that it really did not pay to print any less then a certain number, as the cost of printing for instance one hundred copies was almost the same as printing 2000.

This was the way it was till "print on demand" came along. Now, some may ask what this system is and how does it work? Well, this is a basically simple system which pretty much explains itself, where a book is published but no copies of the book are actually printed until orders have been made for the book. So what we are looking at is a system in which the book in question is digitally stored, and the publisher need not print any copies until they have received orders for the book, which must be paid in advanced. This system even making it possible for one copy to be printed at a cost per unit not much higher then if 1000 had been printed.

All of this has made publishing much easier and cheaper for the publisher, who is not only relieved of the burden of having to print copies which might not be sold but also of having to pay for storage for those copies, which might stay around for a long time. Of course the author benefits from this as well as he or she is able to have his or her book published very cheaply, for as low as 599 USD, such as was the case with me and my publisher iUniverse. They being the ones who in May of 2008 published my first book, naturally paid for

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