Too many authors tell us that they publish via a subsidy/vanity house because they "can't be bothered" with details like ordering their own ISBNs. The subsidy houses go by a bunch of misleading aliases, such as "POD publisher", "self publishing company", "author services company" or sometimes just "POD. But if you pay them to publish the book under their imprint an using their ISBN, then they are a subsidy. If they pay your a "royalty" instead of just charging you for printing/fufilling the books then they are a subsidy.

Two other things subsidy authors  apparently can't be bothered with:

1. Making money, or at least breaking even.

2. Getting wide readership.

Subsidy presses make it easy to publish a book but hard to sell it.  The  pricing on even the cheapest subsidy costs twice what it would cost to print and fulfill via a POD printer such as LSI. And meaningful prepublishing reviews with the big five prepub reviewers are just not availalbe to subsidy published books. With narrow margins you can't sell via bookstores or Amazon Advantage. A distributor is out of the question.

Most subsidy books fail in the marketplace. Bluntly most are not worth publishing in the first place. The subsidy house makes money from authors and sales to those authors. But what if you succeed? What if your book takes off and you start racking up sales? Now you are in even worse shape. To get decent margins you need to take over the publishing of your book.  You may need to print offset.  But once you have published subsidy you are more or less stuck. The favorable publicity attaches to the ISBN, and the ISBN is the property of the subsidy publisher. The same goes for the interior layout, the cover art, and so on.

The more glowing the promises the worse the deal.  Bottom line, don't publish subsidy.

The best of the worst are these three, in order of preference.

Booklocker.com

Lulu.com

Infinity.com

Here is the four P formula of success in self publishing, and some starting steps:

Your first step is to learn the business. You wouldn't attempt to open a restaurant or auto repair shop without studying the business carefully. The same applies to self-publishing. Getting your book in print is very easy, often too easy.  Selling books is increasingly difficult, in part because there are so many published every year.  So you must do your homework. 

There are many resources incliding mailing lists and internet searches. But

if you plan to publish books it is essential that you read some books on the subjects of marketng and self-publishing. Here is the url for my short list of books to buy, read and reference throughout your project:

http://wexfordpress.com/tex/shortlist.pdf

Remember, your book may be a lifelong dream but it is also a product. Authoring and self publishing your work may be your form of self-fulfillment but it  is also a business. If you care about profit or even just readership you need too do it right.

First P. PLAN your project, including marketing, product production, review strategies, and printing.

Second P. PRICE out your production and distribution costs, including printing, fulfillment, discounts and price your product accordingly.

Third P. PRODUCE your product, including writing editing,  layout, typesetting, indexing,  and most important cover design.  Some of this you can do yourself and some you should farm out. LIke anyone in business you are faced with "make or buy" decisions. The battle is always between product quality (good) and production costs (bad).

Fourth P. PUBLISH, executing your printing, marketing and fulfillment plans.

Interneting is a contact sport, and sometimes a collision sport.  When someone knocks you flat your backside might hurt,  but don't let your feelings get hurt. It is all in the game.  To the extent possible put your anger in your pocket and figure out your next move. Remember there are fans watching from the sidelines.  The best course is to ignore the venom and keep your response professional, helpful, friendly, and on-topic.  If in fact you said somethig wrong you can offer a brief oops. But the oops is not an apology. It is an acknowledgment of a mistake.  Move on.

Don't crow in victory, and don't cry in defeat. 

My array of listservs (mailing lists) in the publishing area include:

ind-e-pubs@yahoogroups.com (may be dead, I'll check)

pod_publishers@yahoogroups.com

Print-On-Demand@yahoogroups.com

pub-forum@pub-forum.net

publish-l@googlegroups.com

Self-Publishing@yahoogroups.com (I co moderate this one.)

 smallpub-civil@yahoogroups.com

For book design and graphics I follow these:

graphic_design@yahoogroups.com

 publishingdesign@yahoogroups.com

My array of typesetting and programming listservs is too bulky quote here.

The word "group" is a bit vague whe discussing internet fora. The above are all listservs, but most are addressed via googlegrooups or yahoogroups dot com.  Internet news groups are another species altogether.  I visit and sometimes query on newsgroup comp.text.tex. But most of my surfing and postings on news groups deal with technical computer issues. 

Enough for now.  You might want to print out the above listings for future reference, or book mark this item.

Here it is, the wexfordpress.net blog for John Culleton.  I hope to fill it with interesting tidbits

for all you self/subsidy/small publishers out there. Your comments are always welcome!

A reminder. Wexfordpress will be offering two books next February:  Unholy Orders, the top-notch police procedural by Willam Redding, and Independent Publishing,  the concise desktop guide by Sylvia Hemmerly, based on her earlier work Unlocking the Secrets of Publishing but with new and updated material.  Stay tuned. I'll keep adding tidbits as these works progress.

Your comments are always welcome of course.