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I'm not sure you will find POD publishers who regularly deal with
hardcover books. In fact, a rather common practice is to pre-print a
run of color covers and use them as the orders are filled and the
individual copies are produced.
Whether you stick with a local publisher or not should depend upon a
number of factors. Because costs are generally high there, and because
your purchasers must deal with sales taxes on top of everything else,
and because shipping costs will be a function of distance--unless you
anticipate that most of the sales will be local throughout the life of
the book, I would consider more centrally-located publishers also.
With overnight shipping, email and the like it should be relatively
easy to deal with the various details. Being face to face is nice, but
by no means necessary.
POD makes sense for some books, less for others. For instance, if the
coach has pre-sales of a fair number of books, conventional printing
may be more economical. As a coach, he may be able to move quite a few
of these books through other coaches who know and respect him and his
methods.
Personally, I would think fairly strongly about producing the book and
marketing it through this avenue--since schools are perenially looking
for income-generating projects, a promotion could be made for the
schools to market the finished volume for the coach...and, by
guaranteeing a minimum number, the costs of conventional printing
would be fairly easily covered. Remember that POD is a very expensive
printing medium on a per-volume basis.
If the book is to be heavily illustrated--and the illustrations in
color--then I do not believe that POD would be a particularly
attractive option.
Best of luck with the project...
David
On Fri, 15 Oct 2004 13:43:40 -0700, Michael Strickland
<mstrickland -at- entriq -dot- com> wrote:
>
> Dick,
>
> I haven't done any self-publishing/POD, but I did look into the various POD
> publishers a little while back, and Booklocker.com seemed like the best one
> out there (for my needs, anyway). They have a very low setup fee, and offer
> a range of other services (and they're an American company). The one
> drawback is that I think they only print trade paperbacks, not hardback. If
> you decide to look into that route further, you might want to check them
> out.
>
> Congrats, and good luck!
>
> Mike
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