What you need to know about print-on-demand book publishing

Part 3: An insight into self-publishing a book

This is the third part of a series about how we self-published a book. This part is about how to get your book printed, and demystifying print-on-demand services.

Please don’t be scared by the length of this article. If you’re thinking about self-publishing a book, this article could save you a lot of time and money!

Photos by Bank Phrom and Joel Muniz via Unsplash

If you want to self-publish a book, essentially you have two options:

1. Find a printer to print a large run of books, store stock (p.s. boxes of books take up a lot of space), sell the books yourself, then pack and post all the orders yourself. The upside is you’ll have more control over the quality of the book — depending on your budget, you can work with your printer to choose the materials for the book. As you’d be selling the books yourself, you can create your own bespoke storefront, which can be more profitable, you have more marketing tools at your disposal, and you get valuable data you can use to sell more books (I’ll go into all of this later in this series). The downside is it’s a big investment to print a large inventory of books upfront, it’s risky (you might not sell all the books), and packing and posting hundreds of books is a lot of work!