Publishing, Self-Publishing, Print-On-Demand

There is a lot of confusion between the use of these words: publishing, self-publishing and print-on-demand.

Here's a definition of Publishing and Self-Publishing from Wikipedia: "Publishing includes the stages of the development, acquisition, copyediting, graphic design, production – printing (and its electronic equivalents), and marketing and distribution of newspapers, magazines, books, literary works, musical works, software and other works dealing with information, including the electronic media. In some cases, authors may be their own publishers."

Any time there is a question on LinkedIn "How to publish my book?", there is an answer "Use Lulu.com and you are okay"

In reality, no, you are not okay yet, if you are going to sell your books to the public. Yes, the process of uploading your manuscript on Lulu is a snap. Yes, Lulu will print and ship a book in a snap IF and WHEN there is an order placed. BUT where will the order come from?

The business model of POD (print-on-demand) is selling printing services to the book authors/publishers who are supposed to order books for their own sales or somehow send their book customers to the ordering page. So, printing-on-demand is actually the process of manufacturing books, not selling them. Uploading your book to Lulu means that you covered just the first part of the publishing process - production.

More on SELLING books later.

http://www.linkedin.com/in/olgakellen