As recently as 10 years ago, a few large companies ruled the publishing business. Today, publishing has become democratized. Nearly anyone can publish and distribute a book worldwide without spending a fortune. The major publishers still hold considerable sway over mass-market publishing, but the rest of the business is wide-open.
The technological innovations that have opened the publishing business are Print on Demand (POD) publishing and Internet booksellers. Technical communicators can take advantage of both to better serve their customers and even bring in a little extra revenue. For this post, I’ll discuss Print on Demand.
Print on Demand (or POD) publishing is just what it sounds like. You upload the cover and interior of your book in PDF form to a POD company. When an order comes in for a book, the POD company prints that one copy and ships it to the purchaser. There’s no need to print thousands of copies of a book, pay a distributor to store them in a warehouse, and then hope you can sell enough of them to stay in business.
Before POD, it was prohibitively expensive to print small numbers of books, let alone single copies. It still costs more per copy to use POD, but the cost is now much more competitive. For small publishers like XML Press, the additional per-copy cost is more than offset by eliminating the cost of warehousing and the uncertainty of estimating print runs, which is pretty much impossible anyway.
The tech comm connection
What does this mean for technical communicators? After all, tech comm has been running away from print as fast as it can. It’s expensive to print and ship manuals, and with so many products being sold and distributed online, there often isn’t even a product box to put the manual into. For that reason, among many others, technical documentation has been racing towards online-only distribution.
At the same time, sales of third-party books, like the Missing Manual series from O’Reilly, haven’t slowed down. Many people like to have a printed manual, and with print-on-demand it isn’t that hard to sell them one. Print-on-demand companies like Lulu, CreateSpace, and Lightning Source offer low-cost services to small publishers and self-publishers, making the cost of entry so low that pretty much anyone can get a book in print.
So if you use a process that enables you to generate a good-quality PDF, it’s worth investigating POD as a way to make printed books available to your customers and bring in some extra revenue. In my next post I’ll discuss the other major technological enabler, Internet retailers.
Richard L. Hamilton is the founder of XML Press, which is dedicated to producing high quality, practical publications for technical communicators, managers, content strategists, marketers, and the engineers who support their work. Richard is the author of Managing Writers: A Real-World Guide to Managing Technical Documentation, and editor of the 2nd edition of Norm Walsh’s DocBook: The Definitive Guide, published in collaboration with O’Reilly Media.