Used to be I couldn’t be bothered with print-on-demand for most of my indie-published stuff. It was way too difficult to manage the content management systems, and there’s no economies of scale with a print run of one, so it was also super spendy.
But the CMS, especially at Amazon, got better, and as trade published books got more expensive (thirty-five bucks for a trade paperback, are you fucking kidding me!?) the numbers started to line up.
Plus, there are just some people who prefer paper and are willing to pay for it. So I revisited the process a while ago and started experimenting.
As always, the friction is mostly outside the Amazon ecosystem. For all of the billionaire tyrant behaviour, Bezos does know how to build a platform. The two paperbacks below are the Amazon print copy on the left and the IngramSpark on the right
If you dial right in, you’ll see Jeff’s copy is supersharp hi-res, and the alternative, i.e., the rest of the market, is some fuzzy fucking shit. (FWIW, the nice, sharp Amazon edition only cost me a couple of dollarydoos to run up a test copy and have it shipped out. That shitty alternative print job cost nearly thirty bucks, just so I could see how bad it was.)
It can be fixed, and I will get onto that today, but man, why does it have to be so fucking hard to escape the monopoly?