DIY Publishing
Published June 30th, 2009 | 
DIY publishing services are not equal. You need to shop around. It’s not quite like picking out auto insurance.
The considerations are different.
For example, how much of this process do you want to do yourself outside of writing your book? Obviously, the more of the process you handle yourself, the less money it will cost you. However, if you plan on hiring a copyeditor, an artist to design the book cover jacket, etc., you’re talking about a nice chunk of change. So DIY outfits offer these services and often these services are not cheap or of suitable quality. Also, you have to consider the printing costs. Are you going to do traditional offset printing or print-on-demand? Traditional printing may have less cost per unit on the front end, but will cost more on the back end. POD is the opposite. It may, in fact, cost more on print initially, but save money in the long run. However, with POD, you’ll find it more difficult to get books into physical bookstores. That’s going to change sometime in the future, probably, but for now, you’re basically stuck with Amazon and a handful of lesser online booksellers with POD.
So when picking a self-publishing service, you need to know what you want to achieve and compare those aspirations to what each company delivers.
