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Yesterday and today I was busy editing a whole raft of reviews of POD published titles for the June issue of our newest online book review magazine: Small Press Bookwatch -- and in the process of my editing and layout efforts, something started to impress itself upon me over and over again.

The cover pricing of trade paperback books, fiction and non-fiction, from POD publishers like iUniverse, 1st Books, AmErica House, Trafford and others is drastically non-competitive with similiar trade paperback titles coming from the likes of HarperPenguin, Vintage, Plume, Houghton Mifflin, and other "traditional" publishers.

And I'm speaking of POD titles that passed my initial selection process, were good enough to achieve a review assignment, and whose reviews came in recommending the title (often _highly_ recommending the title) to its intended readership.

Three examples just off this morning's stack of reviews:

Tom Wedderburn's Life (AmErica House, fiction, 206 pages) $19.95, Outsourcing The American Dream (iUniverse, non-fiction, 183 pp.) $16.95, and Only The Determined (1st Books, fiction, 115 pages) $12.42.

If each of these titles had been published by a Random House or Penguin-Putnam as one of their trade paperback imprints the prices would have been something very like:

Tom Wedderburn's Life $12.95, Outsourcing The American Dream $14.95, and Only The Determined $8.95.

And this pricing differential seems to be pretty much across the board with a two to seven dollar gap spanning the difference between POD titles and traditionally published titles.

The irony is that these seemingly overpriced POD books (remember that each and every one also earned a positive review) is quite probably going to founder and fail in the competitive book selling marketplace -- or end up being severely discounted so as to eventually become saleable.

If these POD pricings are the result of careful financial number crunching based on the costs of production, distribution, marketing, and profit margins -- then I don't know what the answer is to make them commercially viable in competing with the thousands of other books of similar nature, page count, literary quality, and format being offered to the reader public by the major houses.

But this is most definitely a problem that must be solved if the POD published author is to be able to have their efforts (and financial investment) pay off for them in more than just some kind of hobbyist satisfaction of having their work published.

Jim Cox
Midwest Book Review
http://www.midwestbookreview.com

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