Review of POD People: Beating the Print-on-Demand Stigma by Jeremy Robinson

Reviewed by Lupa
The author comes from the viewpoint of a single person publishing primarily through Lulu.com. While it's primarily of interest to self-publishers, small presses that use POD technology will also want to take a look, as there's some very valuable information here.

Robinson does a great job of laying out the realities of POD self-publishing for the reader. He deflates common myths (my book will sell itself, I'll instantly get an agent, I don't need an editor, etc.). He also does a great job of debunking a lot of the stigmas associated with POD in general (all POD books are poor quality, etc.) and gives the reader good advice for overcoming the negative stereotypes.

He also emphasizes quality, whether it's covers, layout or editing. His philosophy is that in order to succeed, POD books need to be as good--or better--than traditionally published titles. This is also useful in that since POD books are often overlooked because of the aforementioned stigmas, showing that we can make quality products helps, again, to overcome the stereotypes. Robinson's writing style is excellent, very conversational while conveying the information in a concise but thorough manner. He even gave me some marketing ideas that I hadn't thought of, for which I am ever grateful.

I think my only complaints are the few typos I found (pobody's nerfect), and the layout of this particular book. The sentences seemed like they were spaced a little far apart, at maybe 1.5 lines instead of 1, which made it seem like it was just padding to make the book longer. And I wasn't too crazy about the font used for headers; it didn't seme to match the Garamond text well.

Still, these are tiny quibbles for what turned out to be a very valuable addition to my POD collection. I highly recommend this whether you're a self-publisher or a small POD press as a great guide to getting it right.

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