The Print on Demand Playbook

Entrepreneurs, Authors and Digital Product creators are always looking for ways to increase profits without doing more work. One of the best ways to do that is to increase pricing on their products and services. However, there are limits to that strategy if a customer doesn’t perceive the product or service to actually be worth more. One way to change the nature of the product’s perception without changing the content is to re-package it into a physical product. So a PDF can become a paperback or hardback book. A downloadable video course can become a DVD Course delivered by mail. An interactive set of exercises on a website can become content delivered by CD. In the past entrepreneurs haven’t taken this strategy because it can be cost or time ineffective. First, traditional publishing even in a hybrid arrangement typically starts at a $5,000 up front payment before any books are sold. In addition to that, the author can be responsible for marketing and have to purchase numerous copies of their book. Moreover, the author tends not to have a lot of control over the number of books that arrive.

This puts them in the awkward position of having to “pitch” the books or content everyplace they go to brand or represent their business. The same constraints were true if the entrepreneur wanted to sell instructional CDs or DVDs. Limited runs with a few sets were very expensive. So the creator was faced with buying more than they needed and before a single sale was made. This took some of the profit out of creating information and selling it in the past. However, the digital information age has changed this and authors as well as information product creators now have cost effective options. Because of Amazon.com’s website with both Kindle for EBooks and Createspace for Physical books, authors now have cost effective options for self-publishing their book