We’re a small Buddhist publisher and we set up our own publishing organisation in order to be able to publish our books. We also turned to POD because it allowed us to publish with lower overheads.

The editing and design process is still the same. The part that we miss with not being with a major publisher is publicity/marketing.

So you have a 300 page paperback – a standard first novel. You can’t sell that thing for over ten bucks unless you want to hurt sales. Possibly you could choose a 6×9 or 7×10 Trade Paperback format, but several of the small publishers I have spoken with have suggested that over ten bucks makes a big difference in sales.

You’re gonna pay at least 4 bucks for the POD printing per book. That leaves you with a potential profit of $6. But where are most POD books sold nowadays? The answer is Amazon. Certainly you can pretty much assume you won’t get your POD book in any stores you don’t visit personally. If you choose CreateSpace, Amazon takes a $4 cut of your $10 book. If you choose one of the other two, the cut is over $5.

So your profit per book is really not much more than with a traditional publisher. Now, you may suggest several things to counter this problem:

1.Raise the price of your book. For non-fiction that might work. For fiction, unless you already have a decent audience, you will be hurting yourself.

2.Try to get sales either in person or on your own web site. Not a bad option and has some potential. That’s a lot of legwork when you should be writing, though. Yes, you’re gonna have to promote your work, but ideally you leave fulfillment to someone else.

Now, I haven’t even mentioned the cost of hiring an editor, cover designer, and layout person. Layout is the easiest to learn of these three, but I suspect 90%+ of authors are incapable of doing a professional quality book cover. YOu will have to pay someone or have an obviously inferior product. And editing – look, there are plenty of mediocre editing jobs done by big publishers. But you simply cannot copyedit your own book effectively. Maybe you can find someone to do it for free – trade chores with another offer. But copyediting is a different skill than writing.

Bottom line, if you haven’t spent $500 to hire people to get your book done right, you are either part of a tiny percentage of authors who have the necessary skills or you have an inferior product. So how many books do you have to sell to make that up?

There are plenty of reasons to self-publish, but bigger profits most assuredly are not one of them for a new writer of fiction.