Print-On-Demand

There is little doubt that the arrival of the internet has made a huge impact on the publishing industry. Amazon has long sold more Kindle eBooks than paperbacks and hardbacks combined, newspaper sales across the board have declined as more people go online for their news, and magazines seem to be closing down on a near-daily basis.

According to Media Outlook 2015-2021 report predicted that by coming years, the magazine industry alone will have dropped 20% to 40% of its 2015 rate, marking a loss of about $19bn worldwide. This has led to decreasing ad revenues, particularly for print and for magazines worldwide. As per the report concluded that the traditional borders between entertainment and media, technology and telecommunications were dissolving. It identified five fundamental drivers of change which were ubiquitous connectivity, the mobile consumer, need for new sources of revenue growth; value shift to platforms and personalisation.

Today we have more opportunities than ever to get our work into print, online, and distributed as e-books. And with the help of today’s technology, publishing books has never been more affordable. New categories of printing and publishing companies emerge every day with services to prepare and format manuscripts for reproduction or electronic distribution.

Yet the types of services and terminology can be very confusing—even to publishing professionals. Various skill sets and job descriptions have been consolidated. New technologies may eliminate or combine steps in the publishing process. Inexperienced self-publishers may skip or ignore tasks that seem petty, but that could have a significant effect on the quality of the finished product. All these factors combine to complicate and obscure the publishing process.

The basic definition of self-publishing is the publication of a book by the author of