What you are referring to, based on my own poorly constructed definiition of quality, is PRODUCTION VALUE. Traditionally published books ARE MOST CERTAINLY meticulously edited, bound, printed beautifully.

Just as a movie from Paramount, Fox, or any of others will have Dolby sound, professional and crisp camerawork, good visual effects, etc.

What I’m talking about when I talk quality is……is this product any damn good? Is it worth the investment of time and money??

And my orginal statement stands, just because a book was edited well, has a nice and glossy cover, and was printed and bound well DOES NOT guarantee that it worth the read. Just as there are movies that have (sometimes hundreds) of millions of dollars spent on them and have left the moviegoer wanting to have the producers shot on sight.

POD’s model is efficient, and yes, that efficiency originally made PRODUCTION VALUE not a top concern.

However, just as advances in camera technology and the advent of video and digital video have vastly reduced the expense of film production and distribution….while simultaneously…..increasing the potential PRODUCTION VALUE of the work….so too has advances in printing technology allowed not only the proliferation of book producing capabilities, it has also heightened the quality of work that can be independently produced.

Independent film has made sure and steady gains in closing the production value gap between it and studio produced films, so too we will see the day when a POD book is indistinguishable in quality from a publishing house produced book.

And no longer will a privileged few be able to dictate what manuscripts are worthy of reading. For obvious reasons the publishing houses don’t want this.

First, let’s talk quality. Your argument hinges on a definition of quality as ‘artistic merit’. That’s fine, really, except that it has nothing to do with the way bookstores and publishers view quality: i.e.: books people want to buy. Traditional publishers, for all their flaws, do produce books that are meticulously edited, beautifully designed, and well printed. We can’t deny this, of course – bookstores know that they are at least guaranteed consistent quality when they buy from a traditional publisher.

The only thing bookstores care about is whether or not those books they stock can sell. It’s unrealistic to expect them to do research – not many bookstores have the time or even the inclination to approach independent, POD-reliant publishers and inspect them for quality (much less content). Bookstores already run on small margins – makes more sense for them to play it safe and run by a hard-and-fast rule of ‘traditional publishing only’.

I can think of a couple of exceptions, though. The first is if the self-published book concerned is a proven seller (e.g.: Will Wheaton’s book) … but that’s only because it’s got Wheaton’s name running behind it.

The truth is that you’re guaranteed a higher level of ‘quality’ (with quality being defined as book-to-market fit) with a traditional publisher than you are with a POD outfit. The answer is plain economics: as a traditional publisher you’re forced by the inefficiencies of your business model to publish books of a certain standard (or risk going out of business). In simple terms, it becomes ever more important to be able to publish books that sell in traditional publishing than it is in POD/independent publishing. And bookstores like that, of course. With POD and digital publishing there isn’t much risk to put out a book of lower or substandard quality at a higher frequency as compared to traditional publishers – because your business model is more efficient. It may take a hundred bad books to ruin a publishing house – it’ll probably take thousands before the digital publisher goes under.

I’m afraid artistic merit (your definition of quality) has nothing to do with it.

Too bad that we’re in flux now, as technology emerges and develops. It’s hard to see how to survive the present and immediate future.

But in the next century we’re going to have digital bookstores. Thanks to Ipad, Kindle, Nook and the like, people are going to have interactive advertisements online, that get them interested in downloading electronic books. There won’t be paper books unless people want to pay extra for them, it’s environmentally unsustainable. The question is, now that the technology is developing, how long the cultural shift will take. I’d say “when the baby boomers die off” but look how fast Itunes caught on.

The simple fact is that publishing houses share the same parlor trick as movie studios, TV networks, and record labels. They all try to pass themselves off as arbiters of good taste and gate-keepers of quality; in other words, because they are the ones “judiciously” directing the millions of dollars it takes to create a movie, TV show, book, or album they are surely only going to direct such resources to only the most worthy product.

This is, and always has been, 100% b.s. Having the millions of dollars only means that you can direct that money toward the product YOU deem of value, it doesn’t mean that it’s quality.

A quick perusing of the average Barnes & Noble will let you know that Random House, St. Martin’s Press, et. al. have spent millions to print some books that weren’t worth the tree bark used for the paper.

Granted, some outfits are very professional and try to be discerning with publishing work. But the fact is, most publishers’ first priority ain’t quality. It’s…..money.

Because of the success of Harry Potter and Twilight, you see an influx of fantasy, teen-angst books. You can usually spot the knock-offs due to the poor quality of the work. Furthermore, there are a good many people that will be quick to point out that just because Twilight was published traditionally, and has sold a ton of books, in no way has anything to do with the literary quality of its writing.

The fact is, POD is shunned in bookstores for the same reason, once upon a time, independent film was shunned in theaters. Bookstores are used to dealing with traditional publishers and it’s difficult to get someone to look somewhere else. Also, we’d be naive to think that traditional publishers aren’t actively discouraging POD as it is a direct challenge to their line of business.

But as the traditional model gets tedious and the work of POD authors becomes more accepted; I think that will change.

Diana’s got it right, I think, when she says that the old model – while inefficient – is particularly suited to guaranteeing quality.

The second approach is to completely bypass the bookstore. Which – while increasingly possible with Amazon, and the iBookstore, is probably not as compelling as being traditionally published.

There is something to seeing your novel in a bookstore that can’t be easily replicated. =(

It was simply a problem with bookstores stocking us. There were other problems that made this particular book unsuccessful, primarily insufficient funds for advertising, but several bookstores I have worked with before balked when I listed Ingram’s POD catalogue for purchases.

Perhaps, with enough money, we could have overcome this problem by purchasing in bulk and by using the traditional distribution channels (and not telling the retailers it was POD), but then that would have totally defeated the purpose of using POD in the first place, both in terms of environmental impact and cost.

[Update]: I mean, authors began to think that you were a self-publishing outfit?

In contrast, our first book, an anti-war poetry anthology printed the traditional way was wildly successful. Yet we still have about 400 of them, unsold in a corner of our bedroom. As responsible people who care deeply about our environment, manufacturing products which will end up going into a landfill is not an option. It sucks, really.