Major Christian Publishing House Announces POD (and my thoughts about that)

One of the things I like about the whole social networking phenomenon is that there are opportunities to talk to people you would never likely meet any other way. Case in point, I follow Michael Hyatt CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishing on Twitter, Facebook and I also subscribe to his blog. And while you may get the impression that this sounds obsessive, don't worry, he's amazingly open to interacting with those who wish to (as long as it's done professionally I'm sure).

Today, when he announced his company is teaming up with a major fee-based/POD company to provide those services under a new imprint, I saw it quickly and was able to pop over to see what was going on.
The vast majority of the comments so far are a combination of the angels singing allelujah and "way to go". Those of you who have been following me for any length of time are probably not surprised that I immediately checked out the site to compare it against those companies that are already out there that I've researched in the past. As with most things, good and bad with this new venture.

As far as good, the premise behind starting the POD is good hearted. Hyatt admits there just aren't enough slots at traditional publishers to accomodate everyone who wants to be published and that won't change anytime soon. This is their way of trying to do something about that, to be proactive and that's definitely good. It might not be quite the right answer, but it's movement in a positive direction.

Also in the positive column, unlike most PODs, they are offering a version of full service distribution (see more about distribution in my series on it a few weeks ago) along with the typical online distribution. And that's were the not so good starts. Westbow (the new company) has some of, if not the most expensive packages in that market. Part of that is said to be because of the association with Thomas Nelson and an implied trust factor you don't have if you pick another company just from Google. I'd say that's true unless the POD experience falls apart as it has with so many other firms.

A couple other current issues are that there's no royalty info, nor book price/cost to author info in any of the packages which makes no sense to me. Be upfront, there's no reason to hide it. Don't make people jump through hoops to get such a important info.

Going back to my earlier statement, cool thing about Michael is he really likes interacting, so I made the above comments on his blog where the announcement was made-and he answered within a hour or two. He also asked a rep from Author Solutions to do the same. If you scroll through the comments to about the last third or so (as of now), you'll see the conversation. Pretty much standard stuff from the POD rep which was disappointing. He trotted out the same tired example that's been used for quite a while now as far as a success story. If I didn't respect Michael so much, I probably wouldn't pay much more attention to this, but we'll see how it goes, if they can really be different in a good way.

Check out the whole deal here Would love to know what you think, if you make a comment over there.

Good Writing & God Bless,
Cheryl Pickett