Episode 13
In my first ever interview show, I talk to Jane Davis, award-winning author and print aficionado about her recent experiences getting a small print run of her books done to improve print quality and reduce costs.
I mention her recent post, Production: How to Use Short-run Printers as an Alternative to POD, on the Alliance of Independent Authors’ blog about Short-Run Printing – that is rather than using Print-On-Demand where each book is published individually as the sole way of providing paperback books.
The prime reasons for doing this are:
- Is cheaper per book than Print on Demand, especially in very large quantities. Jane placed orders for 200 books each run, but for the lowest price you need to order over a 1000 books.
- The quality is usually more consistent than Print on Demand.
- The lower costs let you be competitive (and make a profit) if you are trying to get your book stocked in book stores.
The main reasons for still sticking with Print on Demand as well is that it lets Amazon never mark your book out of stock and for international orders.
We talk about Jane’s on-going efforts to get her books sold by Waterstones in the UK and about the state of self-publishing in the UK as opposed to the US.
You can find out more about Jane (and get a free book if you sign up for her e-mail list) at http://jane-davis.co.uk/
Jane Davis’s first novel, ‘Half-truths and White Lies’, won the Daily Mail First Novel Award in 2008 and was described by Joanne Harris as ‘A story of secrets, lies, grief and, ultimately, redemption, charmingly handled by this very promising new writer.’ The Bookseller featured her in their ‘One to Watch’ section.
She has since published five further novels, ‘These Fragile Things’, ‘I Stopped Time’,’A Funeral for an Owl’ (released as a box-set called ‘Second Chapter’), ‘An Unchoreographed Life’ and ‘An Unknown Woman’. ‘An Unchoreographed Life’ was also chosen to be featured in the multi-author limited edition box-set ‘Outside the Box:Women Writing Women’. Compulsion Reads describe her as ‘a phenomenal writer whose ability to create well-rounded characters that are easy to relate to feels effortless.’
Jane lives in Carshalton, Surrey with her Formula 1 obsessed, star-gazing, beer-brewing partner, surrounded by growing piles of paperbacks, CDs and general chaos. When she’s not writing, you will often find Jane halfway up a mountain with a camera in hand.