So, you’ve finally got there. The long hard slog is over, you can go back to a sense of normality, and you might even get to sleep at night. Yes, your manuscript is finished. So what do you do now?

Send it to a couple of friends, see what they think of it? Publish it on your website, see what your followers think? Or do you send it to a publisher? Who on earth are you going to trust with the blood, sweat, and tears of millions of hours of work?

This is likely one of the biggest fears that new authors face. Once the hard work is finished, what on earth do you do with it? You might not have the budget for a traditional publisher so why not consider self-publishing? You can do it; you wrote the book, you sure as hell can manage to publish it by yourself.

When you do eventually decide that your manuscript is going to be turned into a book you need to think very carefully about how you are going to publish it. There are loads of options – digital, offset, even print-on-demand - so which do you go for?

If a publisher is your choice then you want digital or offset printing, especially if you are planning a big print run. But, if you opt for self-publishing, print-on-demand is the choice to make.

What is Print-on-Demand?

With Print-on-Demand or POD, an author can have just a small number of books printed, even a single copy, whenever it is in demand. With POD, a company will not print books until they get an order in hence the name – you are printing on demand.

5 Advantages of Print-on-Demand

Like most forms of publishing, POD comes with a number of advantages:

You Can Print Anything and Everything

For POD, all you need is a couple of ideas and a manuscript. It doesn’t matter if you have written a textbook, a children’s book, or a full-on graphic novel; any genre is suitable for POD. The self-publishing industry is enjoying huge success right now and it follows that the POD market is right behind it. It’s a simple easy way of publishing whatever manuscript you have – any size, full color, black and white, with or without graphics or photographs – anything. Picture how you think your book should look and, voila, it’s done!

Any Book Format

You can have pretty much any format you want for your book. If you want it in full color, hard-bound, no problem. All-color, premium color, two or four color, black and white, the choices are almost endless. What about size? That’s up to you and it will depend mostly on what your book is. You can choose a small book that can be held in one hand or a large book – whatever suits your content and you. You even get to choose between hardback, with or without a book jacket, a paperback, a paperback with flaps and so on.

Just when you thought the hard part was over! Move on to part 2 to find out what other advantages POD has.