The Use of Ghostwriters by POD Firms

Print-on-Demand publishing is thriving, and that means both new and established POD companies are fighting for business.  For several years, they have added expensive marketing and promotional packages to their original business model of formatting and printing books.  iUniverse originally formatted and printed paperbacks on demand for a single fee of $99.  Except for honest companies like Booklocker.com, it's becoming increasingly difficult to find a POD that offers to put a book into print for under $2,000.  I have spoken to many people who just want the basics: formatting, printing, and eBook conversions, but POD firms no longer offer a basic package with only those three elements.  Embedded within almost all packages are the marketing and promotional services.  As I have noted in several articles and posts, these services are virtually useless.

But POD companies are now going a step further in trying to grab customers away from other firms: they're offering ghostwriting, and I'm not alluding to the large ghostwriting companies that I've written so much about over the past ten years.  More and more companies (Dog Ear is an example) are offering, or are considering, ghostwriting services.  Unfortunately, these POD outfits, like large ghostwriting companies, subcontract the work out, and we're back at square one.  Ghostwriters who function as subcontractors are usually not high-quality, top-tier writers.  Regrettably, the POD firms are looking for warm bodies to give work to so that they may print and promote a finished manuscript.

Self-publishing is not a bad option for authors given the cutthroat competition for mainstream publishing contracts, but as the POD industry has grown, along with the success of eBooks, the self-publishing industry has begun to take advantage of their customers' ignorance of the literary marketplace.  Most POD companies lead people to believe, implicitly or explicitly, that promotional services can lead to books becoming bestsellers.  And now, in the rush to garner more and more profit, they're adding bad to mediocre ghostwriters to the POD business model.

Trying to find ethical, talented ghostwriters with impeccable credentials is like walking through a minefield.  Let the buyer beware.

~William Hammett

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