The Hobson & Holtz Report - Podcast #321: February 21, 2008

Content summary: Podcast Alley voting system now working again; discussion: the legitimacy of print on demand; the Media Monitoring Minute with CustomScoop; description meta tags; the influence of employee bloggers in corporate acquisitions; successful marketing campaigns on social networks; start-up brings Second Life to mobile phones; Dan York reports; listeners’ comments discussion; upcoming FIR Interview; music from Rock Kills Kid; and more.

[Messages from our sponsors: FIR is brought to you with Lawrence Ragan Communications, serving communicators worldwide for 35 years, www.ragan.com; Save time with the CustomScoop online clipping service: sign up for your free two-week trial, at www.customscoop.com/fir.]

Show notes for February 21, 2008

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Welcome to For Immediate Release: The Hobson & Holtz Report, a 60-minute podcast recorded live from Wokingham, Berkshire, England, and Phoenix, Arizona, USA.

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So, until Monday February 25…

Posted by neville on 02/21 at 07:15 AM
  1. Hi, guys. Just wanted to put in my two cents on POD. (Most of us in the biz pronounce it as an initialism rather than an acronym, by the way.)

    Listeners may be shocked to know that the average book published by any means sells about 500 copies. Most big publishers won’t take you on if they don’t think you can sell more books than that, but they still lose money on most of their authors, given that it costs them about $50,000 to produce a book, not counting the author’s advance.

    Two of my clients have published with POD houses, Booksurge and Lulu respectively. Neither had to pay the kind of inflated costs old-fashioned vanity publishers used to charge. (Both had hired their own editor (me) and cover designer, and had someone “typeset” the book for them and create the PDF to upload.) Neither had to order any copies at all—though both did, because they sell their books at the back of the room during speaking engagements.

    Both have attractive books which are not readily distinguishable from those produced by traditional publishers. Both are selling in respectable numbers. Both make more money per book sold than they would if they’d gone with a traditional publisher, though less than if they’d self-published in the old-fashioned way and had a print house run off a few thousand copies. The retail prices of their books are slightly higher than for a comparable mass-produced book, but not so much as to be unreasonable.

    There are drawbacks to all methods of publishing. There are also advantages to all of them. You can find lots of articles out there, including a few of my own, and some podcast interviews with representatives from POD houses at selfpublishing.com.

    Posted by Sallie Goetsch (rhymes with "sketch")  on  02/21  at  05:41 PM
  2. Thanks, Sallie. It’s refreshing to hear a balanced, reasoned view of the issue as contrasted with the biased rantings coming out of the “discussions” taking place on the blogs we referenced on the show.

    Now, I thought an initialism was for letters that couldn’t be pronounced (like TSA) and acronym was for those that could. I musta had it backwards.

    Posted by Shel Holtz  on  02/21  at  06:25 PM
  3. You could pronounce “CEO” and “CIO” as words, but you don’t. Hence they’re initialisms, rather than acronyms.

    Posted by Sallie Goetsch (rhymes with "sketch")  on  02/21  at  06:28 PM
  4. Right. So nobody says “POD,” they say “pea oh dee?”

    Posted by Shel Holtz  on  02/22  at  01:24 PM
  5. Everyone I’ve ever heard says “pea oh dee.”

    Posted by Sallie Goetsch (rhymes with "sketch")  on  02/22  at  01:28 PM

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