Black Spring has been innovating in publishing since 1985, and in our 35th year we haven’t stopped. We now want to introduce you to one of our publishing streams – POD Plus!
Print On Demand Plus is our projected plan for the best way to bring many new books and authors to readers, in a turbulent world of pandemic and economic challenge, where printing, distribution, shipping and retail costs have risen, and more and more retail options are closed or interrupted, due to lockdown, or social distancing or closure.
It is also a way to safeguard the environment, by avoiding the wasteful pre-printing of hundreds and thousands of copies of books that may never be sold.
With POD Plus, we will be able to offer our authors and readers delivery of books anywhere in the world within a few days, at reasonable cost, in acceptable printed formats, with the same level of writing excellence we have always offered; and, because we will be working with one of the world’s largest distributors, Ingram, with their major information feeds to bookshops and libraries around the world, we should expect even more of our books available in major bookshops.
So what’s the plus?
Not just a gimmick, the plus is that we will continue to pre-print some additional copies, always, to guarantee that large numbers of review copies, author copies, and copies for submission to prizes, will always be available.
Plus (see what we did here?) we will continue to work wherever possible with our smashing American, Canadian and British physical book distributors. And that's because, for some books, the traditional way of printing 500 or 3,000 copies in advance may be what’s required, especially for our beautiful illustrated and hardcover books that will often still work best with very high spec paper and binding.
The past few months have taught us all that we need to become agile, flexible, and able to accept the changing world we live in. Online orders for books, and delivery to your door is the new normal – and browsing for books in shops is unlikely to become the regular way to select books at least until the vaccine is available in MID 2021, if we are fortunate, and discover one as a human race. In the meantime, we will also continue to create more eBooks and audiobooks, and develop more readings for YouTube, to celebrate the many ways book lovers now want to access and enjoy their literary discoveries.
Speed, availability, flexibility, and a greener system, all make POD Plus the way forward!
