That, to me, is the difference: Print-on-demand produces a book one off. Publish-on-demand displays available books, takes orders, produces books, and ships them–it handles the entire “product” side of self-publishing. I’m definitely not interested in handling order-taking and fulfillment–and with any inventory at all, you have to switch to accrual accounting. Different businesses to serve different needs…

I\’m pleased with the results: really nice cream book paper, excellent printing (which, these days, almost goes without saying), all nicely done, and p&h wasn\’t bad.

I\’ll check out Avalon Impressions.

For what it’s worth…

Lulu.com does a good job on POD, in terms of doing what’s spec’ed out, doing a proper trim, delivering when they say they will, providing customer service contact info, and that kind of thing. They aren’t the cheapest POD printers, though. $6/copy for b&w, approx 8.5 X 11, 86 pg book, softcover.

Avalon Impressions (Avalonteam.com), on the other hand, is cheaper, but you need to think of them as fully automated, and you just have to hope that they get it right. Slow, no customer communication at all, and heir trimming can be significantly off so you’d be better off doing a full-bleed cover. Spot color (on 10 pgs) for otherwise the same specs as above was $4/copy. b&w would have been approximately $2 per.

We only know cafepress for t-shirts, but they have good customer service and meet specs.

It’s a question that all industries face, and all (good) marketing and ops departments agonize over.

When I was in the retail wireless, industry, for example, for a long time the “acceptable” monthly “voluntary churn rate” was around 2%. That’s people that leave on their own steam; not folks that we kicked off due to non-pay. But a VP of mine pointed out that we would gladly accept a much higher acceptable churn rate if we could pick the customers that left; eg, the ones that spent almost no money with us but were always calling in with complaints, demanding concessions, using every possible angle to get more-for-less, etc. etc.

But of course you can’t do that. And you can’t design a customer service philosophy around your “best” customers, either. You have to aim for what you want to accomplish in the aggregate, and take the good and the bad.

What helps is to have very good definitions of goals, metrics that measure progress towards those goals, and transparency on those metrics. If everyone — employees, customers, management, owners — is agreed on the goals and how you’re getting there and how *well* you’re getting there… it makes it easier.

Regarding: “THE CENSORWARE CHRONICLES disappeared of its own accord.” – understood, but still sad.