Why I’m No Longer an IBPA/PMA Member

October 23, 2008 by roland.

I have been a member of PMA for several years. On the surface it looked like a good organization. Membership got you a newsletter, access to shipping discounts, and, in theory, some marketing help. Over the course of the past year the newsletter has turned into and endless stream of “Rah Rah Amazon” feces. And yes, feces is the correct word.

Doing business with Amazon is pretty much a recipe for starving to death on the street. It really pains me when supposedly knowledgeable publishing individuals spout things like “I have to do business with Amazon, because that’s where the customers are.” These individuals apparently have no access to traffic data reports. Very few customers are actually “at” Amazon. The traffic comes primarily from referral and shopping comparison sites. Amazon usually wins on the shopping comparison sites because it is willing to play the price whore game with your money.

Now, Amazon wants even more of your money. They are running around buying POD (Print on Demand) companies and starting to state they will only “stock” books from these companies. This pretty much puts 90% of your money in Amazon’s hands … and you thought flipping burgers at McDonald’s paid bad?

To start with, there are exactly two reasons to print with toner.
1)The book is part of your long tail, but you would like to keep it in print without actually doing another print run for it.
2)You want to print only 50 copies to pass out to people you meet so you can claim you are a published author.

No other reason is justifiable. No other reason has any business knowledge behind it. Printing with toner produces a really crappy book. Oh, yes, the POD companies will be all up in arms claiming they get no complaints about their print quality in a vain attempt to divert the conversation from the rest of the “product” they put out.

You can identify a toner printed book in under a second. Open it to any given page and drag your fingers down the paper. Feel the ridges from the toner? Good, you can now conduct the test that really matters. If you have an old tube type monitor, leave the book sitting on top of it all afternoon while using your computer. If you don’t have one of these old monitors, simply leave it on your car dash on a sunny day, or take it to the beach/pool with you during prime suntanning hours and leave it sitting on your towel. Put the book in a cool place, then try to read it the next day … assuming you can still get it open. Toner partially remelts under these conditions and leaves part of itself on the facing page. In extreme cases, the pages stick together and will rip when you try to separate them.

Why have I veered off on POD? Because the newsletter also contained articles spouting the virtues of this and LOTS of ads from POD companies. An organization which really is focusing on the betterment of small/independent publishers should be refusing all advertising from POD and not printing articles of “success” stories for POD companies.

P. T. Barnum was right. There is a sucker born every minute and Amazon is grabbing for them with both hands. Don’t get suckered.

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