When I work with writers, I often hear that they want to produce a book with a color interior (such as a children’s book, a cookbook or a photography book). In these cases, I often recommend an ultra-short run printer over a print-on-demand vendor (such as CreateSpace or Ingram Spark) to produce the book.

This often puzzles people. On first glance, it makes no sense to incur the upfront costs of printing, say, 50 copies of your book when you can upload your manuscript free to CreateSpace and, poof, it appears for sale on Amazon, right?

What people don’t understand (and what is often hidden from them by print-on-demand vendors until the last minute) is that the per-copy cost of producing a color book by a print-on-demand vendor is generally higher than the per-copy cost of producing, say, 50 books by a short-run printer.

And why do you care about the per-copy cost of your print-on-demand book, since your readers will be incurring that cost?

The reason is that print-on-demand vendors require that you set your book’s price above a certain minimum, based on the book’s production costs. They do that to make sure that for every book sold by you and produced by them, they get their cut. Whatever’s left comes to you. What sometimes happens when you start to get fancy with color is that the print-on-demand vendor’s minimum price becomes so high that your book is unlikely to sell at all.

So how do you get a book produced by an ultra-short run printer up for sale on Amazon? You consign it to Amazon through the Amazon Advantage program. That’s what the vendors of all those non-book items are doing. Once you complete the online “paperwork” your book is posted for sale just like any other book on the Amazon site.

P.S. Yes, you do have to store 45 copies in your garage. But if your book sells, Amazon will order more. And many writers send out a good chunk of those first copies to family, friends and reviewers, or sell them during speaking engagements.