Print on Demand, aka POD
SFWA offers warnings. While not all POD publishers are unscrupulous, many are. I have seen a growing number of people in the newsgroups I frequent trying to get out of contracts that offer them little or nothing. I have heard horror stories about authors who initally published via POD, then couldn’t break restrictive contracts once they started to get notice.
Julie Duffy offers a quick overview of what to expect. Scroll most of the way to the bottom.
Adam Barr offers his
first hand experience with iUniverse. The economics don’t look good, and the deals these days aren’t as good as they were when Adam started (as he notes).
Piers Anthony has a number of titles available in POD and e-formatsand maintains an extensive list of publishers including POD outlets.
The collective mind sez POD is useful to an established author for the purpose of keeping titles in print that would otherwise be unavailable to their audience. In this case, the $200 to $500 you make per year per title is better than nothing, which is what you would get otherwise. But for a author with a new book at the prime of its earning life, POD is probably not suitable unless your book is so strange and offbeat that none of the major (or minor) presses will touch it.