Situation #2: Over the years, you have carefully built strong and mutually beneficial relationships with several printers whose price and quality meet your requirements and who always deliver. You have a strong evergreen backlist in nonfiction and are an obvious “long tail” candidate for demand printing at the front and back end, and your publisher wants to fully commit to a demand-printing strategy. Your regular printers have seen the handwriting on the wall, and have elected to follow a strategy of outsource alliances with printers in nearby cities to handle “long tail” demand-printing fulfillment. You have been solicited for some time by printers who have invested in a complete in-house (under one roof) solution and offer equivalent price, service and quality for your conventional printing needs, as well as a digital asset management system thrown in that can handle electronic editions of your titles. What do you do?
- People:
- Howard Goldstein
Eugene G. Schwartz is editor at large for ForeWord Reviews, an industry observer and an occasional columnist for Book Business magazine. In an earlier career, he was in the printing business and held production management positions at Random House, Prentice-Hall/Goodyear and CRM Books/Psychology Today. A former PMA (IBPA) board member, he has headed his own publishing consultancy, Consortium House. He is also Co-Founder of Worthy Shorts Inc., a development stage online private press and publication service for professionals as well as an online back office publication service for publishers and associations. He is on the Publishing Business Conference and Expo Advisory Board.