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@bama-rose It means Print on Demand. When you self-publish, you have two choices. You can pay for a print run of your book, which is the same as what a traditional publisher would do for you, which means you might be paying $3-$6 a copy, depending on whether your order size is closer to a thousand or a hundred, vaguely respectively. You then get all those copies and have to try to sell them, shipping them to your customers or using a fulfillment service as a middleman. You end up with a relatively large profit per book this way, potentially $5 a copy or even higher.

With Print on Demand, the book is printed and shipped one copy at a time when it is ordered by a customer. You use a PoD provider for this, such as Ingram Spark or Createspace (now owned by Amazon). You have fewer options with PoD than with a custom print run. For example, you can’t have embossing or spot foil on a PoD book to my knowledge, and at least Amazon didn’t have the standard trade paperback size when I looked at them last December.

Additionally, you receive much less per book for PoD, in part because it costs quite a bit more to print a single book than each copy of a large print run does. On Ingram Spark, a single copy of a 300-page trade paperback with a matte color cover and standard weight creme interior (the same options I used for the calculation above) will cost you almost $11 with 5-day shipping. You’re probably not getting much of a profit on this, but it comes at absolutely no risk to you.

Finally, if you want to have your book in libraries and book stores nationwide as an indie author, I believe PoD through Ingram Spark is the only way to do it. Don’t quote me on this, but I have been told that there’s a catalog you can be in as an Ingram Spark publisher that brick and mortar places draw from.