Booksurge.com Print on Demand Review
Booksurge is a subsidiary of Amazon.com and offers services for authors, publishers, and bookstores to provide book publishing, printing, warehousing, and distribution. Unlike many other print on demand publishers, Booksurge owns its own equipment and distribution channels. There are many benefits to being a part of the inventory chain of Amazon.com, but you can get similar benefits from other POD publishers.
Book Publishing Packages
BookSurge offers many of the package features you expect from a POD publisher. Unlike other POD publishers, BookSurge also offers the ability to customize your package, and offers specific packages for specific genres. Generally speaking, the BookSurge POD packages are a little pricier than its competitors.
Most authors will choose one of the four Total Design Freedom Packages. The prices range from $799 to $5,999. The major difference between the first two packages and the last two is a copy editing service. If you do not need copy editing, the first two packes ($799 and $1,367) will work nicely for you. For the extra $368, you get 5 additional copies of your book, a publicity pack, and a custom copy writing service for the cover text. In our opinion, the extras are not worth $368, you could get most of these extras for far less - and if you wrote an entire book and cannot think of creative copy text, you might be in the wrong line of work.
Other Services
BookSurge offers a variety of additional services from press release creation and distribution to poster creation. We are impressed with the variety of services offered and the reasonable prices. Though you could easily perform many of these services yourself - finding other less expensive companies - if you want a one stop shop, they do offer quite a few services.
Royalties
Unfortunately, the author royalties are quite low. You earn 35% on books sold through Amazon.com, Abebooks.com, and Alibris.com. You earn only 10% for books sold through Baker & Taylor (which would be all other bookstores). You do not earn royalties on books you purchase at wholesale.
The royalties are based on retail, so in comparison to other POD publishers:
If you had a $16 retail price and the book sold at a 50% discount, the gross to the publisher is $8. After printing cost (let's assume it is around $4), the final net is $4. If you earned 75% royalty on net, you will earn $3.
On the $16 retail price, with Booksurge you would earn $5.60 on sales from Amazon.com. On books sold outside of Amazon.com, your royalty would be $1.60.
With such a steep setup price, you would expect better royalties for the other channels.
Royalties are paid 35 days after the end of the month the book was manufactured.
Book Marketing
Like all POD publishing companies, much of the book marketing is left up to you - unless you want to pay for it. Amazon.com offers its Buy X, Get Y program. This program pairs up your book with an already successful book - but the program costs $1,000 per month!
You can purchase your own publicity kit for $499. This provides you professionally designed postcards, business cards, and bookmarks. You can get this toolkit far cheaper if you go to a printer yourself, but you need to have some design skills to do it yourself.
For $399 (or $549 express), you can have your book professionally reviewed at Kirkus Discoveries Review Service. Its a paid review service, so approach with caution. Booksurge is only providing a $1 discount off the normal $400 and $550 asking price.
You can also get a Library of Congress Control Number to make your book more accessible for libraries - for $75.
Overall, many of the marketing programs they offer you can perform on your own at a much lower cost.
BookSurge Ratings
Booksurge is a good option if you are concerned about Amazon.com blocking out other POD publishers from their distribution channel. The high setup fees combined with low royalties for distribution other than Amazon.com makes this one a questionable POD publisher for us. We would look elsewhere.
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