{"id":81,"date":"2009-11-20T21:49:43","date_gmt":"2009-11-20T16:19:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pothi.wordpress.com\/2009\/11\/20\/so-you-are-not-a-publisher\/"},"modified":"2009-11-20T21:49:43","modified_gmt":"2009-11-20T16:19:43","slug":"so-you-are-not-a-publisher","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pothi.com\/blog\/2009\/11\/20\/so-you-are-not-a-publisher\/","title":{"rendered":"So, you are not a publisher?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>And don&#8217;t want to be one either?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Hmm&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>This is how a lengthy conversation explaining what Pothi.com is ends with many people.<\/p>\n<p>Yes &#8211; one problem of our business is that it takes lot of time to explain to people that we do not fit into any pre-defined category from traditional publishing. Most importantly, Pothi.com is not a publisher!<\/p>\n<p><strong>What does this mean?<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Books published through Pothi.com are published by their authors or other people\/organizations behind them &#8211; not by Pothi.com.<\/li>\n<li>Pothi.com does not do any &#8216;selection&#8217; of the content except to ensure that it is technically fir for printing and that it is not against the law or our terms and conditions.<\/li>\n<li>The entire responsibility of content, its accuracy and quality, its preparation lies with the author\/publisher, not with Pothi.com. Same is the case with Book Design, Marketing, Promotion and Sales.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>What does Pothi.com do then?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Pothi.com provides tools and services to help you through all these steps of publishing. Meaning<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>There are detailed information and guidelines on preparing your book<\/li>\n<li>There are tools for formatting and cover design (e.g. blog to book tool, cover design wizard)<\/li>\n<li>There are reasonably priced services for editing, designing etc. if you need help in preparing the book<\/li>\n<li>There is an e-commerce store where you can list your book for free and sell it without bothering about logistic hassles of printing, maintaining inventory and shipping them<\/li>\n<li>etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>What&#8217;s the future direction Pothi.com will take in that case?<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Create More technological tools to make the publishing process easier and financial burden minimal<\/li>\n<li>Figure out some innovative ways to help authors widen the reach of their books<\/li>\n<li>Develop Technological Solutions for filtering out good content from bad<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>Ouch! So, you will never, never be a publisher?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Pothi.com &#8211; the platform will remain Pothi.com the platform. It will not become a publisher. We may or may not have a parallel business as a publisher, but that would be under a separate imprint most likely. We haven&#8217;t decided anything on that front yet.<\/p>\n<p><strong>That&#8217;s sad! Pothi.com can&#8217;t help me become the next Chetan Bhagat.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>In all likelihood you are right. Exceptions can occur, but Print on Demand based self publishing model is not optimized for creating best-sellers. It works better for books with niche audience or publications for small, targeted audiences. It is also good for casual publishing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>And don&#8217;t want to be one either? Hmm&#8230; This is how a lengthy conversation explaining what Pothi.com is ends with many people. Yes &#8211; one problem of our business is that it takes lot of time to explain to people that we do not fit into any pre-defined category from traditional publishing. Most importantly, Pothi.com &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/pothi.com\/blog\/2009\/11\/20\/so-you-are-not-a-publisher\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;So, you are not a publisher?&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[14,18],"tags":[133,138,155],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7vAZr-1j","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pothi.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pothi.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pothi.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pothi.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pothi.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=81"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/pothi.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pothi.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=81"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pothi.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=81"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pothi.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=81"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}