by John Harnish

I was pleasantly surprised when I called the toll-free number, 877-BUY-BOOK.  It was after 6 PM on a Friday and a real live person answered.  I had expected an answering machine to pick up and I was going to leave my address so they could send me information. So I was amazed that a real live person actually answered and was asking how he could help me!

I quickly asked what he was doing there so late on a Friday after normal business hours.  He replied that he had promised an author proof copies of her published book for Monday, but he didn’t get it finished so he was staying late to finish her proofs.  He was going to mail them on his way home so the author would have her proof books as he had promised.  Then they asked, “Who is this?”  I promptly replied, “Someone who is about to become your newest author!”

Yes, I’d called three of the major POD publishing services—a fourth I was about to publish with, but I discovered they had lied to me about what they do and how they do it.  I was also very put off when they were reluctant for me to visit their offices in New Jersey.  They explained they really weren’t set up to receive visitors.  Visitor my ass!  I was within a commuter train ride of publishing with them and they were referring to me as a visitor!  Thus the reason for my renewed quest to find a POD publisher I could work with.  I found it impossible to work with a company that needs to blatantly lie to attract authors to publish their books with them.

A few decades ago when I was represented by an agent and working with traditional book publishers, I’d get invitations all the time to attend meetings and social gathering at their New York offices.  I was impressed when as soon as Mark heard I was interested in publishing my book with them he invited me to visit their offices and see their production department that produces all their books in-house on their Print-On-Demand equipment.

Soon thereafter Infinity Publishing offered me a position with the company to help develop our Author’s Advocate program.  Naturally one of the first things I talked about was changing the company name.  I’m an author looking for a book publisher that distributes books to booksellers—not an online bookstore!  Tom said he’d consider a name change.  He had previously agreed to “BBOTW Publishing” for the title page of “Enjoy Often!!!” because there was no way I’d ever publish with a book publisher going by a name that was indicative of only being a bookstore.  But I wanted a book publisher with “Publisher” as part of their company name.

During the opening night banquet at our first annual writers and authors conference held at the Sheraton in Valley Forge, Tom made the official announcement of the name change to Infinity Publishing with our new internet presence being infinitypublishing.com with BuyBooksOnTheWeb.com continuing on as our online bookstore—which would be expanded to include book covers and reviews and lots of indexing and cross-selling potential.  BBOTW enjoys a strong internet presence for readers searching for Infinity Publishing titles.  More and more customers are ordering directly from our online bookstore and they are receiving their book order sooner, plus our published authors earn a higher royalty from direct sales.  Overall, the number of folks ordering goods and services through the internet is steadily increasing every month.

Also, Infinity Publishing is functioning in many of the positive ways of the traditional mainstream book publishers without requiring the author to sell off the rights to their books.  The income from selling books is how we earn our profit—not from the sale of the various book rights.  As Infinity Publishing likes to explain, “We have a vested interest to help our authors promote and market their books.  We are constantly looking for cost-effective ways to help our authors sell more books because we all benefit from those ongoing efforts and investments.”

Remember, whenever you have an opportunity to talk about your published book, identify Infinity Publishing as your publisher and let people know that your book is available directly from our 24/7 online bookstore at: www.buybooksontheweb.com.