http://www.publishamerica.com/
Number one: Their covers suck. Ouch.
Psst...vanity press.
See, they should hire someone like me for $40,000 a year to redesign all those covers. Sales would double overnight.
Like it or not, people judge books by their cover. If it's a good cover, it intrigues people enough to pick it up and read the back. Then you hook them there, get them to read the inside a little, which better be equally well-done, and you have a .01% chance of them buying the book. If you have book club readings and all that other PR stuff, you can kill a sales dead at the bookstore if the book looks poopy.
The aesthetics of the book help too. Those stiff, finger-slicing books that cheap publishers like to throw out all the time are awful. People hate reading those because it's a chore on the hands. You need soft flexible pages that are nonetheless of decent stock and color. Aim for a slightly brownish recycled paper or something. Hignell Printing in Canada is, bar NONE, the cheapest publisher out there that makes excellent quality books. Each one of theirs, if you choose the right paper stock, is a joy to hold. They did "Evasion" and "Off the Map", from Crimeth Inc. (yes, the anarchist collective) and those books are like $5 each.
Even their on-demand printing is excellent. 300 books at 300 pages each of 24lb bond paper and 10 pt CIS cover at 5.5" by 8.5" runs a total of $2,456 (including set-up fee for the first time you run a book). That's $8.18 per book. At 200 copies of 120 pages, it's $1113 - roughly $9. For a good quality book at a very low run, that's excellent.
And that's in Canadian dollars. The first one is then $6 US and the second is $7.25 US or so.
When you get past 300 copies and use their usual run services, you really start getting some cheap books. I got quotes as low as $4 a book for the Entropy Magazine Blowout Special Best-Of The Century of Entropy edition of EM. I don't have $4,000 though. Sad.
If, in a few years, I have enough top-quality works to fill the book, I might take out my Apple stock (I bought it when it was $14 per and now it's worth something like 5x or 6x it's original value), fun a run, and do a cross-country tour. You know, readings by the authors in their home states and whatnot.
Part of my portfolio to get in to the Art department here requires me to make a book cover for my "memoirs". That's going to be some choice work, bitches!
