A word on contracts
Reviewed by bmadge, 2007-08-23 11:04:04

Contracts from AuthorHouse and Xlibirs may outwardly resemble trade publishing contracts, but there’s no reason you should be giving away any rights at all when you’re paying them to publish the book. Don’t fall for the line that the fee you’re paying only offsets part of the production cost, blah, blah, blah. A good subsidy publisher will offer a short contract that describes the publisher’s.

A poor deal for the knowledgeable self-publisher
Reviewed by rkelly, 2007-07-17 08:53:01

Beware of POD publishers such as Iuniverse and Xlibris. These companies have their place for those who are not prepared to do their own page layout or arrange their own cover design, but they do not provide true self-publishing. Xlibris, for example, "publishes" your book for you in one of several packages, which involve turning your manuscript into a digital file and having Lightning Source or another printer produce it on demand. They then pay you a "royalty" of 10% for bookstore sales (don't expect many of these) or 25% off a slightly lower selling price for direct sales. They even oblige you to buy any copies you want of your own book from them at a 40% discount off the bookstore retail price, which they set at $21.99 for a 200 -299 page book. Thus, you are paying no less for copies of the book than a bookstore does--a whopping $13.19 for a book that would cost you under $5 direct from Lightning Source (or Fidlar Doubleday, Berryville, etc). Since many sales of Xlibris books are likely to be made by the author, it is not difficult to see where the company makes a lot of its money--money that should be yours. Xlibris is not a scam--they are up-front about what they do, but they represent a poor deal for the knowledgeable self-publisher.

Stay away from Xlibris...
Reviewed by rsullivan, 2007-04-19 06:00:28

My experience with Xlibris wasn't great.

First, the printer made numerous errors in spacing and paragraphs ran together. The first two author approval copies had faded printing on the last 20 pages.

I used Xlibris' copyrighting service. There were many discrepancies, misspellings, and grammatical errors. I had to get it copyedited again at my expense. Xlibris still billed me about US$1200 for their fairly crappy work.

I submitted my manuscript back in January 2005—it took 1 and 1/2 years to complete and bring it up to a satisfactory level.