Susan Taylor Chehak has a unique perspective on the publishing industry. She is not only the owner of her own five-year-old bookstore, inxpot, in Keystone, Colo., but she is also the author of five novels (including the Edgar-nominated Story of Annie D. and the Hammett-nominated Smithereens). She sees the advent of print-on-demand as a boon for bookstores, allowing them to offer a larger selection of titles, and for authors hoping to keep their books in print.

Just when it looks as though things can't get any worse... they get better. Can it be that this new technology of print-on-demand will turn out to be a superhero with just the muscle that we need to save our threatened world of valuable books?

For years now the news about book publishing, bookselling, and book buying seems only to have gone from bad to worse. We're told that with the quick fixes of television, electronic games and the Internet, not many people feel a need or have the attention span for serious reading. That by swallowing up so many publishing houses with the ferocious appetite of a PacMan gone berserk, corporations are bringing about a disheartening transformation of literature into product. And that by elbowing out so many independents, the chains have added a slaughter of their own to what appears to be the imminent extinction of the midlist writer, the neighborhood bookshop and the literary book.

For me personally, this has been a triple whammy of bad news, because I am an owner of an independent bookstore, a midlist writer and a reader with distinctly literary tastes.

When we opened our bookstore, inxpot, in the winter of 1995, my fourth novel, Smithereens, had just been published by Doubleday—to good reviews, a Hammett Award nomination, paperback rights sold in the U.S. and the U.K., and even a film option, with both a director and a star attached. At the same time, our modest bookshop was the first store to open in the planned Village of River Run in the ski resort of Keystone, Colo., not much more than a stone's throw from the gondola at the base of Keystone Mountain. With a location like that, we thought we had it made.

And now, six years later, my agent has suggested that maybe I should consider changing my name before we go about the business of offering a new book, but inxpot is still in business: selling coffee, food, drinks and books, in about that order of profitability.

I think it was sometime in the third year of our operation that I first heard rumors of a new publishing technology called print-on-demand. It was showing up in the Ingram catalogues as Lightning Source and mentioned in the Author's Guild bulletins as a way to bring out-of-print midlist books back into print. Soon, ads began to appear on newspaper book review pages for places like iUniverse ("Let us put the power to publish in your hands") and Xlibris ("Where writers become authors"), appealing to both published and unpublished writers and offering them an efficient and affordable way to get their work made into books that could be sold to readers all over the world.

It just so happened that at this same time I was finishing up a new book of my own, my first work of nonfiction, Don Quixote Meets the Mob, which was about writing fiction and about living the fiction writer's life. It is also a compilation of my lectures for the writing classes I teach in the Writers' Program at UCLA Extension and to undergraduates at USC. In May of 1998, my agent sent the book to my Doubleday editor, who would be publishing my fifth novel, Rampage, that September.

The rejection came in July, and it was one of the kind that I have come to call a "yes-but-no," admiring but wary, and it closed with the statement: "...some readers were very concerned about the real market for the book."

For the next six months, my agent sent DQMTM out to 12 more houses, and 12 more yes-but-nos came back, all with praise for the book but concerned about its niche. None could see a way to market such a book in a subject area that is already quite full and from a well-reviewed but virtually unknown author.

Finally, in January, my agent gave up, advising me that the next obvious step would be small and university presses but removing herself by stating she didn't know that terrain. My new option was to send it out myself, unsolicited, to one independent press at a time, with a (generous) response time of six to eight weeks. At that rate, it could take years for the book to find its rightful place. I didn't think that I could afford to wait that long. I had several writing conferences and classes coming up, where I was sure I would be able to sell DQMTM if it were in print.

So I began to consider the possibilities of using this emerging technology of print-on-demand. I spent some time comparing the different services offered, dismissing out of hand any that take rights. I just can't see the sense of giving away my rights without some kind of an advance or other promise of fair compensation for them. GreatUnpublished has an unfortunate name and its huge imprint shadows the jacket art to a point of distraction; 1stBooks charges extra to distribute the book; and Firstpublish won't list it with any of the larger online bookstores. In the end, I went with Xlibris, because it seemed to offer the simplest deal: I supply the manuscript, the cover art, the jacket copy and the author photo, and they construct a PDF file that gets listed at Amazon.com, B&N, Borders and more, can be ordered by bricks-and-mortar bookstores through Ingram or directly from Xlibris. It would be printed on demand, as the orders come in, one book at a time.

As an irresistible bit of subversion, I took the recent rejection letters and used the first half of their sentences, the "yes" part that came before the "but no," to write a description of the book for its jacket flap. I smile gleefully every time I see it.

What XLibris doesn't do is edit, publicize or market any of the books it prints. For that, the author is on her own. There is no cover art to consider; no jacket blurbs to mull over. No lunches with an editor, no faxes from a publicist, no book tour schedules with chaperones, no TV radio or bookstore appearances, and no publication parties in anybody's posh Park Avenue penthouse. At first glance this may seem unpromising, but what it really means is that there is no brief window of marketing opportunity, either. A print-on-demand book does not have to bust blocks to stay in print. Shelf life has now become irrelevant to survival.

The Terms

I paid $600 for the Professional Service, which allowed for paper, cloth and e-book editions, copyright registration, custom cover and interior templates, and 50 galley corrections. Plus $350 for the Marketing Kit, an extravagance that includes postcards, bookmarks, and posters. The paperback sells for $16, the hardcover is $25. If I buy the book myself, to give away as a review copy or to family or friends, I get a 25% discount off the cover price and no royalty. If a reader buys it directly from Xlibris, either at the Web site or via phone, I get a 25% royalty. A bookseller who buys my book gets a 40% discount and I get a 10% royalty.

And here's the real beauty of the deal: I just happen to own a bookstore, which is understandably eager to keep my books in stock. I am essentially warehousing my own book, as I sell it through inxpot for a 50% profit to writers in the classes I teach and at the conferences I attend, as well as to the shoppers who discover it as they browse our shelves.

I submitted the final draft of the manuscript of DQMTM in May 1999 to Xlibris. I got the galleys back in June, made some more corrections, approved final galleys at the end of July and had the book in hand by September, in time to take copies to a conference in Tulsa, where I sold them all. By now I've made back my original investment, and my book is in the black. When a customer orders it, it's printed and, according to the literature, the whole production process takes less than 10 minutes, which is just about as long as it takes to ring up a credit card sale, print out a receipt, sign a sales slip and bag the purchased books. There is no distributor warehousing, and so there will be no remainders. It is always in print, and it's easily ordered directly from Xlibris or as a backorder through Ingram. When inxpot bought a few copies from Ingram, as a test, the book was in the shop in less than a week, which isn't much longer than what it takes to get any book to us.

I can already see the future at inxpot. The Cimbali sputters with espresso shots at one end of the shop and the Bookolator flurries the pages of a newly minted paperback at the other. In between, customers browse our inventory of single copies (promotional copies provided by the publishers at no cost to us) or lounge in our easy chairs while leafing through our catalogues that offer sample chapters from an all-but-infinite cyber-library of words. Then, an order number is punched in, the digital text is downloaded, and before you can say "One-large-skinny-latte—to-go," there's the book itself, printed and bound and in its reader's loving hands.

Just when it was beginning to look as though things couldn't get any worse, well... they do seem to be getting better. Better for wild readers (like myself), whose most whimsical choices need no longer be limited by the more predictable projections of a mass marketing machine. Better for midlist writers (again, like myself) with work whose shelf days don't have to be so desperately numbered. And better for booksellers who are freed from the burden of an impossibly expensive backlist inventory and the discounting disadvantage that a limited space necessarily entails.

But better most of all for the books themselves, as all the gold that lies beneath the mainstream can have its fair chance to shine.