The Queen of POD

Tamarac, FL, 2005: They call her the Queen of POD, and in the soulless world of computerized printing, perhaps it has the ring of truth. Deborah Greenspan’s Llumina Press brings qualities to the world of publishing on demand that no other company can offer. For instance, in an industry known for publishing the infamous “slush pile” on demand, Deborah was the first to set an editorial standard that would make it possible for her would-be writers to actually sell their work.

As a serious writer first and publisher afterward, Deborah began publishing because she was tired of letting New York editors direct her life. With a Master’s Degree and three years successful freelancing under her belt, the long awaited word from Harper Collins couldn’t be far off. But as it turned out, after holding her novel for review for nine months, they still turned it down as “too similar to another book on our list.” This was the last straw, and patently untrue to boot. She marshaled her considerable talents and began a search for a POD company to do the publishing. But as she dug deeper, she realized that all the other POD publishers would take any book, regardless of how well, or how badly written it was, and she understood that such a policy would put her book in bad company. The solution: start your own book publishing business.

And the rest is history, or in this case: her-story. As a 100% woman-owned enterprise, Llumina Press has some unique traits: it’s very writer-centric and service oriented and the structure is more networked than it is pyramidal. In other words, if you want to talk to the publisher, you can. She doesn’t stand on ceremony and is about as down-to-earth as you’d expect. And it seems that she sincerely enjoys helping others get their manuscripts into a marketable form. According to Deborah, “Most books that are being published through POD still need work before they go to print, but while most POD publishers will accept anything and don’t really care what’s in between the covers, I do. That’s why Llumina has a skillful editor look over every manuscript and write up a free editing evaluation before we’ll accept it.”

Print on demand, Deborah tells us, is the communication revolution. It allows the voice of the little guy, the unknown with a passionate idea, the senior with a long memory, to put works in writing that would otherwise never make it to the market. Not because these manuscripts are no good, but because the big houses cannot afford to publish anything but bestsellers written by famous people. And new writers with exciting new voices are easily lost in the shuffle. Print on demand changes all that, and that’s why Deborah feels it’s so important for these books to be presented with all their buttons buttoned, their ties knotted, and their hair brushed. The world doesn’t need more badly written books, but it does need books that capture the grass roots soul of America in well-written prose. So if POD publishing really is the communication revolution, then Deborah Greenspan’s work in this field may be just a little revolutionary itself.

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