Hopefully this is the right corner to ask this question...I'm looking for a way to do POD but without distribution: the idea is to print a book, on demand, for Patreon subscribers without otherwise offering it for sale publicly. Anyone know of a halfway decent service for which this fits the bill?
I already have a paperback available through Kdp Print, but I can't see any way (unless I'm missing it) to format and set up a book through KDP-P without having it available for sale. I had a look at a website called thebookpatch.com, but they don't get terribly good reviews. Any recommendations?
I know of other services where you can control the distribution to some extent, but none offhand where you can cut it off from all supply channels.
Pardon me if I'm overstepping by offering a suggestion you didn't actually for. While I can understand wanting to give Patreon backers a book for free, would it be too awful if other people could also buy it? If you made the price high enough, likely no one would buy if that's really essential. You could still get author copies at cost and ship them to your Patreon supporters. To me, that seems easier than trying to find a separate POD, which will probably have higher print costs than KDP-P. I notice the print costs are roughly the same as they were in CS, and whenever I've compared, everybody else I checked was always more expensive, meaning you'd incur greater expense to give your supporters the same book. Also, a lot of PODs base price on how many copies are ordered at a time, meaning that to get closer to the KDP-P price, you'd have to order a lot of copies.
