PublicAffairs Uses POD to Fill Orders for McClellan Memoir

By Lynn Andriani -- Publishers Weekly, 6/4/2008 2:22:00 PM

To help meet an extraordinary volume of bookseller orders for Scott McClellan’s bestseller What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception, PublicAffairs has teamed with Lightning Source, which has delivered 7,000 print-on-demand copies within a 48-hour period. 

Intense media interest led to a spike in orders of the book last week, and PublicAffairs soon sold out of its first printings. To fill the gap while waiting for additional copies from traditional off-set printers, PublicAffairs went to Lightning Source to print and ship books to accounts. PublicAffairs publisher Susan Weinberg said, “Lightning Source's print-on-demand capability helped us reduce our turnaround time and ship more books to booksellers as quickly as possible."

John Ingram, chairman of the Ingram Content Companies, which owns Lightning Source, said he spoke with Peter Osnos of PublicAffairs at BEA on Friday, and that over the weekend, it became apparent there was going to be a short period of time when there would be not enough copies of the title available to satisfy demand. “We immediately offered to bring out a print on demand book to cover this period and ensure that sales were not missed,” said Ingram. Within hours of receiving the file mid-morning on Monday, Lightning Source was printing the first of 4,000 jacketed hardcover copies of the book at its LaVergne, Tenn., facility, and on Tuesday morning they were being shipped to accounts.