Literally thousands of books are published each year that address the many social and spiritual issues that exist within the different people groups residing in North America. In contrast, only a handful of books are released each year that address the social and spiritual needs of the Indigenous people of North America. There are many reasons for this neglect, but very often, Native leaders do not have the national exposure or necessary funds to finance the publishing of their much-needed books and media resources.

Healing the Land is reversing this trend by:

Through these and other stategies, Healing the Land is restoring the voice of the Native American people and producing much-needed books and media resources that otherwise might not be produced.

Print-on-Demand (POD) utilizes digital printers that replace the conventional printing process. The advantages this approach brings to book publishing are numerous, especially for a niche market like the one we are developing. For example, if an author is speaking at a conference and needs 100 books for the event, we can print just 100 books. If the author is teaching a one-day workshop for 20 people, we can print just 20 books. The cost per book remains the same in lower quantities and steadily reduces with higher quantities. This represents huge savings in up-front capital and effectively removes any long-term need for storage. Some authors may only need or sell 100 books…ever. No major publisher would even consider publishing an author who would sell that few books because they would never get their money back for their production costs. Our approach using POD technology removes that profit-driven issue completely.

Another advantage to POD is its flexibility for changing and updating materials. This means that the book being published can be changed and adapted easily—every printing if necessary—at no additional cost! Printing five different versions of the same workbook would be cost prohibitive using conventional printing. With POD, it’s a relatively simple process. We recently reaped the rewards of this benefit when we redesigned several of our larger spiral-bound books to a smaller perfect-bound size to meet distribution requirements. We actually ended up SAVING money per book by going to the smaller size and the perfect-bound format. Our only added expense was our time to redesign the book, which amounted to a few hours work. Printing conventionally, this would have been impossible for us to even consider, but POD made it possible. That’s why, as a publisher, we have to make the most of this new avenue of technology.

As demand for our books increase beyond the effective scope of POD technology (1,000 – 1,500 books), conventional printing still remains an option for us. We have several relationships with print buyers that will provide us with competitive conventional pricing.