Like most other sellers, modern authors have the internet at their disposal. This means they can easily sell their books over the net with little or no need to go out of the house.
Most of this is due to new book fulfilment services which provide extensive services for authors and companies who need warehouse logistics and distribution needs.
Traditionally, publishing companies deliver their books to bookstores and this is where bulk of purchases are made. In many cases today, bookstores sell on-line and therefore transactions can also happen virtually. However, the process requires significant costs from printing to selling especially since there are now many commercial companies in involved from printing to delivery, from purchase to shipping.
Book fulfillment services offer an efficient alternative to the traditional mode of selling books while significantly cutting costs which is beneficial primarily to the author as authors can directly contract or outsource book fulfillment companies for services from printing to storage to distribution and inventory monitoring.
First, in terms of printing, many book fulfillment and distribution companies have state-of-the art printing capabilities specifically digital offset printing which is one of the modern cost effective solutions for medium to large print runs for books. Digital offset printing is also ideal and economical for higher volume printing staring with 2000 identical copies. Most of offset printing technologies of book fulfilment companies produce print outputs that are extremely high in quality and fit for professional quality printing for publishers.
After printing there is storage or warehouse logistics. Understandably, most authors do not own their own warehouse where they can store large volumes of their printed material. In fact, many authors who sell on-line are actually home-based and do not have storage capacity along with a host of other supply chain monitoring capabilities. Book fulfilment companies provide services in warehousing which relieves online businesses of the necessary actual space to store all supplies and is beneficial for enterprises without the capacity to directly manage their own inventory. Sellers send merchandise to the book fulfillment center and the outsourced service provider ships the merchandise to the customer for them.
And then, there is tracking services which means inventory monitoring services from warehousing to distribution. These part of book fulfilment services are literal supply chain services that monitor activity from warehouse or pick up point to selling. Activities under these services include provision of forms and labels that allow tracking across the whole supply chain functions and assuring the quality of scanning and imaging are critical variables that must be satisfactorily provided by print fulfilment services.
Generally, book fulfillment services provide extensive supply chain solutions where customers can effortlessly conduct production to distribution transactions without leaving the comfort of their on-line base. These services drive productivity and streamline costs. New and integrated warehouse and factory utilities now available fulfillment companies to print, manufacture, store and monitor product movement using state of the art technology in a single structure and this significantly allows the harmonious flow of production, warehouse logistics and inventory tracking and over-all final fulfillment at bare optimal costs.
