Print-on-Demand Publishing for Authors

Richard Moon has published more than a dozen books. Exactly one of them, Quantum Aikido: The Power of Harmony, went through a conventional publisher — Inner Traditions / Park Street Press, on shelves at Barnes & Noble and Amazon. The rest — The Endless River, Ten to the Tenth, The Thalamic Discourses, Healing With Ki, and others — are print-on-demand editions, sold direct to readers through his Books.by store.

That split is not an accident, and it is not a hierarchy of "real" versus "lesser" publishing. It reflects two different tools for two different jobs. If you're an author weighing your own options, it's worth understanding what each one actually does.

what print-on-demand actually means

Print-on-demand (POD) is a manufacturing model, not a genre or a quality tier: each copy of a book is printed and bound only after a reader orders it, rather than printed in a large run ahead of sales and warehoused until it sells.

That single mechanical difference has real consequences. Because there's no inventory to sell through, a POD book effectively never goes out of print. And because there's no fixed print run locked in, the author can revise the interior — fix a typo, update a chapter, add a foreword — and the next copy printed reflects the change.

how it differs from a commercial book deal

A commercial publisher like Inner Traditions does something POD platforms don't: it acquires the manuscript, edits and designs it to house standards, prints a run in advance, and places it into the existing distribution network of bookstores, wholesalers, and catalogs — the shelf space at Barnes & Noble that a self-published title generally can't reach on its own.

That access is the trade. In exchange, a publisher takes editorial control, a share of revenue, and its own timeline. A POD platform hands the author the opposite bargain: full control over the listing, the pricing, the interior, and the release schedule — but the author does the work a publisher's team would otherwise do, and the book reaches readers directly rather than through a bookstore's front table.

Neither is a lesser path. They answer different questions: Does this book need a publisher's distribution network to find its readers, or does it already have a direct line to them?

why Richard Moon uses both

Quantum Aikido: The Power of Harmony was written as an introduction — the book meant to reach someone who had never heard of Richard Moon before, browsing a shelf or a bookstore's website. That's exactly the job a commercial publisher is built for.

The other titles serve a different reader: someone who has already read Quantum Aikido, or taken a class, or found the Insights section, and wants to go deeper into a specific thread — the economics of "Extraordinary Accounting," the listening practice behind Aiki-Dialogue, the awareness work in Ten to the Tenth. That reader already has the direct line. POD keeps those books in print indefinitely, revisable, and available the moment that reader is ready for them — without needing a publisher to bet on a specialized backlist title staying profitable on a bookstore shelf.

All of Richard Moon's print-on-demand titles are available through books.by/kitothecity. See the full list, alongside Quantum Aikido itself, on the Books page.

if you're an author deciding between them

A few honest questions to ask yourself, based on the difference above:

The two models aren't in competition. They're different answers to different distribution problems — and, as with most either/or questions, the honest answer is often both, aimed at the right title.