DVD publishing is a risky business if you don't know in advance how many copies you'll be able to sell. One way to reduce the risk is to use on-demand DVD publishing instead of replicating a fixed number of disks initially. If the title does well, you may pay more with on-demand, but hey, the title's doing well so you're wealthy anyway!

With on-demand publishing, instead of paying around $1000 to a replication house to make several hundred copies of your DVD, you pay a small setup fee to an on-demand service bureau. Then, when orders come in, they print exactly the number needed. The service bureau takes a bite out of the purchase price, but at least if sales are disappointing you haven't lost much money.

Juliet McMains, a latin dancer formerly of Riverside, used customflix.com to handle on-demand publishing of her Salsa Stylings for Ladies series. Customflix charges $50 to set up a new title, and around $10 for each copy sold. They can take orders for your title through their online store, and they package the DVD and mail it to the customer.

"The services they provide are more than worth it," Juliet says. "I don't have to deal with shipping and, most importantly, I don't have to deal with credit card processing."

There is a downside though -- on-demand publishing puts your video on a disk called a DVD-R, not a true DVD. A true DVD is manufactured from a glass master that actually impresses pits onto the DVD surface. The high setup cost is the cost of producing the glass master.

DVD-Rs use a laser to print a pattern on the DVD that looks similar to the actual pits in a replicated DVD. There are a few set-top DVD players out there that cannot read DVD-Rs. (All set-top players can read true DVDs.) So if you use on-demand publishing, some fraction of your customers may complain that the disk doesn't play in their machine.

You can order Juliet's DVD from customflix.com -- click on Video Shop, and search for her name.