Paid Publishing Market Tops In 2006

I spent a little time this morning looking at the year-over-year sales growth of subsidy publishers, also known as author's services companies or vanity presses. The common thread is that the author pays a fee to have the book published, generally somewhere in the $400 to $800 area. There are some multi-tiered versions of the the paid publishing model, such as Lulu's "Free Publishing" offer that doesn't include distribution, or their ISBN purchase model that comes about as close to true self publishing as you can get under the paid publishing umbrella. There's also the PublishAmerica free publishing model that I haven't kept up with lately, but their main catch used to be in the contract terms.

This sudden interest in paid publishing numbers came about through a correspondence I was having with a friend in the publishing business. I guessed that the whole subsidy publishing business would top out at some point when all of the old manuscripts came out of the bottom drawers and got typed up, and a balance was reached between current author production and the willingness to pay fees for publication. Keep in mind that while everybody knew the term "vanity press" ten years ago, the new generation of subsidy presses have have cleverly defined themselves as "Self Publishing" companies. The new labeling works to their advantage because self publishing is a respectable profession at which many authors have earned a living, with some expanding their business into broader trade publishing operations. I don't know anybody who earns a living as a subsidy press author, though a small number have moved on to true self publishing or trade contracts. As to the endless supply of new authors, while everybody may have a book in them, relatively few will go to the trouble of writing and typing it.

The following numbers for the # titles per publisher per year are derived from the Advanced Search function on Amazon. It does not include titles that are not in the Amazon catalog. The publishers listed are those who have been around for years and publish over 1,000 titles per year, I'm sure there are others I've missed. It's also the first time I've stuck a table in Blogger, not very happy with the formatting:-)

Publisher / # Titles	2004	2005	2006	2007 Ytd
PublishAmerica	4106	5163	5469	2214
Lulu	633	1445	2855	1915
iUniverse	3133	3501	3587	1641
Xlibris	2008	2100	2030	956
AuthorHouse	5351	7008	6932	2825
trafford	1178	2219	6954	854

The table shows the paid publishing market topping out in 2005/2006. The only real exception is the growth shown by Lulu, which had been running at 100% growth a year but looks to be less than 50% this year if the trends hold. Both AuthorHouse and PublishAmerica look to be the big market share losers to Lulu as paid publishing becomes a zero-sum game. iUniverse is only a little below trend, and Xlibris has been flat-lined for years now. I can't explain the 2006 number for Trafford, either they went on a marketing blitz that year or there's a glitch in the cataloging. None of these numbers have anything to say about true self publishing, authors who set up their own publishing company to publish and market their own books. But I thought it was kind of interesting that the "top" in subsidy publishing appears to have coincided with the top in the housing market!