The graph below shows the title count on Amazon for the players involved in this news for the last six years. Note that both BookSurge and CreateSpace are Amazon acquisitions, as they bought their way into the POD driven self publishing services industry. Note also that the number of titles listed on Amazon does not equal the total number of titles published by any of these companies. But titles that are published without access to Amazon are generally non-commercial, printed at low cost for friends and family.
The numbers I used to draw the graph were gathered from Amazon and are included on my sales statistics page. The combined Author Services imprints of AuthorHouse, Xlibris and iUniverse made the most titles available on Amazon in 2008, but the two Amazon entities, BookSurge and CreateSpace, are gaining rapidly. It looks like Amazon is moving closer to dominating the author services world, even as they've become the main player in the trade book business.
Of course, paying to get a book published and making a living as an author are two different subjects, and I'd be surprised if one in a thousand authors using these companies to publish original works can make a living at it. See my interview today with Aaron Shepard if your ambition is to make a living selling your books through Amazon.
4 comments:
I think the company is called Author Solutions Inc. and not Author Services Inc which is a different company.
Kenneth,
Yup, that's a typo:-)
Thanks,
Morris
Morris,
I was looking at Author Solutions Inc.'s website, and it says that people can use their company to set up their own print on demand publishing companies using their services. Do you know anything about this service and what do you think about it for self-publishers?
Kenneth,
It's not a service I've used. You'd just have to look at the costs and the options and compare it with the approach I advocate for anybody who is planning on publishing books for a living, ie, start your own publishing company. I can't imagine what you can gain by using middlemen when the ultimate print and distribution partners, Lightning Source or Amazon itself through CreateSpace or BooksSurge, can be used.
I break the current self publishing world into four major chunks. The first chunk is using companies like those mentioned in this post, who you pay a fee to publish your book. Where you pay them as the author or as some kind of "publishing partner" doesn't really matter, by definition, you're leaving money on the table in exchange for some sort of streamlining or simplification of the publishing process. In my experience, the odds of selling enough books to earn back whatever you are giving up for a small convienience are very, very long.
I wrote out the other three chunks, and then I decided to save them for an upcoming blog post:-)
Morris
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