AuthorHouse Blog

AuthorHouse is starting off the new year with a special offer for authors who want to publish a book in 2008. All authors who enter into any AuthorHouse publishing agreement in January will receive a free author Web site.

“We are making this offer available to motivate authors to start 2008 off on the right foot and get to work on their book,” said Keith Ogorek, AuthorHouse marketing director. “Authors whose manuscripts are at all stages of completion can take advantage of this promotion.”

The free author Web site includes tools for providing real-time news and events about the featured book, content control features like active blog posting, and a portal where readers can purchase and review the book. Additionally, AuthorHouse hosts the site for free.

“A Web site dedicated to your book is an invaluable tool for promoting and marketing your book, and is a key part of our comprehensive approach to helping our authors publish, promote, and sell,” said Ogorek.

In addition, AuthorHouse is providing authors who choose the Standard Paperback Publishing option 20 free paperback copies of their completed book. Special offers are also available to authors choosing to self-publish children’s books and poetry books.

“Authors who take advantage of these offers give themselves valuable tools for promoting their books to the marketplace,” Ogorek said.

Got a Book in Your Head? Get it Published! (From the Canton Repository)

“I ought to write a book.” If you are a wannabe author, there perhaps is no better time than the present to put your thoughts into words and those words onto paper.

Print-on-demand publishers such as AuthorHouse (formerly 1stBooks) are making it increasingly easy for authors who are not named Stephen King or John Grisham to get their fictional and works and memoirs into print.

“Our tagline is ‘Get your voice in print,” said Keith Ogorek, director of marketing for AuthorHouse, which claims on its Web site to have “helped more authors publish more titles than any other company.”

Indeed several local authors have taken their manuscripts to AuthorHouse, which provides editing and proofreading services, help with marketing and sales, and distribution and royalty payment assistance — while allowing authors to have creative control over the finished product.

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Three groups receive publishing grant through Authors Across America

AuthorHouse announced it will help three deserving organizations this year. The Denver School Museum, SKIP, Inc., and the Rainbow Repertory Theatre will each realize their dream of publishing a book through a standard paperback publishing package grant through AuthorHouse’s Authors Across America initiative.

Authors Across America, designed to inspire literacy and encourage authors to get published, is in its inaugural year of granting publishing services to educational and service-based organizations.

“Through this grant, we are giving a diverse group of writers who wouldn’t normally have access to book-publishing resources the opportunity to have their voices heard,” said Terry Dwyer, AuthorHouse’s vice president of sales. “We’re pleased to help these organizations achieve their goals through book publishing.”

The Denver Schoolhouse Museum of Grant City, Mo., was built in 1878 and is the only two-story schoolhouse remaining in Missouri. Carol L. Parman spent the last four years collecting 250 pages of poems, written locally over the last 150 years. The grant will allow the museum to publish a book of these poems that will be sold to fund the museum’s renovation.

The Ohio-based Rainbow Repertory Theater, an energetic, diverse group of artists and volunteers who participate in traveling theater, will use the grant to assist in publishing a history of African Americans in their hometown of Canton, Ohio.

SKIP, Inc., based in Montgomery, Ala., provides supportive services to children and families of incarcerated parents, and increases public awareness of the challenges these children face. The grant will assist founder and executive director Gloria Jean Canty in publishing her dissertation to help others start similar organizations.

The wild wild west of self-publishing has a new marshall in town: AuthorHouse and iUniverse.

According to Publishers Weekly, there are an estimated 86,000 self-publishing companies in the United States. With over 200,000 new titles per year flooding the book market, primarily because of self-publishing, consolidation of the space is a good thing for everyone.

As I travel around the country talking to aspiring and published authors, I hear horror stories about various publisher dealings. One guy self-published with a company, paid his fees, and never saw a galley: the business went bankrupt before they could finish his book. Another author published with a company, the company closed its doors, and now he can’t even get his files from the publisher to keep it active at Lightning Source. Another company in Indiana sold an “authorfest” book show to their authors at Franklin College, only to have four people show up (three of them were authors that paid to exhibit).

AuthorHouse has been the 500 lb. gorilla in the self-publishing space for several years now. With nearly 30,000 active titles in Amazon, their closest competitor has been iUniverse with just over 17,000 active titles. Everyone else is a distant third in size, which doesn’t mean they can’t help you get published, they just don’t have the experience and breadth of services that an AuthorHouse or iUniverse has.

I’ve had a few people comment that AuthorHouse and iUniverse merged to run everybody out of business. Not necessarily. I think both parties felt that the industry can benefit from having an undisputed market leader in a space that has less than stellar reviews over the last 10 years. Lifting the visibility, reputation, quality, distribution, and overall perception of self-publishing will help everyone, including their competitors.

To take AuthorHouse’s position as a market leader a step further, they launched WordClay.com quietly a few months ago. True “self-publishing” has really taken hold at Lulu.com and AuthorHouse wants to extend into that online “do-it-yourself” space. Thousands of free accounts are started on Lulu.com each week with a small percentage of those actually finishing their book’s design, layout, and cover design. People find out that laying out a book isn’t as easy as they thought. Lulu.com is a pure online play, meaning all their services are available online with no or little offline support.

In comes AuthorHouse with a headquarters in Bloomington, Indiana with nearly 180 employees that are eagerly waiting for someone to raise a white flag in WordClay.com to help them finish their book. Need your manuscript edited? How about a fancier cover design? Or maybe you need some illustrations for your children’s book? AuthorHouse/iUniverse can help you fill in the gaps of your “do-it-yourself” publishing experience.

Keep an eye on the self-publishing industry in the coming months and years. As the smaller shops either close their doors or align themselves with printers, we’ll look back at the moves AuthorHouse has made in the last 6 months as a good thing for the entire industry: most importantly the authors themselves.

Listen to Bryan Smith, President and CEO of AuthorSolutions and AuthorHouse; and Susan Driscoll, President and CEO of iUniverse as they share their thoughts about the greater opportunities available to authors as a result of iUniverse being acquired by AuthorSolutions.

 

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