The shape of things to come

22 September 2007

Self-publishing is about to become mainstream, says James Forsyth

AuthorHouse, a self-publisher that has released roughly 45,000 works since launching in 1997, including the book on which the hit film Legally Blonde was based, has seen sales triple in the last five years. Around one in every 30 books published in the US in 2006 was an AuthorHouse title, and last week it ramped up its presence by acquiring its rival iPublish for an undisclosed sum.

The deal is in part a response to Amazon. The online retailing giant, with a market cap of $35bn (£17.3bn, â‚¬25.4bn), is taking increasingly bigger strides into the self-publishing market: in April 2005 it acquired self-publisher BookSurge and last month it launched an on-demand printing service, CreateSpace.

In contrast to BookSurge, CreateSpace offers no traditional publishing services, such as editing your tome: it simply prints however many copies you require. It doesn’t charge an upfront fee for this – although the author must commit to buying at least one copy – and instead makes money by charging a higher cut on the sale of the book than services that levy an upfront fee.

The combination of BookSurge and CreateSpace now gives Amazon a presence at both ends of the market.

AuthorHouse – which is ultimately owned by Bertram Capital, the US buyout shop – faces further competition from Lulu.com, which charges the author nothing until copies of the book are sold; AuthorHouse normally charges between $1,000 and $5,000 for its more traditional service.

Lulu, which has 1.2m members, says it has already published 300,000 titles, with 4,000 being added a week.

Lulu takes 20% of the cover price of each book sold. Traditional publishers usually pay an advance to the author; once they have recouped the cost of this through book sales, they then take 90% of the cover price of each book sold (though of course deals can vary greatly from author to author).

The web has democratised opinion and analysis, which in turn has spawned a new generation of writers: anyone with an internet connection can set up a blog and offer their own personal take on events.

Some blogs, such as Belle de Jour, supposedly the diary of a London call girl, have been picked up by traditional publishing houses and turned into bestselling books.

But they are just the tip of the iceberg: there are now 71m blogs worldwide and counting. And even if just a mere 10% of them decided to take the next step and self-publish a book, then vanity publishing could finally become a truly mainstream, and lucrative, market.