What do you think of Author House buying Xlibris?
What do you think of Author House buying Xlibris? Author House buys Xlibris… big deal. One Vanity Press buys another who buys another. I guess it will make it even easier to write about now. Let’s pull a few numbers from Author House’s various press releases. First number of new titles “published” in 2008 is 12,000 and they printed 2.5MM total books.
Simple math says that those titles sold an average of 208 copies. That is bad enough but the press release was carefully worded to actually mean that the 2.5MM was not for those 12,000 but for all the Author House titles. An earlier press release stated that Author House had hit 50,000 titles as of Spring 2008 so, in theory, the total number of titles in print is currently 59,000. Take that same 2.5MM and spread it out over the 59,000 titles and what do you get…. 42 copies. All you prospective Oprah guests out there… if 42 copies is what you have in mind, by all means, sign right up… You say it’s not fair to take an average? Let’s take a quick run over to IUniverse, another Author House company. Back when IUniverse was first bought by Author Solutions (Author House), the best guess was that they were going to be the “higher” level of Author House. Unlike Author House, they even had executives with publishing experience… right. The first thing the new owners did was to get rid of the person with probably the most publishing experience, Susan Driscoll, the IUniverse President. What message did that send out? IUniverse’s premier program is their Star Program to which they have now added a Rising Star program. To be eligible for the original Star Program, the author needed to sell 500 copies of a title. In looking at the new Rising Star program, it looks like the author needs to spend $1500+ dollars for one of the IUniverse programs. Anyway, there are 165 Star titles in the IUniverse bookstore and 38 Rising Stars. This is out of the 59,000 titles? What is that 3/10 of 1% of the total titles? Now we add in Xlibris. According to the press release, they published 7,000 titles this year, although the Xlibris website says that they only have a total of 20,000, in print. Even though an April 2007 press release stated that Xlibris had 20,000 titles in print. Funny, they also had 20,000 titles in print in a 2006 press release. I guess it doesn’t really matter. Let’s just say that between the three, they have a ton of titles that have sold very few copies per title. The only way I can rationalize these places is that they are very expensive copy shops. Go to Kinko’s for a few copies…. Go to Author House. Different price, same results.
As a comparison, I announced a new book marketing award a few months back called the Glengarry Award. There is no entry fee to win this award. All an author needs to do is sell books. To qualify for the Copper Level of this award, an author needs to sell 1,000 copies of their title. This is double the entry level of the Star program mentioned above. There are currently 110 titles at this level, out of the titles produced through one of the RJ Communications services (which have produced a whole lot less than 59,000 titles or 20,000 or 10,000 titles for that matter). In addition to these, an additional 47 titles are currently at the Bronze level which means they sold over 3,000 copies. Another 41 titles have sold over 5,000 copies, attaining the Silver Level and 31 reached the Gold level. To qualify for the Gold level, a title needs to sell over 10,000 copies. Rounding out the list are 4 winners of the Platinum Award for titles selling over 50,000 copies. To put this all in prospective, the total number of copies sold of these 233 titles is over 60% that of the total sales for the year of Author Solution’s 59,000 titles.
In short, while the “Pay-to-be- Published” market might continue to grow from a dollar standpoint, the number of suppliers, with the money needed to influence the media, will continue to shrink. In the long run, I think that all of this is good and will eventually spell the downfall of the whole vanity market as the author choices become easier to understand. Time will tell.
As I was finishing up this article I received a timely email with a link to an interesting article titled Is IUniverse Losing It? It is an interesting observation of the result of the previous Author House consolidation. I guess it’s not just my imagination. (Click here to read article)
Last 5 posts by Ron Pramschufer
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January 16th, 2009 at 10:22 am
I published a book with Xlibris last year and sold one copy.
January 16th, 2009 at 10:49 am
As a freelance childrne’ns book illustrator voer 18 years, I strive to steer clients away from these POD/Vanity Houses.In the past year alone, I;ve had 3 clients sereiouls taken advantage of by these house.
One example: I delivered the print ready PDF. The vanity house redesigned the entire book (had over 3 designers working on it instead of just one!) The desingers didn’t understand what “full bleed” meant. They redid the cover, also. And completely chanes the font from an industry standard serif font, to the Kids fonnt!! ARRGGHH! It took the writer & me 4 months and endless phone calls to get it redone at no charge the way we submitted the book orignally.
And we I never could speak directly with the “Book designers” (Insert sarcasm here) directly, I had to deal with the account manager, who didn’t know any of the industry specific terms used.
The marketing was to send out a baunch of email from a database (big deal!) and create a “press release” for the internet with 3 othewr writer’s books.
As of today, I have still not seen the final product.
Writers: For the money you’re investing in your book, don’t waste it on a POD.
January 16th, 2009 at 1:20 pm
I published a fiction book last year using Xlibris. My ONLY goal was to get it in print at a reasonable cost to me so that I could print/give away 50 copies to family and friends. That was achieved and, in the end, I was happy with Xlibris. Luckily, I made them agree – early in the process – that we would not proceed with printing final copies until both of us were happy with the galleys. They agreed. This fact gave me the leverage to make them redo the entire book once, with regard to font, font size, line spacing, margin sizes, and total pages.
January 16th, 2009 at 1:31 pm
It can be very difficult to sell books after self-publishing, no doubt about it. If a self-publishing company implies it will be easy, run. If a self-publishing company implies that you’ll be on Oprah in a few months, run screaming. A legitimate operation will be up-front with you about this stuff.
Laurie B: Why on earth did those designers (three for one book?) make any changes at all? Scammers usually don’t want to make extra work for themselves. Yikes.
January 16th, 2009 at 8:29 pm
I self published with RJ Communictions. Have made back 3/4 of the money in just a matter of 4 months. Have been doing all my own marketing, and it takes alot of hard work , but my book is now with two novelty distribution companies, Baker & Taylor, Borders, and Barnes & Noble. I was told that a few publishing companies are going out of business. If you want to make any money, work it yourself.
Thanks,
Shanti Milan
Author of Get Ready, Cause Here I Come
Thank you Dana and Ron for leading me in the right direction………………..
January 17th, 2009 at 4:20 pm
My first thoughts in reading about this were similar to yours, Ron. In fact, in a world where everyone plays well with others, the consolidation should mean streamlining processes which would actually make things easier on authors. Right now, investigating this option gets overwhelming really fast, which is why many people ultimately end up making poor decisions.
I do know a few authors who’ve done better than average with fee-based publisher,s but they also did their homework, had better advice going in and that’s the key no matter which option is chosen.
Cheryl Pickett
http://www.publishinganswers.com
January 20th, 2009 at 11:35 am
The biggest problem I see with the vanity houses is that they are giving POD a bad name. This is not good for business or the environment. The idea behind POD came on the wings of ideas like “on time inventory” and both were designed to help publishers with the issue of returns.
Returns, always the bane of the publishing industry, are unpredictable and can cause publishers to make bad decisions (such as having a second printing only to see most of the books from the first printing coming back). POD was supposed to rectify this issue by allowing publishers to print books as demand occurred.
Unfortunately, vanity publishers have hijacked the concept, lowering their printing bills and increasing their profit margins by printing fewer books with the promise that POD will pick up the slack. Of course, that originally small print run usually doesn’t even sell, leaving the author with the bill and very little else.
Distributors and booksellers have caught onto this causing many to refuse to take books created in such a way.
All of this is bad because POD does have a legitimate function in the marketplace. It saves trees and print dollars, but with the current trend I fear that POD is becoming anathema to what it actually should be.
Along those lines, too many people are getting into publishing projects that do not have a hope in heck of succeeding and no one is out there telling them to think through it. The continue on with the doomed project because the “sticker shock” of a printing and shipping bill are no longer an issue.
I guess my point is that the vanity publishers and the vain authors are both to blame here. Wannabe authors should write their books, but they need to much more realistic about who in the heck is going to read them. Counting on a vanity press to give you advice as to whether or not to proceed with a project is facile at best so don’t blame the vanity press when the book does not sell and don’t blame POD either.
January 21st, 2009 at 11:45 am
I published with Xlibris at the end of 1998 and have had a pretty good experience. Book quality, though very plain vanilla and without today’s bells and whistles, was professional level and the book, an historical novel, has sold over 1200 copies to date, albeit most of the sales occurred between 1999 and 2003 when I was actively promoting the book. Still, sales continue to occur most months and Xlibris has been very timely in remitting royalties to me.
I did find Xlibris difficult to deal with in some ways. The company lacked flexibility or an interest in innovatively enhancing their model. I proposed a premium imprint program to them, long before iUniverse introduced its STAR program but Xlibris just wasn’t interested. They also raised my book’s retail price to levels that made it virtually unsellable after it was out for a few years but after extensive correspondence back and forth with them, they ultimately did drop the price to a more reasonable (if not its original) level, allowing sales to resume, albeit less robustly than at the old price.
At one point I proposed that Xlibris could enhance its services by really focusing on marketing and promotion for its better authors. I don’t know if they ever really processed what I suggested but ultimately they came out with a revamped approach which included selling authors all sorts of marketing packages. Although their representatives contacted me numerous times to try to sell me these rather high priced packages I declined. Perhaps if my book were new I’d have felt differently but the costs involved were just too high.
When I decided to self-publish my historical novel through Xlibris in ’98, my wife was annoyed and I promised her I wouldn’t do it if it cost a lot or if I didn’t think I could make back my investment. That initial investment amounted to $730 (I bought their Level II service at the time, long since superseded of course) plus about $700 in review copies and mailings to prospective reviewers. So my whole investment amounted to about $1400 – $1500. By keeping my costs low and doing most of my promotion on the Internet, I managed to earn back more than twice that in royalties and so kept my promise to my wife. I certainly wasn’t going to throw that away by investing a lot of additional money in the dubious possibility that I could generate enough sales on an older book and thereby remain in the black!
My proposal to Xlibris had been that they endeavor to identify books in their stable that had real prospects and that they partner with the authors of those to enhance promotion and outreach and thereby create a hybrid publishing service with two tiers: a general list of all authors and a premium list of selected authors. This would have 1) served as a magnet for authors to use their service, 2) provided an incentive for their basic authors to strive to enhance their own product both resulting in improved offerings and an infusion of potential premium titles, 3) provided a new revenue stream for Xlibris by making them partners in the monies generated by the premium titles and 4) enhanced Xlibris’ reputation as something more than just another POD based vanity press. Alas Xlibris management could not be moved in this direction and decided that the way to address these concerns lay in creating and offering high priced marketing packages to their authors.
I am saddened to see Xlibris swallowed up by another company at this stage both because it further limits self-publishing authors’ choices and because it takes one of the oldest and once respected POD names out of the business since, even if the name survives, if it goes the way of iUniverse (which was really a roll-up of earlier entries, including toexcel.com) it will lose its once unique cachet.
I think the management of Xlibris would have done better to have followed my suggestions but I guess it wasn’t to be.
Stuart W. Mirsky
author of The King of Vinland’s Saga (Xlibris)
January 21st, 2009 at 12:01 pm
It doesn’t shock me in the least.
I wish someone would buy them out…I’m suffering until they do.
January 21st, 2009 at 12:34 pm
As a former book publishing editor (the nuts and bolts, not an executive) and subsequently a journalist reporting on the book business, I was appalled by the “publishing services” Xlibris offered. A few years ago, an older friend wanted to write a memoir on her teaching experiences. I offered to help her get the manuscript into publishing format, etc. (she was 80 years old and was still using a typewriter). Xlibris did nothing! I sent them rough copy my friend wrote for the back cover–they printed it as it was, no editing, not even copyediting for typos! They charged about $1,000 and she never sold even one copy. Horrible! What a rip-off.
February 2nd, 2009 at 8:22 pm
While not disagreeing with your comments , the term POD is no longer only applicable to vanity press. More and more large mainstream and small independant publishers are seeing financial advantages in using POD technology.
Saving on warehousing costs and the wastage of over producing titles has obvious appeal.
POD describes a method of print production. The vanity presses have grabbed onto it to try to add cedibility to what they are doing. Now that have grabbed “Self Publishing companies”. They are not. A vanity press by any other name is still a vanity press.
Ron
February 23rd, 2009 at 4:00 pm
The way of the future, and it is here, the ONLY WAY, is publish on demand.
You save billions in warehouse expense and overheads. I am a CPA. I know.
All the other ways to publish will die very soon, and are dying right now.
If someone has something to say, let them say it. Why not? Sometimes is very important, just for the record. That’s the brave new world of digital information. Ron is only trying to defend the old, dying system, that doesn’t work anymore.
That is THE TRUTH.
J. R.: Remind me not to let you do my taxes. Your math is waaaay off.
Ron
June 1st, 2009 at 11:40 pm
I found all of your articles interesting and informative, I felt led to write a book in the last year and a half and it took me that long to put it together including the time
it took to find a publisher and not a predator, I want to say; the lord put it on my heart to do it, it is about our beloved country and the high road to low morals we have taken and our sacrifice of all we ever stood for, our constitution will be next if this nation does not bow it’s knee to the God that brought us here and made us great and repent of our sins; the name of the book is : “Liberalization and Apostasy of America”, I have chosen Author House after googling countless pod publishers, have spent about $1300 so far and that is my limit until I see action on my book in the sweet by and by, they promised to make it available on Amazon and
Borders and Barnes and Nobles and listed on Yahoo and Google, the latter is a struggle to find it, I was hoping for a #1 seller, not just with them, which brought me here, I hope I am not just being a hopeless dreamer, it is an hot topic these days and with the right promotion it could happen.
June 5th, 2009 at 6:53 pm
I agree that many of these self-publishing companies are a rip off. I published with Xlibris in 2007 and to date I have only sold 10 books. Altogether I have only profited 52.00, which I have not even recieved yet. They do nothing in the editing area, absolutely nothing. They will publish your book with mispelled words and all and take most of your profit. Every month they send email offering these expensive marketing packages. Most of the packages are extremely expensive. I am not satisfied.
July 28th, 2009 at 9:43 am
Self publishing provides authors the opportunity to customize their publishing experience to meet their individual needs. Marketing that book is key to successfully selling ANY book.
Everyday, I see authors who work dilligently, and creatively, to market their books; and they sell books. Sometimes lots of books. Every author, whether it’s Grisham or Rowling, has to actively market their books. This is even more true for unknown or emerging authors.
Industry channel numbers show that fewer than 6 percent of ALL new titles in a given year sell more than 1,000 copies. It’s a very segmented business.
I can cite examples of ASI authors who have sold thousands of books. The common threads, they were good books with solid marketing and promotional plans behind them.
As far as editing, we strongly recommend that all of our authors enlist the services of an author before publishing their books. Those can be an editor of their choosing, or one of our professional editors — many of whom provide editing services to the traditional houses.
No book is published until the author signs off on the final version. We strongly encourage all authors to carefully examine their book before putting it into distribution.
If you have any questions about Author Solutions or self publishing, I encourage you to contact me through our Web site at http://www.authorsolutions.com.
Best,
Kevin A. Gray
Author Solutions, Inc.
Editors Note: I can also name you people who have hit the lottery but I don’t consider then Financial experts.
August 2nd, 2009 at 3:33 pm
Xlibris published my first two books, EXTRACTION and INTERDICTION this past year. I was motivated and enthused to market my work. The first nightmare I experienced was when I contacted a large distribution house that wanted to market my books was, Xlibris could not print the smaller “Airport size” paperbacks. I lost the opportunity but continued to do book signings and the book was reviewed well and then I discovered the second nightmare. The hardback retailed at $29.00 and the “paperback” at $19.00—-no flexability from Xlibris on the price. What new author can sell their work at those prices unless they are on Glen Beck or the spinner zoner five times a week like chubbo Dick Morris?????—For the sequels to these two which will be finished within the next 90 days, I’ll be in the book printing.publishing/distribution business. The other problem with Xlibris was communications–I think the girl said she was in the Phillaippines??? and the marketing posters and bookmarkers can be made at Kinkos for 1/3 the cost. I have learned that finishing the manuscript and proofing it is only the start of the authors adventure into the search for the limelight.