Publish yourself and be damned

By Sarah Glazer
NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
Sunday, May 01, 2005, Page 19

`Self-publishing companies like iUniverse have been growing rapidly in recent years, displacing old-style vanity presses and competing with ... traditional houses.'

When Amy Fisher finished writing her memoir about shooting her lover's wife, she told her agent not to send the manuscript to New York publishers. Instead, Fisher, who made headlines in 1992 as the 17-year-old "Long Island Lolita,'' turned to iUniverse in Lincoln, Neb. The company charges authors several hundred dollars to convert a manuscript into a book and make it available for sale online.

Fisher's I Knew Then, which came out in September, is probably the first sure-fire success to start out under the imprint of a so-called self-publishing company. Other self-published books, notably The Celestine Prophecy and The Christmas Box, became best sellers, but their success was a

surprise to the publishing industry.

iUniverse is one of more than 100 "author services'' companies in a fast-growing industry aimed primarily at writers who can't get the attention of traditional publishers. Earlier this month Amazon.com got into the act, announcing that it had acquired BookSurge, a printing company with a self-publishing division based in Charleston, South Carolina, BookSurge uses print-on-demand technology that makes it possible to guarantee a two-day turnaround to print a book, even if only one customer orders a copy.

For the first time, print-on-demand companies are successfully positioning themselves as respectable alternatives to mainstream publishing and erasing the stigma of the old-fashioned vanity press. Some even make a case that they give authors an advantage -- from total control over the design, editing and publicity to a bigger share of the profits.

It was the issue of control that appealed to Amy Fisher and her co-author, Robbie Woliver, editor in chief of the weekly Long Island Press, where Fisher has a column. They were confident that the book would sell well; indeed it appeared on the New York Times paperback best-seller list in October, if only for a week.

"We figured we might make more money doing it this way,'' says Woliver, who called the royalties significantly higher than traditional publishers though he would not reveal the percentage. In a departure, iUniverse did not charge a fee for producing the book. But he also notes that Fisher was determined not to be sensationalized by the media, which she says presented a distorted picture of her as a promiscuous teenager (perhaps following the lead of prosecutors in the shooting case, who maintained she had been a call girl).

She wanted to control every aspect of the advertising and media interviews, Woliver says. "We knew that wasn't going to happen with a traditional publisher.''

Self-publishing like iUniverse have been growing rapidly in recent years, displacing old-style vanity presses and competing with the number of titles produced by traditional houses. AuthorHouse in Bloomington, Indiana, which leads the pack with more than 23,000 titles, sold approximately 1 million volumes between 1997, when it started business, and 2002. In 2003 alone, it sold another million volumes, mostly through online retailers, according to the company.

Amazon have some catching up to do to get to those levels; on the other hand, since it has nearly 47 million customer accounts, the potential growth for its print-on-demand business is obviously enormous.

The difference between traditional vanity presses and modern print-on-demand publishing is essentially technology. Instead of expensive offset printing, which mainstream publishers use, print-on-demand relies on a glorified digital printer.

The top three self-publishers -- AuthorHouse, iUniverse and Xlibris, based in Philadelphia -- all use the technology, and introduced a total of 11,906 new titles last year, according to R.R. Bowker's Books in Print database. By contrast, one of the few remaining old-style vanity presses, the 56-year-old Vantage Press in New York, produces between 300 and 600 titles a year.

Meanwhile, for as little as US$459, iUniverse will turn a manuscript into a paperback with a custom cover design, provide an International Standard Book Number -- publishing's equivalent of an ID number to place the book in a central bibliographic database -- and make it available at Amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com and other online retailers. Vantage charges anywhere from US$8,000 to US$50,000 for a limited quantity of copies, some owned by the author and the rest warehoused by Vantage.