Publisher Reviews

Wordclay publishing offers similar free self-publishing tools similar to Lulu. Of course, there’s no such thing as free self-publishing, as you’ll have to pay for each book, which can be more expensive than printing in bulk or using a service like Outskirts Press, which will design a book cover and cost less per book. In my own experience, I went with Lulu to save money on going with an entire publishing package, but when all was said and done – after hiring a designer for the cover, ordering books, and marketing, it might have made sense to go […]

Last May, Amazon attempted to muscle out other print on demand outlets by declaring that only Amazon-affiliated books released through BookSurge could be printed via Amazon. The warning declared that unless books printed via BookSurge, the “buy now” button would be deactivated. This unsurprisingly sent ripples through the entire self-publishing universe, as anyone with a POD book through Lulu or other outlook would not be able to sell books through the largest online book outlet. Booklocker.com, a print on demand outlet, filed an anti-trust suit against Amazon, a case which is still pending.

As terrible as this move was […]

This website recently received an email criticizing the content for not driving a line between self-publishing services like iUniverse or Author House and true self-publishing, in which you print up your own books independently. The argument that the former is not self-publishing at all, it’s subsidy publishing.

The argument can be made that even the new breed of self-publishing services does not resemble the old model of subsidy publishing – especially in terms of the amount of profit an author gets per book and the author’s ability to retain copyright. That issue aside, a place like iUniverse is commonly referred […]

The first thing you notice about Mill City Press is the quality of the website.  It has a matte-quality similar to book covers of contemporary fiction – and something that most self-publishers do not offer, as most publishers only offer glossy covers.  So Mill City’s website has the appearance of a traditional publisher, not a print on demand house.  Mill City Press just sounds like a traditional publisher.  One of the things we point out here in publisher reviews is that the less well-known self-publishers can actually pass for a legitimate publisher, unlike the major self-publishers like Lulu, iUniverse, and […]

You have to imagine that a site with the URL Selfpublishing.com gets a lot of traffic – it comes up first in Google results for “Self-Publishing.” That’s impressive but how’s the actual service? Overall, Selfpublishing.com offers well-priced packages that include services such as marketing, which makes Selfpublishing.com a good to choice to print a book. Though SelfPublishing.com is affiliated with an online bookstore, like every self-publishing service, the recommended use of selfpublishing.com is if your interested in starting an imprint, rather than publishing a book with AuthorHouse or iUniverse, which will bear the stamp of those presses.

What this means […]

Wheatmark is unique among self-publishers: it’s a kind of hybrid self-publisher/publisher.  Not that they turn anyone away – which is the main dividing line between a traditional publisher and a self-publisher – but they do give each author more personal contact.  So Wheatmark acts as a traditional publisher would: they try to help books get sold.  As a business model, this makes sense – if books get into the hands of more people, more new authors will want to sign up for the press.

Otherwise, self-publishing is kind of an isolated process.  On the one hand, this is good news: […]