Day: October 10, 2007

Authorhouse and iUniverse

Eoin Purcell

Three month old deals re-emerge
PODdy Mouth – Daily Dirt on POD and Self-Publishing has an interesting piece advising AuthorServices who to buy next following their acquisition of iUniverse.

Of course, not missing a trick, Poddy also points out that this is genius re-selling of old PR! Reading the Bookseller you might not know that!

For my money, given the demand for services such as this it almost seems a mistake to broadcast the fact that you are rolling up the capacity of this sector. With Amazon launching CreatSpace and no guarantee that the larger publishers won’t make similar moves, you would think AuthorServices would move and keep quiet!

Eoin

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HarperCollins launches Authonomy

Eoin Purcell

What is it?
The bookseller news item has the full breakdown (see below) but you can read some more here on MSN and a bit of analysis here:

Authonomy, at www.authonomy.com, will initially be rolled out by HCUK in early 2008, with the intention of it becoming a global programme in the future. The site will connect unpublished authors with readers, and will allow anyone to participate. Readers will be able to support their favourite manuscripts, with HC guaranteeing to consider the most popular for publication. HC anticipates that many of the readers will be industry professionals looking for new talent.

What is going on?
Seems to me that HC are quite cleverly using the web at its best to do the same job that usually gets dumped on the junior editor (not at Mercier I should add. I review nearly very script that comes in). But will it work in their favour? It is a hard call, it may be that the site will become a destination for good writers with talent (it s difficult to tell without seeing how exactly they intend to execute the task they have set themselves) but if, as HC suggest themselves, the site is also a magnet for publishing professionals from beyond HC there is no guarantee that they will take the cream. In fact they could well forced the price of the cream up and simply improve the scrum for talent while costing themselves quite a bit in hosting and marketing.

But what do I know
Eoin