Urging Authors to be Entrepreneurs: iUniverse CEO Kevin Weiss (Part 3)

SM: Your plan is to enable all types of publishers to have an online service?

KW: Not the publishers, the small printers. Printers could use this as a front end to what they are doing. Communities like Writers.net or Gather.com could make use of that as well. What we are doing is giving people an opportunity to monetize what they have. We are fortunate to have a capital base behind us. The publishing industry, outside of the large trader publishers, is actually quite good. There are more than 1,000 qualified publishers outside of the US alone. Some of these publishers have a real art and skill regarding certain genres. They will do 12 to 20 books a year. They do not have $1.5 million to create a high value solution. We come along and provide such technology.

SM: Wordclay is one of your portfolio of products. You have a bunch of other services as well?

KW: We are a full value services publishing company. We do everything that is required to create a quality book. We have a portfolio of editorial services, custom cover and back design, ghostwriters, marketing for authors, and more. We deliver quality marketing services for authors. In general, we can compete and deliver high quality products in the marketplace.

SM: What is your competitive landscape like?

KW: In the self-publishing world we are the largest company. One competitor is BookSurge, and another is Lulu. Those two are companies to be reckoned with. Lulu is terrific. We do a little bit of what they are doing, but we do not brand. They have done an incredible job of branding who they are. Nobody knows Author Solutions.

SM: People do know iUniverse, that is a strong brand.

KW: Some people know Wordclay, but I am not going to spent millions branding it. I would just as soon focus on printers and publishers.

SM: You gave me a lot of impressive numbers. How do BookSurge and Lulu stack up against those numbers?

KW: Nobody goes public with those numbers. We have taken a look and we have used surrogates. For example, we go to Amazon and do an analysis of titles published by Lulu and BookSurge. BookSurge is significantly smaller than we are. This year we will publish 17,000 – 20,000 titles and we will do somewhere in the neighborhood of 3 million books.

SM: Is Lulu between you and BookSurge?

KW: Lulu is bigger than BookSurge, no doubt about it. I am guessing, I don’t know these numbers exactly. I bet this year Lulu will do 1.5 million to 1.8 million books sold. That is good size, and they are a good force. They do a lot of other things as well.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Urging Authors to be Entrepreneurs: iUniverse CEO Kevin Weiss
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