How to Be Your Own Publisher

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 ”If 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.)

Self-publishing companies 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, Ind., which leads the pack with more than 23,000 titles, sold approximately one 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 would 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 $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 $8,000 to $50,000 for a limited quantity of copies, some owned by the author and the rest warehoused by Vantage.) [NY Times]