Author Solutions Buys Yet Another Rival
MediaBistro.com
April 7, 2009
Online self-publishing company Author Solutions (we're not calling them "vanity presses" anymore?) has bought rival Trafford Publishing, a Canada-based brick-and-mortar vanity press that has published more than 15,000 authors from 120 companies. This is just three months after Author Solutions purchased Xlibris. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
ASI has more than 900 employees worldwide, and now Trafford's 95 employees will be added to the mix. Geoffrey Reid, CEO of Trafford, told the Wall Street Journal that the purchase gives his employees greater security. He will remain CEO of Trafford after the sale.
According to the WSJ, self-publishing is hot, hot, hot: 411,000 books with ISBNs were published last year and "a significant number of those were do-it-yourself authors," according to Albert Greco, a professor at the Fordham Graduate School of Business who studies the book industry. Author Solutions' chief executive Kevin Weiss says the company will have $100 million in revenue in 2009.