Penguin in plot to find the latest bestseller

BRITAIN: The booming self-publishing book market has gone mainstream after Penguin books’ owner splashed out on a deal to buy one of the largest platforms for authors without a contract.

Author Solutions, which is based in Bloomington, Indiana, was bought for US$116 million (NZ$144.5m). It started in 2007 as a professional self-publishing service and has since marketed and distributed 190,000 titles for 150,000 authors.

It is one of the biggest players in the self-publishing market, which has blossomed in the last three years to become the fastestgrowing sector within publishing.

About 211,000 books were selfpublished last year, up 60 per cent on 2010, as more authors took advantage of the rising number of e-readers, such as Kindles, to circumvent traditional publishers.

Penguin, a division of media firm Pearson, which also owns the Financial Times and several educational businesses, was a pioneer in the 1930s with success in publishing inexpensive paperbacks.

Penguin’s chief executive, John Makinson, said that the purchase was the biggest deal to unite an established book publisher with a self-publishing specialist.

Kevin Weiss, chief executive of Author Solutions, denied that the company was a ‘‘vanity publisher’’ – companies that offer to print books for those willing to pay for the privilege – given the boom in self-publishing. ‘‘It’s no longer in left field,’’ he said.

Makinson said that selfpublishing had become a serious choice for professional writers, with several authors achieving blockbuster success without a conventional book deal. ‘‘The success of Amanda Hocking [who has sold 1.5m books] and the Fifty Shades of Grey phenomenon is making more people think about writing seriously as a career,’’ he said.