Compare Self Publishing Companies

Over the past five posts I’ve introduced 3rd party resources a writer can investigate when researching which self publishing company is best for his or her needs. This beats relying upon any one source (whether it be positive or negative) since it’s important to realize that single sources may lack knowledge, integrity, or applicability.  Now that the Internet is replacing newspapers, we are bombarded with more information than ever before, but unfortunately, the Internet lacks one component that made newspapers and journalism valuable — the vetting process.  You can’t believe everything you read on the Internet; you must do your homework, and that involves researching numerous sources and then combining that data into a value system you can actually use.

And that brings me to the process of statistically analyzing four sources I introduced previously so you can compare self publishing companies in a logical, mathematical way.   Some sources hate some companies and love others. Whenever you look at any source for any information, you should consider the date of the information and that source’s vested interest. So by combining the sources together to arrive upon a “sum total” you are better equipped to see an accurate “average score” of the companies you are examining.

Let’s compare self publishing companies now by performing this analysis on 20 different companies.  We will put those 20 publishers in a chart along the left in the order they appear in Top Self Publishing Firms, which lists 13 companies in it’s “Large & Medium” chapter. The remaining seven companies will appear underneath. We will place four of the sources I examined along the top.   Then we will apply a numeric value in the following manner:

Top Self Publishing Firms – There are 13 companies in the “Large and Medium” category in Stacie Vander Pol’s book, ranked from best to worse. So I applied a numeric value for each of them ranging from 13 (good) to 1 (not so good).

TopTen Reviews – Since there are ten companies ranked, I will apply a numeric value for each one. The company they rank #1 will receive 10 points, the company they rank #2 will receive 9 points, and so on.

Top Consumer Reviews – Since they rank 8 companies, I will apply a 8-1 numeric value.

Fine Print of Self Publishing – Rather than charting all 45 companies that are analyzed here, we will stick with the 20 companies included in either the “Large and Medium” category of  Top Self Publishing Firms, TopTen Reviews, or Top Consumer Reviews.  Comparing 20 of anything is enough analysis.  Of those, we will apply a numeric value based upon the book’s categories in the following manner:  “Outstanding” Companies get 3 points. “Pretty Good” companies get 2 points. “Just OK” companies get 1 point.  And since “Publishers to Avoid” sounds worse than not being in the book at all, those companies lose a point.

Self Publishing Review doesn’t compare self publishing companies against one another, per se, as these other 4 sources do, so cannot play a role in this self publishing comparison.

And that leaves us with this analysis below (blanks indicate no presence in that particular source):

I don’t mention other companies by name in my blog.  After all, that wouldn’t be very sporting to “Company #20” and certainly not to Company #13– hmm, I guess it’s unlucky after all.

And that’s not even the point of this posting. The point is the concept of combining sources of information to arrive upon a general consensus of data. Now if one were looking to find flaws in the data above, the easiest thing to say would be Top Self Publishing Firms is weighted too heavily because that value system goes to 13 while the others go to 10, 8, and 4, respectively.

Fair enough.  So let’s apply a 10-point system to all four sources and see what that tells us next time…