I always enjoy comparing the success of our authors with the success of authors from our competitors. And fortunately, ForeWord Reviews makes that pretty easy with the announcement of their Book of the Year Finalists for 2010 at http://www.bookoftheyearawards.com/finalists/2010/ – You can search for any publisher and see how they perform.
Competitive analysis is something I don’t spend an enormous amount of time on, but I do try to keep up with other self-publishing firms as much as I can. In general, I only bother to keep a close eye on our five major competitors and they are, respectively, Publisher A, Publisher C, Publisher L, Publisher U, and Publisher X.
As I’ve mentioned in the past, I don’t mention other publishers by name in my blog, but it’s not difficult to unravel my super secret naming convention. Of course, if you were to agree with one rather vocal member of our Board, we don’t actually compete with Publisher C or L. To paraphrase: “That’s like saying Perrier competes with swamp water.” Meow.
But he has a point. Publisher C has a grand total of 3 finalists and if you are to believe their marketing claims, they publish roughly 1 trillion books a day (slight hyperbole), making for an award-winning percentage of approximately 0%. Similarly, Publisher L publishes so many books the Library of Congress had to open a whole another wing just to accommodate their volume (if you’re to believe a press release from April 1 that they distributed a few years back), and yet they published exactly zero ForeWord Book of the Year finalists in 2010. Their April Fool’s day release notwithstanding, that’s not a very high winning percentage. Perhaps this goes to show that publishing with one of those cheapo do-it-yourself outfits isn’t exactly the route to an award-winning book…. And interestingly, if you actually look at the “services” they’re starting to offer, they’re becoming pretty expensive, which is basically like adding insult TO injury.
More on the Book of the Year finalists and our other 3 competitors in a few hours…
President of Outskirts Press 