New BookWorks post on the many mergers, acquisitions, agreements and more reshaping the environnment self-publishers work within.
It begins,
“On May 10, the R.R. Bowker Company, the main source in the United States for ISBN numbers and other services, said it plans to ally with two other publishing-related companies, FastPencil and Infinity Publishing, to offer a suite of services to help authors “write, edit, collaborate, format & publish your book.” It also indicated “distribution partners” would include Barnes & Noble, Amazon and others. Bowker said “this solution makes it easier to go from concept to manuscript to market.”
It’s the most recent example of many agreements, mergers, acquisitions and other connections in the book publishing environment. Headlines in the last few decades have pointed out the swallowing of one major national book publisher by another, but those are only the most visible instances. Indie publishers would be well served by maintaining awareness of other connections between companies with which they work. Sometimes these can help their interests—and sometimes not so much.
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