Publisher Reviews

CreateSpace is the publishing engine of global online retailer and publisher Amazon. Createspace began life in 2002 as CustomFlix Labs (DVD), originally intended to make widespread distribution easier for independent filmmakers by providing on-demand DVD production. In 2000, a small group of writers pooled resources to form Booksurge with the intention of creating opportunities for authors to self-publish their books and retain content rights and sales profits. Both companies quickly flourished and in 2005, Amazon acquired them, with CustomFlix Labs changing its name to CreateSpace in 2007. By late 2009, Amazon took the logical step and merged CreateSpace and […]

Diadem Books are a Scottish author solutions company based in Fife, Scotland, and run by Charles Muller, a South African born academic and former hotelier. An author in his own right, he founded Diadem Books in 1997 and for many years used iUniverse’s print on demand service to issue Diadem’s published books. Diadem became a sister company of Spiderwize in 2010.

“Diadem Books was founded in 1997 by Charles Muller, who is Editor-in-Chief and Proprietor of Diadem Books. Since then well over 200 books have been published and given worldwide exposure through Diadem Books in association with the US company

Aventine Press is one of those publishing services I continually keep coming across when I read about self-published books, particular in online magazines and self-publishing reviews. It’s like stumbling upon a sheepdog in a country cabin in the mountains sprawled out in front of a roaring fire. You know you are home and you don’t have to keep looking over your shoulder for the wolves. Mind you— didn’t the uni-bomber live in a log cabin in the mountains?

• Author Discount: Most self-publishing authors purchase numerous copies of their own book for marketing giveaways, reviews, to sell or to distribute to

Authors Online describe their company as an author solutions service. They proudly claim to be the original UK based company to offer a digital Print On Demand publishing service with full distribution. They may have been, but a lot has changed in self-publishing since they first began in internet publishing in 1997. There are more companies offering these services across the globe than at any time ever before, and the quality of service can vary widely.

A look at the Authors On Line web site quickly tells you that they are book and author driven with sizeable space given over […]

Wingspan Press is a US based author solutions service with offices in Livermore, Northern California, just a few miles shy of San Francisco. They were formed around a group of frustrated writers tired of the commercial sales-driven publishing world and the ‘agent/publisher loop’. So Wingspan Press began, (frustrations I assume finally cast aside) with a focus on quality and customer service and a desired not to be grouped with POD publishing and the negative perception that it is overrun with scam artists, hacks and well-meaning but inexperienced staff.

“Our focus is on quality and customer service. Our business rules are

Wasteland Press is an author solutions service based in Shelbyville, Kentucky. I might stand corrected, but I think this is the first company we have reviewed from the state of Kentucky. Timothy Veeley is their CEO and he started Wasteland Press in 2000. I thought it a rather disparaging name for an author solutions service, but according to Veeley, it was named after his favourite T.S. Eliot poem, The Waste Land. Their about us snippet from the website claims they specialize in ‘publishing poetry, short stories, religious/inspirational, fiction, and non-fiction novels for writers trying to get noticed.’ Unless I find […]

When I first started researching companies who provide author solutions services some years ago, Virtualbookworm was one high on the radar. About four or five years ago, had you dropped ‘self-publishing’ as a keyword into a Google search or visited many self-publishing resources looking for information on self-publishing, you can bet VBW would have been pretty high up there in prominence. Try the same now and you will have to do far more extensive searches before you come across the name, VBM.

Instinctively, when I came across VBM a few years ago, I held off reviewing them. In many ways, […]