Author-Services CompaniesRay Sabini is a fourth-grade teacher in New York. After reading a letter from Benjamin Franklin extolling the virtue of curing the smell of human gas, he wrote a book called Sweet Fartsabout a student who tries to find the cure for farting.
Sabini used the pen name Raymond Bean so that a book about farting did not harm his reputation as a teacher. He pitched the book to traditional publishers for eighteen months with no success. Then his wife told him about a company called BookSurge that helped authors self-publish their books.
Sabini used the company to release Sweet Farts in November 2008. By March 2009 it was an Amazon children’s bestseller. It did so well that Amazon Publishing contacted him to write two more books to make a three-part fart series.
BookSurge is now part of CreateSpace, the author-services company of Amazon. Sabini completed his fart series with Amazon Publishing, but he still used CreateSpace for his twelve-part series School Is a Nightmare , because he wanted to publish a new title every ninety days.
Firms such as CreateSpace, Lulu, Blurb, and the imprints (an imprint is the name of the publisher of a book; traditional publishing houses are often made up of dozens of imprints) of Author Solutions (Dellarte, AuthorHouse, Wordclay, Trafford, Xlibris, Palibro, Inkubook, and iUniverse) act as intermediaries between authors and online and brick-and-mortar resellers. These companies provide services such as copyediting, conversion, layout, cover design, printing, and then send your book to resellers.
Pros:
· Fewer reseller programs to join, learn, maintain, and track. It’s time consuming to create an account, pick your price, upload your Word file and cover, provide banking information, and monitor sales and payments for one reseller. Try doing this for three or four. Author-services companies can alleviate much of this pain.
· One-stop shopping. If you’re new to publishing, you may not have all the contacts and vendors that you need for editing and cover design. Author-services companies may provide what you need to publish your book.
Cons:
· Reduced revenue. The services these companies provide come at a price. You can buy them on an à la carte basis for some services, but you usually pay a percentage of your royalty off the top.
· Overdependence.The good news is that you have to deal with fewer organizations. The bad news is that if your author-services vendor experiences an outage when you’re in the publishing process, you’re in deep trouble. Worse, if your vendor experiences financial issues, you may never collect your royalty.
· Poor quality.Author-services companies often use independent contractors and offshore labor to provide editing services. These people may not be native speakers of your language, and true fluency is necessary for good editing. You won’t have much choice in selecting them, so you might be able to find better ones yourself. That said, you might not want the burden of finding them yourself.

· Extensive “fine print.” You’ll learn more about this in chapter 15: “How to Use Author Services.” For now, suffice it to say that some of the options that look easy and inexpensive might come back to haunt you later if you’re successful. If you’re not successful, it won’t matter. 
Guy Kawasaki has written 12 books, 10 of which were traditionally published. His newest book is APE: Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur - How to Publish a Book, which helps people understand how and why to self-publish. 

APE: Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur - How to Publish a Book, by Guy Kawasaki and Shawn Welch, is available as an eBook ($9.99) and in paperback ($24.99). Visit  http://apethebook.com/