iUniverse in Deal with Kensington's Zebra
by Steven Zeitchik -- Publishers Weekly, 9/23/2002
Hoping to gain currency among both unpublished authors and traditional publishers, iUniverse has announced a deal with Kensington that could give the Nebraska company's authors a better chance to get picked up by a traditional house.
According to the arrangement, iUniverse will package and present select titles to Zebra Books, Kensington's romance imprint. Books that sell 500 copies in six months will be eligible for review by a board set up by iUniverse. If the books pass muster, they will, after a possible slight repackaging, be sent to Kensington for review. The publisher will not be obligated to print any book. "It's not a press-release agreement. If it doesn't work, it just wastes everyone's time," said iUniverse CEO Kim Hawley.
The deal is meant to increase iUniverse's appeal to prospective authors. About 5,000 writers are currently with iUniverse, a number the firm will need to increase if it is to reach profitability. If this gambit works, Hawley said, the company could make deals with other houses in other genres.
Hawley views the deal as part of the company's drive to move away from being a subsidy house and toward one that performs author services. (The company has even brought in a packager to help with certain titles.) She said she is not worried that many of its authors have been rejected by houses like Kensington in the first place, citing an internal study that says that about half of iUniverse authors have never tried getting published by a traditional house.
To make the deal work, iUniverse will likely have to overcome the dilemma that has bedeviled it for some time: to become more appealing to authors, it needs to increase the odds that authors will get print deals, but by increasing print deals, it limits its royalty streams. Officials also acknowledge it will need to avoid some of the problems encountered by iPublish, the defunct division of AOL Time Warner that also bridged self-publishing and traditional publishing. "Part of the problem is that there hasn't always been a well-defined process for how to get from point A to point Z," Hawley said, adding that unless the process becomes more transparent, "people think their book will just end up at Random. It sets up a lot of false expectations."
