AuthorHouse, formerly known as 1stBooks, is a self-publishing company based in the United States.^[1] AuthorHouse provides self publishing and utilizes print on demand services.^[2] Authorhouse has printed manuscripts by nearly 40,000 people.

[edit] History

1stBooks was founded in Bloomington, Indiana, USA, in January 1997 by an aspiring author who had received more than 100 rejection letters from publishers; its first e-book appeared in June of that year. In January 1999, it started using print on demand technology to produce paper books. By December 2001 it had published 350,000 books and by January 2004, 2 million books from 18,500 authors — an average of 110 copies per author — had been printed. In March 2004 the company changed its name to AuthorHouse. It opened an office in Milton Keynes, United Kingdom in May 2004. By December 2004 it had published more than 3 million books. In December 2005, AuthorHouse was nominated by the Indiana Chamber of Commerce for the Small Business of the Year Award.^[3] In October 2006, AuthorHouse won the Silver Award in Business excellence from BKD.^[4]

The California company Bertram Capital purchased AuthorHouse in 2007 from the previous owners, Gazelle TechVentures, who had owned AuthorHouse since 2002. Later that year, Betram established Author Solutions and acquired one of AuthorHouse's competitors^[5] - iUniverse - before relocating iUniverse's operations to Indiana in early 2008.^[6]

In August 2006, AuthorHouse suffered legal troubles when it was sentenced to pay $240,000 in punitive damage as well as $230,000 in actual damage to romance author Rebecca Brandewyne and her parents for publishing a book by her ex-husband that was libelous of them. Although the court acknowledged that AuthorHouse employed a business model that placed a degree of responsibility for the content of works upon the authors, in this case they found that AuthorHouse had failed to act when it was informed that the book may include libelous content.^[7]

[edit] External links

• AuthorHouse - official site

[edit] References