Self-publishing company Author Solutions, Inc. (ASI), whose imprints include AuthorHouse and iUniverse, has acquired its competitor Xlibris for an undisclosed sum. The two companies, which publish books for a fee, released a combined total of nearly nineteen thousand titles in 2008.
Last year Indiana-based ASI alone published twelve thousand titles, selling 2.5 million copies. Since it was founded in 1997, Xlibris, which is headquartered in Philadelphia, has put out roughly twenty thousand titles by fifteen thousand authors.
In addition to book publication, the publishers also sell services such as editing, illustration, distribution, and marketing, which ASI hopes to enhance as a result of its acquistion. "Xlibris offers leading-edge marketing tools for authors that we will now be able to offer our writers," said the ASI president and CEO Kevin Weiss, the Wall Street Journal reported.
"From the outset we believed ASI could help lead the way in transforming the publishing industry," Weiss said in a press release. "This acquisition gives us an even stronger base from which to help both authors and publishing companies compete successfully today and in the future."
