Urging Authors to be Entrepreneurs: iUniverse CEO Kevin Weiss (Part 7)

SM: What should I have asked you that I didn’t? KW: We have not talked about our overseas facility yet. I recently did a press conference with the governor of Indiana where I announced the closure of our Shanghai facility.

Urging Authors to be Entrepreneurs: iUniverse CEO Kevin Weiss (Part 6)

SM: Will your publishers be paying a fee to gain access to the service? KW: Yes, they will pay a fee to use the service. In this business, if you do not have critical mass it is really hard to drive customer satisfaction and to get costs in line.

Urging Authors to be Entrepreneurs: iUniverse CEO Kevin Weiss (Part 5)

SM: From a writer’s perspective, one of the biggest issues is marketing. If you are an author without an existing platform, how do you market your book, aside from to your friends and family? KW: That is the biggest complaint that writers have. We will launch something focused on author marketing by the end of

Read Full Article »

Urging Authors to be Entrepreneurs: iUniverse CEO Kevin Weiss (Part 4)

SM: How big do you think the self-publishing, or publish on demand (POD), market is? KW: McMillen, Random House, and HarperCollins have all asked that question. My answer is that it is as big as anything else out there. There could be as many as a million manuscripts sitting around waiting to be published; people

Read Full Article »

Urging Authors to be Entrepreneurs: iUniverse CEO Kevin Weiss (Part 3)

SM: Your plan is to enable all types of publishers to have an online service? KW: Not the publishers, the small printers. Printers could use this as a front end to what they are doing. Communities like Writers.net or Gather.com could make use of that as well. What we are doing is giving people an

Read Full Article »

Urging Authors to be Entrepreneurs: iUniverse CEO Kevin Weiss (Part 2)

SM: We should establish some context for iUniverse, Author Solutions, and your portfolio of companies. What is the history between iUniverse and Author Solutions, and how did Bertram Capital get involved in them? KW: Author House is a company that was founded ten years ago in Bloomington, Indiana, and iUniverse is a company founded eight

Read Full Article »

Urging Authors to be Entrepreneurs: iUniverse CEO Kevin Weiss (Part 1)

Writing a book takes dedication. For many authors it is a culminating, defining feat of their lives. Sadly, the chances of an author’s book actually being read are miniscule at best.

Tackling EDA’s Broken Business Model: Blaze DFM CEO Jacob Jacobsson (Part 7)

SM: Is TSMC making overtures to acquire you? JJ: You have to ask them that. I don’t think either party has an interest in that kind of setup today because we want to see how this plays out. It is not something we are talking about actively.