Publishing Business For Sale Directory - Listing Small Publisher Assets

Blog Posts On Publishing Assets

For a free estimate on the value of your copyrighted property, whether books you currently publish, an out-of-print book, a website, or for properties you are responsible for selling to settle an estate, e-mail me directly with as many details as possible. I'll not only give you a written estimate of the price, I may make you an offer if it fits my own acquisition list.

After a couple years of noodling about a central directory listing publishing assets for sale, I've decided to try to create one. It seems the only place I can find small publishers listed for sale is on craigslist, or anonymous websites that look like scam directories. My goal is to create a marketplace for the assets of small presses, authors and self publishers, including their in-print titles, out-of-print titles for which they hold the copyrights, and websites. The sort of listings I hope to attract are those that I might be willing to buy myself, with annual sales ranging from $1000 to $50,000 a year. In some instances, a publisher selling just a few hundred dollars a year might be of value to another small publisher trying to build a list for economies of scale, so I'm willing to look at everything. But don't waste my time with websites that have been slapped together from kits for the purpose of resale. I'm only interested in websites that contain original, copyrighted content that could have just as easily been published in books or magazines. I'll be happy to call you by phone if you prefer talking to e-mail. All inquires will be kept confidential. I'm soliciting listings to determine the feasibility of investing in custom software to handle them, but I'm also looking to acquire new publishing assets myself.

One likely source for listings, if I can figure out a way to reach them, would be executors of estates, especially for small publishers or self publishers who operated as sole proprietors. A small publishing business is not an asset that can be easily valued by somebody without extensive experience in the business, who can evaluate how much of the value of the list was due to the daily marketing efforts of the publisher, or the public platform of the self publisher. For an attorney or an executor to try to value such a business based on the previous year's sales could be disastrous, especially if estate taxes are involved. The sale price of publishing assets can't be determined until a buyer is found, and without a regular marketplace for such assets, I suspect they often go to waste. I worry about this in the case of my own estate planning, that nobody in my family could run the business effectively and that they'd get stuck selling out for less than a year's net profit.

Other sellers of small publishing businesses include owners who retire or move on to another career, who can no longer run the business for personal reasons, or who simply need the money in one chunk. If I needed to sell my own publishing business tomorrow, I have no idea where I would look for buyers. I might even try selling my existing titles individually to large trade publishers and to sell the website separately to a new publisher who could get the most benefit from it, but I doubt I could get the real value for it. Another source of publishing businesses would be from newer publishers who managed to get a business going but who just can't make a living at it. Whether they have one title or a dozen, as long as the books are in print and selling, they should have some market value to another small publisher. All listings will be caveat emptor, I'm not currently set up to research that sellers are who they say they are or have the sales that they claim, but I will talk to anybody who requests a listing and I reserve the right to reject listings for any reason.

Currently soliciting listings for Fall 2008, will post early if I gather enough.