Blurb® authors earn $1m in profits in 2011

Authors Ship Nearly 100K Books as the Blurb Platform Disrupts the Publishing Industry

San Francisco, Calif. — March 14, 2012 — Blurb®, the creative publishing and marketing platform, today announced that Blurb authors earned more than $1M in profits on the sale of nearly 100K books in 2011 as part of the Blurb Set Your Price program. Author demand to self-publish books of all kinds continues to rise: Blurb’s customer base grew by 44% in 2011, and the company shipped more than 1.8M books to 69 countries. The success of Blurb authors reinforces the market readiness for the self-publishing model.

Blurb continues to see growth across on-demand publishing categories including business books, portfolio books, design projects, photography books, novels, and more. Blurb’s commitment to high quality has positioned the company to expand its offering into more categories, and into higher-end markets. Blurb’s new ProLine customization options open up more than 500 possible combinations of book size, cover type, paper quality, etc.

“I’ve had considerable success as a traditionally-published author,” says Larry Smith, editor of SMITH Magazine, home of the bestselling Six-Word Memoir® project and book series. “Still, working with Blurb is an amazing window into the future of bookmaking and marketing: I produced our first Blurb book Six Words About Work, from first line to finished book in seven weeks. The result is as fine a book as I’ve done. Our next book with Blurb, SIX-WORD MEMOIRS ON JEWISH LIFE, is due out in April.”

"When quality is this high, it makes the lines between 'traditional' and 'self-published' blurred to the point of extinction,” Smith continued. “The contributors to the WORK book were every bit as thrilled as those of our previous books done with a major publisher."

In addition to its bookstore-quality books, Blurb is seeing traction within its ebook line, with an average of 2,000 downloaded books per week in 2011. Blurb customers can take any book they’ve already made with Blurb Bookify™ or Blurb BookSmart®, and buy or sell it as an ebook for just $1.99. Blurb is committed to further evolving its ebook platform, and innovating around the social nature of books.

“The Blurb platform allows self-published authors to set the price of their books and keep 100% of the profits,” said Eileen Gittins, founder and CEO, Blurb. “We’re also opening up social marketing channels like Facebook to help our authors spread the word about their books as broadly as possible. And it’s working – people are making real money on the Blurb platform, to the tune of nearly $1M in 2011.”

Blurb offers more support, marketing, and social tools for authors than any other self-publishing platform. Blurb authors can “slurp” manuscripts directly from Microsoft Word; create both “wordy” and illustrated books; and can easily share and promote books on Facebook and Twitter using the Blurb Bookshow ™ digital book preview.

For more information, and to create, share, promote, and sell your own book today, please visit www.blurb.com.

About Blurb®
Blurb® is a self-publishing platform and creative community that enables individuals to design, publish, share, sell, and distribute photo books, trade books, and magazines in both print and digital formats across the globe using its free, innovative book creation and layout tools. Founded in 2005 by Executive Chairman, Eileen Gittins, Blurb has nearly 2 million independent book authors worldwide, resulting in 3.9 million unique book titles, with more than 14 million units shipped to 80 countries around the world. The company is headquartered in San Francisco and can be found online at www.blurb.com.