April 5, 2005

Increase in Book Business Expected

Kris Wise  /  Post and Courier

BookSurge LLC foresees prosperity with Amazon

BookSurge LLC, a print-on-demand book publisher that operates next to a bingo hall in a Dorchester Road strip mall, expects a surge in business in coming months thanks to its new owner: Amazon.com. The North Charleston company plans to hire at least 10 new employees as a rush of wannabe writers comes looking to cash in on the Amazon name.

"I think it's a real validation of the effort we put forward in building this," said Mitchell Davis, one of the four people who started BookSurge five years ago in a little downtown Charleston printing shop. "I think Amazon is a smart company," Davis said Monday. "I think they're going to pump a lot of money into the right projects, and I think our visions align very well. The reality is that it has to work out in a business sense, too. We want to keep doing what we're doing, just on a grander scale."

The 60-person publishing house works now in a low-key, 14,000-square-foot facility with exposed brick walls and cement floors. Amazon acquired the company last week for an undisclosed amount. BookSurge officials say Amazon has announced no plans to move the facility or make any significant changes to its structure. Davis said he and the only other original owner, company president Robert Ford, will stay on as part of the BookSurge management team, working mostly to drum up even more new authors from around the globe.

Since 2000, the company estimates it has published more than 10,000 titles, and it works with other publishers in at least a dozen countries. It's likely Amazon will begin incorporating parts of BookSurge's publishing systems to help reduce the amount of storage space needed for the giant online retail operation.

What makes the BookSurge system unique is that it prints books only after they've been ordered. Authors pay to have their book published. The books are advertised on the BookSurge and Amazon web sites. If one copy is ordered, one copy is printed and shipped out. No giant warehouse is necessary and no money is wasted if somebody writes a flop that doesn't sell.

The attraction for writers is that BookSurge will publish anything by anyone in any language at any time. That's sort of the company slogan, Davis said."Previously, things like language or the esoteric nature of a book's content, there were any number of challenges that would keep a person from a certain book at any one time," he said. "A lot of them have to do with time and space and money. We mitigate all of those obstructions."

It's not just novices who are taking advantage of the opportunity at BookSurge. The ease of the process is drawing in already-published writers looking to bypass some of the headaches that often accompany partnerships with traditional publishers, Davis said.

For example, novelist Robert Morgan, who had a best-seller a few years ago with his fiction book "Gap Creek," chose BookSurge to publish his first book of poetry. One of the company's best- selling books is an insider's guide for corporations, written after the Enron scandal broke, on how to navigate federal accounting laws. Charleston journalist Jonathan Sanchez published a compilation of stories about the Cooper River Bridge Run through BookSurge, and two Washington D.C.-based psychologists scored a hit and an appearance on "Good Morning America" with "The Facelift Diaries," a log of their experiences with plastic surgery. BookSurge also published Dan Brown's recent best-seller, "The DaVinci Code," in Arabic.