Book Country: It Was Part of the Author Solutions Sale

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We covered the Author Solutions sale last week, but there was an aspect of that sale that escaped just about everyone’s attention: Book Country. It’s now part of Author Solutions, not Penguin.

Let’s recap Book Country’s history, because even we had trouble remembering its genesis and evolution.

  • April 2011: Penguin launched the public beta of Book Country, a free online writing community focused on writers of genre fiction. The effort was launched by Molly Barton, former director of business development at Penguin and president of Book Country, who pitched the concept to the Pearson Innovation Fund. (Pearson was the parent company of Penguin at the time.) During coverage of the launch, Barton said that Book Country would eventually offer self-publishing services for a fee, and that it was formed as a company separate from Penguin.
  • November 2011: Book Country announced the addition of self-publishing services. This marked the first time one of the Big Six (now Big Five) entered the self-publishing market. All services were provided in-house, rather than being outsourced. The development was met with considerable negative commentary from the self-publishing establishment, but at the time, Victoria Strauss of Writer Beware studied the service’s operations and found them reasonable and above board.
  • February 2012: Book Country announced its first member to be “discovered” on the site and picked up by Penguin in a traditional publishing deal.
  • July 2012: Pearson (parent company of Penguin) acquired Author Solutions.
  • October 2012: Penguin and Random House announced their plans to merge; the merger became official in July 2013.
  • January 2013: Book Country announced changes to their services. They abandoned print self-publishing services and focused on ebook distribution. Royalty rates for ebooks were increased from 70 to 85 percent, presumably to compete better against services such as Smashwords. Barton acknowledged help from developers at Author Solutions. While it was not formally announced at the time, Author Solutions began providing some of Book Country’s services.
  • July 2013: Book Country announced another round of changes: they added many more categories to the community, departing from their original focus on genre fiction. Also, they added an online bookstore where members and readers could purchase ebooks published through the site’s publishing platform. It was formally acknowledged that services offered through Book Country, such as book cover design and line editing, were performed by Author Solutions, and that customer service lines were manned by Author Solutions.
  • July/August 2013: Booktango, an ebook distribution service of Author Solutions, merged its bookstore with Book Country’s.
  • November 2013: Book Country launched a curated page on Kickstarter to help writers get their projects funded.
  • January 2014: Molly Barton left Penguin for academia and consulting work, and now leads the startup Serial Box, which she has co-founded with Julian Yap.

Bottom line: As of today, you’ll still find Penguin Random House branding all over the Book Country website and social media profiles. We asked Keith Ogorek, senior vice president of marketing at Author Solutions, what the sale means for Book Country. He said: “Book Country has been reporting to Author Solutions for two years while we were under PRH [Penguin Random House] ownership. We designed and maintained the technology that supports the website, and we have also been managing community engagement and outreach since then. That will not change under new ownership.”

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