Not long after the announcement of Pronoun’s closure last month, a similar service was pulled from the market: Bonnier’s Type & Tell. It wasn’t even a year ago that the Swedish media company announced Type & Tell’s launch into the English market, and now the venture is already shuttered. (Its Swedish operations, established in 2015, will continue.)
So what happened?
Type & Tell was celebrated by Bonnier as a new kind of self-publishing service, but what was really new about it was difficult to discern. It offered the same smorgasbord of services as other companies, and at similar prices, but didn’t carry a brand or unique position that would help it stand out. In some parts of the world, Bonnier is best known in magazine-publishing circles, and even then, it’s not a household name among American consumers—at least not in the same way as a Condé Nast or Time Inc. In the UK, Bonnier has made itself a book-publishing force to be reckoned with, yet it appears that Bonnier’s clout in the UK book trade didn’t translate to an equivalent success with self-publishers there.
The closure of Type & Tell is not so dissimilar to that of Pronoun;in both cases, major publishing conglomerates decided to step back from the self-publishing services market after a short period of time. We can readily envision the corporate meetings addressing the thin profitability of these services and where the company’s time and energy is best spent; publishers are not author-services companies in their heart of hearts, and these decisions acknowledge that. Jon Watt, who manages Type & Tell UK, said of the closure (paywall), “I think the self-publishing services market is quite a slow burner. We’re asking authors to invest money in their writing, and that’s rarely an instant decision. It’s not automated, it’s about building a relationship, and that takes time.” It’s not hard to read between the lines here; there’s considerable expense involved in attracting and keeping author-clients.
Bottom line: The self-publishing service market first blossomed with the advent of print-on-demand companies in the early 2000s, and it was a booming business before ebooks and Amazon KDP arrived on the scene. Consolidation and closures have been happening ever since, and it’s exceedingly difficult to launch a new self-publishing service company that stands out from the crowd and earns the trust and respect of authors. For most traditional publishing companies, the work is not worth the potential revenue. This is why Author Solutions’ white label service has been so attractive to traditional publishers: it offers the profits without the headaches via Archway (Simon & Schuster), WestBow (Thomas Nelson), and Balboa Press (Hay House). The fact that such services overcharge and take advantage of authors’ lack of knowledge about the industry doesn’t seem to bother the affiliated publishers.
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
