iUniverse and Kensington Publishing Announce Partnership

Posted on September 25, 2002

iUniverse and Kensington Publishing Corp. have announced a partnership that gives bestselling iUniverse romance titles a chance to reach an editor at Kensington. Kensington, which publishes fiction and nonfiction in all formats, and publishes romance fiction through its Zebra Books imprint, has entered into the partnership in order to find new talent.

The agreement between iUniverse and Kensington indicates that there is some potential for authors with strong sales at epublishing outlets to move to traditional publishers. Kensington has already picked up several iUniverse authors prior to the announcement of this partnership, including Ruby Ann Boxcar, author of Ruby Ann's Down Home Trailer Park Cookbook. Ruby is now working on her third book in the series for Kensington, after publishing the initial book with iUniverse.

"We have many great authors and the Kensington partnership validates that fact," said Kimra Hawley, iUniverse's Chief Executive Officer, "Kensington is the number one U.S. based publisher of romance titles, and we feel this partnership is a way for our bestselling authors in this popular category to achieve success."

Time Warner also recently tried to find talent electronically with its iPublish venture, but the company was closed shortly after the AOL Time Warner merger. iPublish sought to find the best talent among manuscripts submitted to its peer-review online community, but the funding behind the project was pulled before there was enough time to see if it would have been a success. There have also been epublished authors from iUniverse.com and other epublishers that have made the move from epublisher to traditional publisher. Strong sales can definitely interest publishers because these books have already proven that they can sell. If this agreement helps Kensington discover future bestsellers, then other agreements between epublishers and tradional publishers may emerge.

"iUniverse has proven its leadership position, providing a level of quality production and support to self-published authors that has helped them to reach their audiences and, for many, bring their books to the attention of established publishers," said Steven Zacharius, President of Kensington Publishing, "We're excited about this new partnership. Focusing our resources to discover new talent is a long standing commitment at Kensington that has brought us great success and satisfaction. Our alliance with iUniverse, a company that works with some of the best independently published authors and continues to attract an amazing range of new and ambitious writers, offers us the opportunity to further expand and enhance those efforts."