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Reading the landscape
How Kevin Weiss plotted high growth in a stagnant industry for Author Solutions
By Mark Scott
Smart Business | August 2009
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Kevin Weiss had witnessed other publishing industries fall victim to the independents. Major labels in both the film and music business had watched, seemingly helpless to stop it, as the independents took away one artist after another.
“When you go to a movie today, most of those guys who are doing those movies are independent film houses that have been picked up by the big distributors,” Weiss says. “There is a whole lot of independent music out there that is great music today.”
In his mind, Weiss could see with crystal-clear clarity the same potential for the independent publishing industry when he joined Author Solutions as its president and CEO in December 2007.
“They are having trouble making money, and they’re being attacked in multiple places, including by Amazon, who is trying to cut them out,” Weiss says. “The fact is, (the publishing industry) has a model that doesn’t work. Independent publishing is absolutely here and now.”
Weiss was convinced that not only did he have a model that would work but also a model he could successfully implement at Author Solutions. The challenge was to take the passion and energy he felt for this grand opportunity and convey it to the nearly 1,000 employees whom he needed in order to make it happen.
“You can set the direction and you can start to change the focus of the corporation, but you really have to win the hearts and minds of the people and establish the vision of where you want to go,” Weiss says.
“For me, the hardest thing I’ve had to do here is really transform the thinking and focus of the business that we’re not this little $18 million company in Bloomington, Ind. We can be a $100 million company growing at 30 percent a year.”
By displaying a single-minded focus on achieving his goal, communicating directly and clearly to his people and establishing a solid focus on the customer, Weiss and Author Solutions brought 19,000 titles to market in 2008, six times the number of titles of consumer publisher Random House, or about one out of every 20 book titles in the United States last year.
Here is how Weiss put Author Solutions in a position to flourish.
