The wild wild west of self-publishing has a new marshall in town: AuthorHouse and iUniverse.

According to Publishers Weekly, there are an estimated 86,000 self-publishing companies in the United States. With over 200,000 new titles per year flooding the book market, primarily because of self-publishing, consolidation of the space is a good thing for everyone.

As I travel around the country talking to aspiring and published authors, I hear horror stories about various publisher dealings. One guy self-published with a company, paid his fees, and never saw a galley: the business went bankrupt before they could finish his book. Another author published with a company, the company closed its doors, and now he can’t even get his files from the publisher to keep it active at Lightning Source. Another company in Indiana sold an “authorfest” book show to their authors at Franklin College, only to have four people show up (three of them were authors that paid to exhibit).

AuthorHouse has been the 500 lb. gorilla in the self-publishing space for several years now. With nearly 30,000 active titles in Amazon, their closest competitor has been iUniverse with just over 17,000 active titles. Everyone else is a distant third in size, which doesn’t mean they can’t help you get published, they just don’t have the experience and breadth of services that an AuthorHouse or iUniverse has.

I’ve had a few people comment that AuthorHouse and iUniverse merged to run everybody out of business. Not necessarily. I think both parties felt that the industry can benefit from having an undisputed market leader in a space that has less than stellar reviews over the last 10 years. Lifting the visibility, reputation, quality, distribution, and overall perception of self-publishing will help everyone, including their competitors.

To take AuthorHouse’s position as a market leader a step further, they launched WordClay.com quietly a few months ago. True “self-publishing” has really taken hold at Lulu.com and AuthorHouse wants to extend into that online “do-it-yourself” space. Thousands of free accounts are started on Lulu.com each week with a small percentage of those actually finishing their book’s design, layout, and cover design. People find out that laying out a book isn’t as easy as they thought. Lulu.com is a pure online play, meaning all their services are available online with no or little offline support.

In comes AuthorHouse with a headquarters in Bloomington, Indiana with nearly 180 employees that are eagerly waiting for someone to raise a white flag in WordClay.com to help them finish their book. Need your manuscript edited? How about a fancier cover design? Or maybe you need some illustrations for your children’s book? AuthorHouse/iUniverse can help you fill in the gaps of your “do-it-yourself” publishing experience.

Keep an eye on the self-publishing industry in the coming months and years. As the smaller shops either close their doors or align themselves with printers, we’ll look back at the moves AuthorHouse has made in the last 6 months as a good thing for the entire industry: most importantly the authors themselves.