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Any good idea that's worth actualizing is certainly worthy of being mimicked, replicated or just plain ripped off. Often, competitors will seize on the opportunity to take someone else's recipe, replace certain ingredients and then pass it off as their own. That holds true in the kitchen and in the board room.
King Printing, the pride of Lowell, MA, has been printing books since 1978 and is no stranger to educational and trade book manufacturing. On the educational side, King Printing has forged long-standing partnerships with publishing heavyweights such as Houghton Mifflin, Pearson, McGraw-Hill and Harcourt to offer short-run, fast-turnaround services.
Right around the turn of the millennium, Siddharth (Sid) and Adi Chinai—the father and son brain trust behind King Printing—decided to take their product to the Internet. The company now boasts a clientele list of more than 8,000, many of them small and independent publishers. Though adibooks.com may not have been the very first independent/self-publishing vehicle on the scene, it had plenty of company within a few years.
Undaunted, King Printing has been able to differentiate itself from the larger dotcoms in the marketplace—AuthorHouse, Xlibris and Lulu, among others—with a more personalized approach that provides guidance to authors who, quite obviously, are more adept at writing books than manufacturing them. That's when King Printing steps up to the plate, on a global level, providing assistance to authors nationwide, as well as in the United Kingdom, Germany, South America, Africa, Asia and Australia.
Author-Friendly Model
"When independent authors look to publish a book themselves, they want someone to show them the right path, and we've been very honest and helpful in guiding independent authors," Sid Chinai remarks. "We offer these authors a source for inexpensive, high-quality books that they can then pass on into the marketplace.
"We offer direct service and maintain a staff that will walk the independent author through the process—help them get an ISBN number, contact booksellers and advise them on building distribution. We don't offer distribution as a service, because there are other people who specialize in those services. That differentiates us from the current offering for self-publishing sources, because they try to offer distribution as a service and then charge more money. Our cost model works for authors who can publish a book inexpensively, sell it and retain the profit for themselves."
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