Your Book, Your Way

John Marino and William Reynolds founded their printing company in 2003 to print just about everything—postcards, business cards, brochures, catalogs. But they soon realized that in order to grow, they had to narrow their focus.

“Early on, we had a consultant that said, ‘You guys are a mile wide and an inch deep, and you need to be an inch wide and a mile deep,’” Marino says. “That was a great piece of advice, which we took.”

Having printed books, and finding that there was less competition there—as well as a growing market—Marino and Williams decided to put their focus there. Today, book publishing makes up 95 to 98 percent of the company’s revenue.

Brio is a contract book publisher, meaning it helps an author edit, design, market, and distribute a book for a fee that the author pays; the author keeps all rights and royalties. (This approach contrasts with that of vanity publishers, where the author pays for the publication and the press holds the copyright, and typically doesn’t promote its titles.) While Brio helps its authors execute the project, the authors retain creative control. The company prints both hardcover and soft-cover books.

Brio doesn’t limit its book production services to printing. It offers a menu of services that includes marketing, editing, designing, printing, storing, and distributing books. (Its distribution system extends to 25,000 retailers, including Barnes & Noble and Amazon.) The company also can develop dedicated Web sites for the books it publishes. All of these services are available à la carte.

The service Reynolds and Marino are currently most excited about is ghostwriting, which Brio started offering in early 2008, targeting primarily CEOs and other high-level executives. A customer can now hire Brio to produce a book from conception to distribution—plus an ancillary Web site and marketing plan—for $25,000 to $50,000. The entire process can take as few as four to six weeks.

Besides business titles, Brio publishes books in other genres, including children’s, biography, religion, cooking, and self-help. It also has published textbooks. All told, it produces up to 400,000 to 500,000 books a year, averaging 250 titles annually. A staff specialist in search engine optimization creates roughly 10 Web sites a year to market these books.