Who We Are Not — A Look at Publishing Genius and Genius Publishers
Recently, I’ve spent a great deal of time—and more than a few words—describing who Genius Publishing is. The time has come to describe who we are not.
In the last 5 days or so, I’ve been indulging in that guilty pleasure, Googling myself. I wanted to see what people saw when they searched for the term Genius Publishing. It turns out, there are two other players in that particular name-space that might be confused with us.
The first is a company called Publishing Genius. They are in Baltimore, and they’ve been around for at least 6 years. They even have their own Wikipedia page. That, in my humble opinion, makes them way cooler than we are. I sincerely hope they are selling lots of books and are having a great deal of success in their business. (I also sincerely hope that one of you Wikipedia editors take the time to memorialize us as well. Thanks!)
The second company is called Genius Publishers. There are only a few references to them, particularly on bookjobs.com. They are advertising for interns for various positions (see the link), and because of that and the fact that they don’t seem to have another website, I get hits for Genius Publishers all the time. In fact, I’ve received at least two contacts from people looking for jobs in the recent past. Since there is so little information on them, I have no idea if they are new or established, if they are reputable or otherwise. If anyone knows more about them, please leave a comment.
The reason I am bringing your attention to these potential competitors is because, frankly, we are not them.
I tried to be careful when choosing the name of my publishing company, and when I discovered that the name Genius Publishing was pretty much clear, I felt comfortable entering that name-space. But it is becoming clear that I am being confused with at least one of these other groups. That’s not good for me, and it’s not good for them.
Thus, I have made the decision to differentiate our company from theirs. I have been quietly changing references to our company to the term Genius Book Publishing. You can now see it on our header, in our title (in the tab at the top of your browser), and on Facebook and Twitter. This is a logical move because I own the domain GeniusBookPublishing.com, rather than GeniusPublishing.com (which is for sale and the last asking price I saw was $10,000). Since someone may pony up the $10k at some point, it is better if I differentiate myself from them as well while I have a chance.
So, when you see my Vitruvian logo with the addition of Book in the name, you can be confident that someone didn’t walk off with my logo (which is public domain—thanks Leonardo!). Genius Book Publishing is different in no other way, and you can rest assured that we will continue to publish books that are as high quality as we have been saying all along.
Update: About 3 hours after posting this, I got a call from some very nice woman asking if I were Genius Publishers and if I had an internship. I guess it will take time for the name change to kick in. 
