In today’s Publetariat Dispatch, author and Editor in Chief of The Independent Publishing Magazine shares the latest version of his periodic index of Publishing Services.

This will probably be the last index published until late September/early October as I have a pretty busy schedule coming up over the next two months. I suspect as we move closer to the financial quarter four for 2011, there will be quite a number of changes with a the companies I include in the index. There are one or two publishing services that I don’t expect to see surviving into 2012, and there are also a few at the bottom I am considering removing because of their poor showing, lack of foresight and development, and output.

The index takes a great deal of time to put together, and it involves following and analyzing not just the 70 companies included here, but a further 50+ on the edge of entering the index. As always, I would ask companies to keep me updated on what they perceive to be improvements to their services, but again, as always in my correspondence with them; don’t spam me with correspondence about actual books. I am not interested. The Publishing Index was set up to review your company services and it is not a device or platform to promote your authors or books. What matters to me is the value of your services, experienced by your authors.

Let me once again thank the authors and companies who regularly feed me back with updates, experiences and information which all goes into producing the Publishing Index chart every month. Your input is invaluable and always welcome.

Beyond my own reviews on each company (which plays a small part in each company’s index evaluation), all the data gathered is entirely subjective and based on positive and negative correspondence and formulaic analysis. I deliberately avoid making my own comments when the chart is produced and published each month, in so far as highlighting movements of significance in the index. It should speak for itself if followed closely. The companies in the top 20 are there for a reason, because they follow and respect the core values a good self-publishing service should offer. If you want to know what those vales are then you’d best go here to read the book I published on self-publishing, or here, to read the articles I have written on the values I believe should exist in self publishing.

For now, here is the [publishing service] index for August [2011]…

This is a cross-posting from Mick Rooney’s The Independent Publishing Magazine.