Our Origin Story

How we got here, by founder David Wogahn

Although unplanned, I wrote this article as the 2016 Rio Olympic Games were in full-swing, relevant because it was my experience working for the 1984 LA Olympics that first introduced me to the power and importance of controlling one’s brand. It was also an event that no other city wanted and that no one in Los Angeles was willing to pay for. You might say we had no choice but to “self-publish.”
David Wogahn 1984 Olympics LAOOCWhat I learned from my 16-month job-of-a-lifetime was that controlling your brand can provide enormous flexibility and long-term value for the future. And when you control your destiny, it’s surprising what you can accomplish. You can read here how that worked out for future generations of Los Angeles residents. (That’s me above in the Olympic Arrival Center at LAX using an AT&T terminal to send an email to my staff.)
David Wogahn-Times Mirror and Los Angeles TimesAfter a ten-year stint at Times Mirror, the parent company of the Los Angeles Times, I had an opportunity to put my brand management education into practice, again in the sports world but this time for college athletics.

In 1995, my partner Dick Beedon and I launched a company to create branded websites for university athletic departments. We bought up domains like calbears.com, und.com and umterps.com, literally gave them to the schools, and then licensed them back to create what we dubbed an “OAS,” or Official Athletic Site. (This business is now known as the CBS College Network.)
We figured that in a future world where anyone could have a website, these athletic departments—creators of content for news organizations, and the ones with a vested interest in marketing it—would be in the best position to benefit from a new direct-to-fan publishing future. Instead of serving the media, they could be the media. Little did we know that in time, this would become the model for every team, in every sport that has a fan base.

Today, as access to information through the internet and social media affects every nook of our society, we are facing both risks and opportunities. Nowhere is this more evident than in media, and most especially in publishing.

The stigma of self-publishing is rapidly disappearing. Self-publishing is in fact becoming a business imperative, as we, through our personal brands, increasingly shoulder the responsibility for our own marketing. The benefit is that we now control our own business affairs.

Author Imprints - Your books, your brand

AuthorImprints is founded on the belief that authors and businesses can and should benefit from establishing their own publishing brand. Properly established and maintained, there is no reason why an author’s imprint cannot publish books that are as professionally presented as books from the largest publishers in the world.

And with this control comes opportunity.

Just like we learned in 1984.

David Wogahn
Founder, AuthorImprints: Your Books, Your Brand.

AuthorImprints is a service of Sellbox Inc.
Sellbox Inc is a California corporation established in 2003 and based on Carlsbad, CA