How to choose a book publisher in Texas

Updated August 2026

Texas has a large and growing cluster of publishing service companies, particularly around Houston and Dallas. Some are long-established; some registered last year. Telling them apart takes about fifteen minutes and the state gives you the tools free.

Verifying a company in Texas

1. Check the business registry

Texas splits this across two places, which trips people up. The Secretary of State maintains entity filings through SOSDirect at sos.state.tx.us, and the Comptroller publishes free Taxable Entity Search data that confirms whether an entity is in good standing on its franchise tax.

The Comptroller search is the more useful of the two for a quick check, because it is free and it shows right-to-transact status. An entity whose right to transact business is forfeited is not a company you should be sending a deposit to.

2. Check for complaints

The Texas Attorney General takes consumer complaints at texasattorneygeneral.gov, and the general complaint form explicitly covers false, misleading or deceptive business practices and not receiving what you paid for — which is the shape most publishing disputes take.

Texas also has the Deceptive Trade Practices Act, which is unusually strong consumer protection compared with most states. You do not need to understand it to benefit from it; you need to know it exists and that a written record of what you were promised is what makes it usable.

3. Check the books

Ask for titles, look them up, and check who is named as publisher. A service company should not be the publisher of record — that should be the author’s own imprint or "Independently published", because you are supposed to keep the rights.

The checks that apply anywhere

Four questions separate a service company from an operation to walk away from, and seven warning signs cover most of the rest. They are the same in Texas as everywhere else, so they are written out in full once: how to choose a book publishing company

Read that first if you have not already. What follows is the part that is specific to where you are.

Texas resources worth knowing

The Writers’ League of Texas runs classes, critique groups and the long-standing Agents & Editors Conference in Austin each summer, and its members have collectively dealt with most companies operating in the state. The DFW Writers Workshop is the equivalent in North Texas. Both are better sources of candid opinion than any review site, and both are cheap to join.

One Texas-specific advantage: if a company has a real office in the state, you can go there. It is remarkable how much clarity a request to visit produces.