Book Country eBookstore Unveiled for Self-Published Authors

Self-published authors are always looking for new ways of getting their work out there and, on the face of it, Penguin’s Book Country is a good way to do that. The site has just made a new breakthrough — where authors previously sold through Amazon, Barnes & Noble and the iBookstore, now they can sell their books directly from Book Country and with a better royalty than Amazon offers.

Authors who sell their books through the new Book Country bookstore will receive an 85% royalty, which, as Laura Hazard Owen at PaidContent points out, is “higher than the 70 percent they get in the Amazon Kindle Store and the 65 percent they get at Barnes & Noble’s Nook Press.”

This is interesting, particularly as Penguin already offers self-publishing services via its company Author Solutions, Inc and its subsidiaries and “imprints” for other publishing houses. What it does suggest is that they’re testing the water for selling self-published work in a place they don’t have to share the profits with a retailer.

For the most part, the amount they might make from such sales is very limited: it’s still far more profitable to charge authors for publishing their books than to actually try to sell those books. But the occasional self-published success, like Fifty Shades of Gray, might make the 85/15 split worth it, and an e-bookstore with a large and established self-publishing ecosystem behind it could give other retailers a run for their money.

Let’s not forget as well, that Author Solution’s services are coming under increasing criticism (as I wrote back in May) so we’ll have to see what happens. Have you used Book Country? Is their eBookstore going to entice you? I’m not sure I’ll be jumping on board just yet.