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The Perseus Books Group has created a distribution and marketing service that will allow authors to self-publish their own e-books.
The new service will give authors a favorable revenue split that is unusual in the industry: 70% to the author and 30% to the distributor. Traditional publishers normally give authors a royalty of about 25% for e-books.
The service arrives as authors are looking for ways to avoid the traditional publishing model, take advantage of the infinite shelf space of the e-book world and release their own work. That’s especially the case for reviving out-of-print books whose rights have reverted back to the author.
The new Perseus unit, called Argo Navis Author Services, will be available only to authors who are represented by an agency that has signed an agreement with Perseus. Perseus is in discussions with more than a dozen other agencies.
While Argo Navis provides distribution and marketing services, the author remains the publisher. While authors get a higher share of the revenue under this arrangement, they’ll receive fewer of the services, and financial support, provided by publishers under more conventional contracts.
To help readers discover e-books, Argo Navis will offer basic marketing, like placing product pages on retailer Web sites. It will also make more extensive marketing services available for a fee.
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- Perseus Creates New Service for Authors Seeking to Self-Publish (nytimes.com)
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There’s nothing wrong with self-publishing to make life easier on aspiring authors. However you want to make sure that all your legal paperwork is in place to protect all that hard work. DISCUSSION QUESTION: What contract tips would you give fellow #business owners? View our blog at http://wp.me/p1JRPo-17 and LEAVE A COMMENT.
This is an exciting development in publishing. Whilst people will lament the decline of books and magazines as we know them today e.g. the printed paper version, the growth of the digital book is the way to go in the 21st century.
My own interest is in the perpetuation of threatened languages, Irish in particular. Stephen Fry’s BBC programme Planet Word on languages confirms the importance of all languages to mankind. The self publishing ebook service will be an encouragement and incentive to people to start producing content in their own (threatened) languages. Is maith sin! (That is good!)