Top sites where you can self publish your e-book

The e-book market is developing rapidly and publishing houses have started to integrate options to publish on paper and/ or online into their offers. If you don’t want to spend money on a publishing house or you think they might not fully respect your concept, here are some of the best websites where you can self-publish your book.

To be noted that Amazon offers 70 percent royalty (which means profit) for authors with books priced between $2.99 and $9.99; otherwise, the rate kicks down to 35 percent. Amazon’s publishing platform is Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP). The platform provides incentives for authors who decide to offer their works exclusively on Amazon. This service called KDP Select offers authors financial rewards and plenty of benefits as long as they publish their books exclusively on Amazon for at least 90 days.As for your cover and possible illustrations, you could try to do it yourself, though if you’re not a designer, it would be better to hire a professional illustrator.

The Create Space slogan “Publish your words, your way” pretty much sums upt their publishing style. This platform brings to the table the whole package: free tools, design, editing and marketing services, wide distribution and permanent help available from real professionals. Not only manufacturing and shipping is taken care of, but your book is always (and we do mean always) in-stock. Your profit is calculated depending on your book size, complexity and distribution place-of your choice. Take a look at their website and see if it “speaks ” to you.

iBookstore store is an e-book application by Apple. Here, you can upload your e-book directly, but you do have to fill out an application and it’s a bit of a longer process. This website is great because it can also display e-books with multimedia content. iBookstore is the heaven of iPad books.

Smashwords.com is one of the first e-book online publishers with over 125.000 titles. This website not only allows authors to publish their book, but it also has tools to help you create it: you upload your Word document, your cover and press a button. In a few minutes, the Smashwords Meatgrinder will provide you with your own brand-new book. Smashwords also gives writers the option of selling the book on their own website or distribute it to some of the major e-book sellers(here mentioned).

Barnes & Noble’s PubIt. With the amazing reputation of Barnes & Noble, this seems like the perfect place to sell your “baby”. It sets the rate at 65% profit for authors that price their books between 2.99$ and 9.99$, and the percent lowers to 40% if you go either lower or higher than these limits. Barnes & Noble’s PubIt includes a free conversion tool that takes your files of any kind and automatically converts it to an EPUB file, which you then upload to their eBookstore.

BookBaby has often described itself as ‘a team of authors, poets, bloggers, and artists’ who have put together an e-book distribution network and various publishing services. Unlike other big publishing platforms, BookBaby is ready to offer a wide range of design, layout tools and many kind of support services for file creation and production. The great part is that this team has packages with the option of distributing your e-book on other publishing titans websites (Apple iBooks, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Copia, Gardners, Baker & Taylor, eSentral, Scribd and PagePusher).