Where Should You Publish Your Book: 9 Great Self-Publishing Companies For Indie Authors

 

So, you have your manuscript, along with a beautiful cover ready to upload and hopefully get your book out there to start earning royalties, but perhaps you're wondering: Where should you publish your book?

First thing's first, you want to decide on what you require from a publishing platform. Will you be offering both an ebook and print format of your book? What about an audio version? Are you comfortable having your book exclusively on one platform, or would you rather publish wide to many platforms. Are you willing to pay a fee to have one platform handle the distribution of your book to many platforms?

There are a myriad of options out there for ebooks and print books alike, all with their unique features, benefits and drawbacks, and with all of these options, it's easy to get overwhelmed. There's a lot to consider.

Some self-publishing services require exclusivity, sometimes royalty rates vastly between platforms, some companies require you to pay upfront to publish with them, while others allow you to upload your book for free.

In this post, we want to help alleviate some of the stress by helping you to figure out which platform is the best choice for YOU. Hopefully after reading through this article, you'll have an idea of which platform best suits your needs.

Below, you'll find a list of some of the most popular self-publishing platforms, and some aspects of each of them:

1) KDP Kindle Direct publishing 

We'll start with the titan of the list, Amazon's KDP Kindle Direct Publishing platform. For Ebook purchases Amazon holds a whopping 83% of the market share, and within the US, approximately 50% of the marketshare for print books. It doesn't cost you any money to upload your book, Amazon will only take their fees when you get a sale. Royalties for ebooks are 70% if you price your book between $2.99 and $9.99, and this drops to 35% if your book is priced below $2.99.
Amazon is many authors' first choice when it comes to self-publishing because of the sheer volume of the marketshare that they own.

KDP Select is another option for self-publishers on the Amazon platform, although it means you will be distributing your book exclusively through Amazon. Enrolling your book in KDP Select means that KDP Unlimited subscription members can read your book for free, you get paid for the monthly amount of pages read. Amazon will grant you benefits of being enrolled in this program however, like free promotions and deals. Keep in mind, you do not have to enroll your book in KDP Select and you can still have your books on Amazon.

KDP also offers POD distribution, and being the largest online retailer in the world, and so highly trafficked, it is very likely that your book will be seen. Amazon KDP featured only paperback print books for a long while, however they have begun experimenting with hardback books as well. So for those of you who might have been counting them out for a print book option because of the lack of variety, this might change your mind.

Check out KDP here: http://kdp.amazon.com/

2) Barnes & Noble Press

 

 

Barnes & Noble Press offers self-publishers ebook, paperback and hardcover print options. Just like Amazon KDP, you upload your book files and submit your book for publishing on your own.

Barnes & Nobles boasts a user friendly interface. But, the distribution of your book is limited to Kobo devices and BN.com. Still, being a book retailer, Barnes & Nobles allows your book to be discovered by potential customers on the actual website.

Uploading your book to Barnes & Nobles is free, and the royalty rate is a flat 70% for ebooks, they boast no tiered royalty rate for sale prices, which is very fair! Also, they make royalty payments in 30 days, unlike Amazon and some other platforms that take about 90 days to pay out your first royalty. 

Check Out Barnes & Noble Press Here: https://press.barnesandnoble.com/create-account

 

3) Rakuten Kobo (Kobo Writing Life)

Kobo is a strictly digital book platform, currently offering ebook and audiobook formats to its customer base. Once again, you can upload your book yourself through Kobo’s platform quite quickly. Being a large international retailer, the distribution of your ebook will span bookstores across 190 countries. Rakuten Kobo’s royalty rates are 70% on ebooks priced higher than $2.99, and 45% on books priced below $2.99.

They don't require exclusivity, and allow you to run your own promos.

Check Out Kobo Writing Life Here: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/p/writinglife 

      

4) IngramSpark 

IngramSpark is another platform that offers ebook, paperback and hardcover print options. Not only that but they offer dust jackets, cloth covers and a whole bunch of other print book options that you just can't find on Amazon. Their print quality is noted to be a smidge better as well.

You can upload and submit your book yourself, but the interface isn’t as user friendly as some other options on this list. Uploading your book can be an intensive process for a newbie.

IngramSpark is good option for worldwide distribution purposes as they work with 30,000 book retailers that your book can be distributed to. Publishing your book through IngramSpark starts at $25 for an ebook format only, $49 for a print book only, and $49 for both a print format and ebook format of the same book.

Check Out IngramSpark Here:  https://www.ingramspark.com/

5) Google Play Books

In early 2020, Google Play finally opened up its doors to allow indie authors to sign up and upload their books freely onto the platform without first going through an approval period, or worse yet, a waiting list.

Now it’s easy for authors to create a new publisher account and start uploading books right away. With royalty rates of 70% for the author, Google beats out Amazon on lower priced ebooks.

Using this platform to distribute your book, Google will offer it (in ebook format only, there are no print options) to Android users across 50 countries, and potentially billions of people, so this is a great platform to be on. Unless you have some kind of exclusivity deal on your book, there is no reason NOT to be on Google Play. GPB allows buyers to preview your book through Google books before they decide to buy, just like the "Look Inside" feature on Amazon.

This is a do it yourself platform, meaning you upload your book files on your own. One more thing to keep in mind is that Google Play does reserve the right to price match the price of your book with other platforms, so keep this in mind and price your book accordingly.

Check out Google Play Books Here: https://play.google.com/books/publish/u/0/

6) Apple Books

Just like the former, Apple books only offers ebook distribution and no print on demand services. The royalty rate is 70% for the author on most books. You are able to upload and submit your ebook by yourself.

Unlike Google Play Books, Apple Books offers a variety of marketing tools. Of course as with most Apple services, you only have access to this self-publishing platform if you have a Mac computer. However, there are ways of bypassing this if you decide to use an aggregate service such as Draft2Digital or Smashwords, and distribute your book to Apple Books through them.

Finally, your book will only be available on Apple Books. The price to upload your book is free.

Check out Apple Books Here: https://authors.apple.com/publish-your-book/

 

7) Smashwords

Smashwords is another option for ebook publishing. It is free to upload your book, however with each copy sold, Smashwords gets a fee of 15% for each book sold on the Smashwords retail site, and 10% for each book sold on other platforms.

Aside from your ebook being available on the Smashwords Store itself, Smashwords is partnered with Apple Books, Barnes & Noble, Scribd, Kobo, Blio, Overdrive, Baker & Taylor Axis 360, Tolino, Gardners, (Askews & Holts and Browns Books for Students), Bibliotheca CloudLibrary (3,000 public libraries), Odilo (2,100 public libraries in North America, South America and Europe) and Califa's Enki (powers ebook checkout systems for over 100 California libraries). Currently, Smashwords doesn’t distribute to Amazon unless you meet a certain quota of earnings per month.

There is a bit of a steep learning curve when it comes to the software, also you must have your ebook cover design, and book file formatted and ready to go. But overall, Smashwords publishes books quite fast and being an aggregator, Smashwords helps you to publish your ebook to many online book retailers all at once saving you both time and energy.  

Check Out Smashwords Here: https://www.smashwords.com/signup/

8) Draft2Digital

Draft2Digital is like Smashwords in that, for a fee, they will help you to publish your ebook and distribute it to multiple online platforms. To upload your ebook is free, however they get paid 10% of the book’s retail price per book sold.

Publishing through draft2digital means that your book will be distributed to Amazon, Apple Books, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Tolino, OverDrive, Bibliotheca, Scribd, Baker & Taylor, Hoopla and Vivlio.

The platform has a user friendly interface, and a clean website. Draft2Digital also offers a number of benefits to authors, for one D2D will give you something called a Universal Book Link or UBL, allowing a customer to be directed to their preferred retailer to buy your book. They also offer formatting of your book. Finally, all of your books are automatically added to “Also By This Author” section of all of your books published and distributed through D2D through their automated back matter tool.

Check out Draft2Digital Here: https://www.draft2digital.com/

9) PublishDrive

Another aggregator, PublishDrive is another platform through which authors can publish their book one time, and have it distributed through multiple channels at once.

They allow you to publish audiobooks, ebooks and print on demand books. Their pricing system is a bit different. For a monthly fee of $100 dollars an author can keep 100% of their royalties, or they will charge the standard fee of 10% of the retail price of each book sold.

PublishDrive is partnered with Amazon, China Print, Findaway, StoryTel, Dreame, Kobo, Apple Books, Google Play Books, Barnes & Noble, Scribd, OverDrive, Playster, Odilo, Bookmate, Perlego, 24symbols.com, Tolino, Gardners.com, ciando, and so many more. With PublishDrive, authors are given access to so many foreign markets, so this is definitely something to take advantage of, if you choose to use them.

Check Out PublishDrive Here: https://publishdrive.com/