A few weeks ago a new digital publisher has hit the scene in the form of Payhip. This new London based company is attempting to get indie authors to sign up with its service and writers will retain 100% of the royalties on the ebooks they sell. It sounds appealing and services like this are perfect for added exposure for your books and author profile in Google and other major search engines.
Payhip may not have any ebooks currently in its library or any type of store setup on its main webpage, but we were told this is not what the company is all about. It is promoting the fact that authors can leverage social media to promote their books. The company basically launched on September 15th and developed a solid infrastructure for authors to sell their books and be paid via PayPal.
Uploading ebooks to Payhip is simple and intuitive. There are only a few fields you will have to deal with, such as eBook Upload, Name, Thumbnail, Price, and Description. When you upload a book to the site you can generate links to share with your friends on Twitter and Facebook. There are plenty of options regarding how much of the ebook you can make available for free. I really like this option, because quite often you are locked into how many pages you can flag as a “sample.” Also, you can upload your books in as many different formats as you want, and have around 1 GB per book in storage.
According to their blog “In the coming weeks, we will be adding a few pro features that users can pay for if they want to. The current version will always be free – the selling of ebooks. The new features include custom domains, in depth analytics and customization of the buy page. It may be the case that a small percentage of users will opt for this but it will be enough to keep the service free for the majority. So we’re really adopting a freemium model.”
Independent Authors might see greater success via Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or Kobo to self-publish ebooks. A great marketing ploy is to basically get your book on as many services as possible to help you get more visibility. It will be interesting to keep track of this company and see how they do.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
