A service called Tunecore lets musicians self-publish their music into Amazon, iTunes, and eMusic for a flat fee—after the music is published, the artist gets all proceeds (after the store takes its cut, of course). Now Ars Technica reports that the company behind Tunecore is coming out with a new service called Bibliocore, currently in beta, that will do the same thing for e-books and the iBooks store.
All that’s required is an ePub 1.0.5-compliant e-book with no unmanifested files, an ISBN, and cover art that is at least 600 pixels wide or tall. Bibliocore currently does not offer pricing information; authors must e-mail for a custom quote.
Of course, Bibliocore is only one of several “aggregators” that have started offering the ability to put e-books into the iBooks store, and some of the others will cover Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other e-book providers as well.
And as Ars points out, getting the book into the store is only half the work: with all the other self-published titles, let alone the professionally-published ones, there is a lot of competition for readers, and self-published writers are going to need to figure out ways of promoting their work.
I mentioned Bibliocore to self-publishing author Henry Melton, and he is inquiring into what they would charge him. It will be interesting to see if he thinks it is worth the money.
This is interesting. One of the problems with smashwords is that they don’t accept native epub files but require MS Doc files, which are unwieldy. Let’s hope that Bibliocore doesn’t charge an arm and a leg (which I define as 250-500$).
It’s hard to beat Smashwords for simplicity. Just give them a Word file of your book, and they create the appropriately formatted eBooks for Amazon, Apple, B&N, Sony and others. A little reading and a few clicks was all it took to add my existing Smashwords title to the iBookstore.
Bibliocore would make sense for these people:
1. Those want their iBookstore ebook to look better than Smashwords’ automated software can generate and who have (or can buy) the skills to create a better ePub file.
2. Those whose books will sell well enough that Bibliocore’s fixed charge will cost them less over time than Smashword’s 10% cut of the retail price.
Competition is good. Competition with differences is even better.
–Michael W. Perry, Seattle