New self-publishing model : OffTheBookShelf.com

After being invited along to a pretty new self-publishing site by an editor friend, I was impressed with what they offered. I decided to stick around and see how it worked. It's free to join and is called OffTheBookShelf.com. Now that I've been there a while I'm happy to share it with you all. Their business model is a breath of fresh air and gives the authors plenty of control. :)

Authors build their own online bookstores free. The authors sell their books - ebooks, audiobooks and printed books- at their chosen price and OffTheBookShelf only takes a small charge for each book plus banking fees. You, the author, gets to decide on how much you want to charge for your book. All you need is a Word document (or Open Office one saved in Word format) to create a book.

See some examples of the fee structure here.

They also provide free tools to help you create your book cover and convert your Word document to the epub format needed. 

Scott, the founder and a writer himself, is a very pleasant guy. His dream was to offer authors and poets a service that made publication within everyone's grasp, and at a price and profit margin they're happy with. He has many extras there to help you sell and promote your book once it's up. Transactions are via Paypal on both the buyers and sellers side.

See the quick tour on the homepage or the longer webinar for more information. 

http://offthebookshelf.com/

Last but not least, there's also a TV campaign in the pipeline and a contest is being run that members can join where the prize is to star in it. Just register free and you'll see the entry form in your back office. Now if that's not a great chance to market your book, I don't know what is! :)

I like this idea very much and will be using it myself for an e-book I'm putting together. I haven't seen anything else online that lets you create and publish ebooks and audiobooks for your own store that costs you nothing to set up.

(There is a one-time set-up fee of $35 for printed books to set up the book with their printer and add the barcode to your back cover. Whether you get hundreds of printed books or half a dozen, it's the same fee, paid once. After that it's the fee structure mentioned above. Nothing extra for the ebooks or audiobooks as I said. All that's taken is what's mentioned in the fee structure. You just upload your files and wait for the buyers to come by!)

Hope that's helpful to some of you looking for a way to get published at a minimal cost, if any. :)