Unless you’re living under a rock, you are, as an author, familiar with Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited. It’s a monthly subscription service of ebooks. The arrotontent of KU is comprised of the books for which an author opts in and gives Kindle/Amazon exclusive rights to sales of that ebook. Subscribers can choose to read as many of the books within KU as they want. This appeals to volume readers. Think of it as a Netflix-of-ebooks. Authors are paid by Kindle Edition Normalized Page reads, as a percentage of overall KENP across all titles in KU in any given month, applied to a designated author payment fund for that month. You can read more about KU on an earlier SkipJack post, HERE.
Some authors don’t want to give Kindle/Amazon an exclusive on their ebooks. Some authors oppose monopoly in general. Some authors recognize that KU doesn’t yet have a big international footprint and don’t want to lose the chance for sales in countries where they individually do well. If you fall into any of those categories, Palatium Books may be for you.
Palatium curates and aggregates content for ebook subscription services worldwide in 24 countries reaching 6 million readers and growing. If you use Draft2Digital or Smashwords, you’ve encountered something similar, but a) on a far smaller scale and b) without much impact for most authors. We first learned of Palatium from—you guessed it—Jane Friedman in the Hot Sheet she puts out with Porter Anderson. It turns out that Palatium curates up front, taking only books they believe they can place successfully with their client companies. They took SkipJack’s Pamela Fagan Hutchins’ eight novels, and, within a month, had her front page on sites around the world, sites she’d never appeared on after long stints with Smashwords and Draft2Digital (because they offer false hope by letting all comers upload, saying they aggregate to the sites, but leaving out the part where they curate and you, the author, aren’t on that list).
Palatium is a young venture, but the staff is eager and delivering results in the short run, with a responsive and creative marketing approach. Palatium’s submission instructions and contact information are on their website.
Check out their website, but also, take a look at all the sites below, to get a feel for what the quality is like. These are some of their clients who now carry Pamela’s novels.
Fabula: https://fabula.im/en/588f1dd3d65fc318002487b1-Leaving-Annalise-Pamela-Fagan-Hutchins
Youboox: http://lire.youboox.fr/books/134097
Bookmate: https://bookmate.com/books/TSggk6SX
The list grows every day.
And it gets better. They’ve given us a code to use for readers to get a month free on Bookmate if they’ll use it to download Saving Grace free (then all books read for a month are free). Please share this with anyone and everyone you know. The code is PFHUTCHINS. Create a login. Start with this link: https://bookmate.com/books/TSggk6SX, chose to “Read”, then click your user icon and enter the promo code in the blank provided. Sweet, huh???? Even if you’re not a reader yourself, this gives you a month to check Bookmate and the world of international ebook subscription services out.
We’ll keep you updated as our experiment in this area continues. So far, so good!
Eric
Palatium sounds compelling, Eric. Thanks for the insider info on Pamela’s journey there. She has many books, so it sounds like a good fit for her.
As you know, I only have one book out now. How many books do you think an an author should have before seeing if Palatium will take us on?
Hi Marcy,
My name is Anastasia, and I work at Palatium Books. Some of our authors also have one book so it won’t be a problem. If you consider joining us, please write to us, we’ll be happy to answer all of your questions. You can find the form on our website: https://www.palatiumbooks.com/ 🙂