Self-published in Norway, with extra help from book publisher Cappelen Damm.
Late last year Cappelen Damm’s online e-bookstore Digitalbok.no launched a new self-publishing book service in Norway: DinEbok. The service lets aspiring authors put up their books on the e-bookstore under a special section just for them.
“First, the author has to register himself or herself as a publisher at DinEbok,” says Tomas Schreiner, the brain behind the service at Cappelen Damm. “After that she has to upload metadata, including an ISBN number for which you have to register separately with the proper authorities, a cover shot and an ePub file. Once this has been submitted, we publish the book under the “selvpublisering” tag on Digitalbok.no.”
While self-publishing might seem on the surface to be in competition with traditional book publishing, for Cappelen Damm the decision was clear.
“With the positive results from self-publishing in North America, it will be only a matter of time before every country in Europe follows suit,” says Schreiner. “It makes much more sense to be part of and develop this end of the book market if this is an unavoidable part of the book market's evolution.
"Plus, looking to North America again, there is no reason to believe that self-publishing will not produce some bestsellers, and that new bestselling talent will be discovered through this channel.”
Cappelen Damm handles both distribution and sales of the titles, so it also takes a cut of the sales.
And how have the authors, self-published with a bit of help from Cappelen Damm, done so far?
“We did expect that some quality books would be submitted and that they would perform good, but not necessarily as quickly as we have seen,” says Schreiner. “We have considered one of the contributions so far, due to his popularity, but nothing has been picked up by Cappelen Damm yet.”