Indie Publishing in germany

[fjtorres]

From Publishing Perspectives:
http://publishingperspectives.com/20...ook-dominance/

As the German fixed book price law doesn’t allow anyone to sell ebooks at different prices (“Preisbindung”), Amazon couldn’t differentiate its offer by offering bargain pricing as it did in the United States and elsewhere. So KDP was, ultimately, a perfect strategy for the book giant to pursue in Germany. It didn’t take long until authors discovered it was a great way to earn money with books that publishing companies had rejected. All the other German ebook retailers, such as Thalia, Hugendubel or Weltbild, hesitated to sell self-published books. And as of today, there remains no significant German based ebook retailer with a self publishing program, not even the recently-formed Tolino alliance offers that, by all accounts, took its time to even accept self-published ebooks from distributors like Xinxii, Neobooks, or Smashwords.

The end result has been that fully half of the ebooks from Amazon’s top 100 list in Germany are self published. A third of the top 100 ebooks are only available from Amazon – so it’s no wonder that the company has a market share of (depending on whose numbers you trust) between 40% and 70%. In a survey by selfpublisherbibel.de (an English translation is available) answered by 500 authors, some 40% confessed they used Amazon’s KDP Select, a program that demands exclusivity.

For ebooks, Amazon is the clear leader, but there are four other companies where authors can publish directly: Google Play (which is quite full of erotica, a segment which is somewhat less visible — the likely equally present — on Amazon), Kobo (which is only very slowly gaining ground, as it lacks a connection to the larger book chains), Apple (where publishing is more difficult for German authors, as Apple requires a US tax number to open an account) and Beam-eBooks (a small company focusing on DRM free ebooks).