Reading ebooks online is getting easier, as well as less expensive. For fans of free ebooks and writers who want to self-publish, there's Bookmato. A relatively new site, it was founded in late 2010, it has been building a steady readership who rate books, share criticism with authors and publish their own works through the site.
Like other sites for free ebooks, it houses vast numbers of public domain ebooks and makes them easily searchable and available for download. The books can be read on the reader's computer or on a separate ebook reader.
Publishing Indie Ebooks
The low cost and ease of publishing ebooks online has lead to a large number of independent authors who publish their books outside the traditional systems of agents and print publishing houses. Bookmato publishes indie ebooks that are available for free, as well as those that writers put up for sale.
Authors can choose to sell their works on Bookmato or to simply share them with the world for free. There is no cost to do either. Writers can write a complete work and sell it through the site or serialize a larger work and sell it chapter by chapter.
Public Domain Ebooks
Ebooks that are in the public domain, not subject to a current copyright, are available on many ebooks websites for free and Bookmato is no exception. The site continuously adds new public domain books to its virtual library.
The site relies on a ranking system to provide readers with ratings for the available books. The ratings area of the site displays the most popular books on the site; the books that get the most "thumbs up" votes and the most "thumbs down" votes.
Selling Ebooks Through Bookmato
Bookmato takes a relatively small portion of the sales made through the site. Writers get 80 percent of the sale's price of their works. There are no additional fees for membership and no transaction fees. The minimum payout to authors is $50 unless PayPal is chosen as the payment method. With PayPal payments, Bookmato will pay as little as $10 accrued each quarter.
All rights to published works remain with the author, and works can be removed from the site at any time. However, Bookmato reserves the right to use samples of any work published through the site in order to market Bookmato or the work itself, and authorizes its affiliates to do the same.
Lizz Shepherd - I am a freelance writer specializing, for now, in Web writing. The Web is an enormous place and I have been carving out my own little ...
