Self-publishing Companies
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Self-publishing is the publication of media (e.g. books, music, art) by its author at their own cost, without the involvement of a publisher. However, the author may engage professionals or companies to assist with various aspects of publication, distribution or marketing. This page lists the best-known of such companies. It is not an exhaustive list.


Assisted Self-publishing

Assisted self-publishing companies offer services such as editing, proof-reading, cover design, formatting, printing, cover design, marketing and promotion. They may offer these services separately or as a package. They do not take any rights from the author and the author retains total control of the work and decisions relating to it. * Blurb, Inc. * CreateSpace * Darkside communication group * DiggyPOD * FastPencil * FriesenPress * Greyden Press *
Lightning Source Lightning Source is a printer and distributor of print-on-demand books. The company is a business unit of Ingram Content Group. Originally incorporated in 1996 as Lightning Print Inc., the company is headquartered in La Vergne, Tennessee. Its UK ...
* Llumina Press *
Lulu Lulu may refer to: Companies * LuLu, an early automobile manufacturer * Lulu.com, an online e-books and print self-publishing platform, distributor, and retailer * Lulu Hypermarket, a retail chain in Asia * Lululemon Athletica or simply Lulu, ...
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Notion Press Notion Press is an Indian self-publishing company based in Chennai, India India, officially the Republic of India (Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the List of countries and dependencies by area, seventh-largest country by area, ...
* Self Publish, Be Happy *
Wattpad Wattpad is an online literature platform intended for users to read and write original stories. The founders Allen Lau and Ivan Yuen say that the platform aims to create social communities around stories and remove the barriers between readers a ...


Self-publishing e-book platforms

* Amazon's
Kindle Direct Publishing Kindle Direct Publishing is Amazon.com's e-book publishing platform launched in November 2007, concurrently with the first Amazon Kindle device. Originally called Digital Text Platform, the platform allows authors and publishers to publish their ...
* Apple's App Store (iOS) * Barnes & Noble * Blurb, Inc. * Kobo Writing Life *
Lulu Lulu may refer to: Companies * LuLu, an early automobile manufacturer * Lulu.com, an online e-books and print self-publishing platform, distributor, and retailer * Lulu Hypermarket, a retail chain in Asia * Lululemon Athletica or simply Lulu, ...
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Powell's Books Powell's Books is a chain of bookstores in Portland, Oregon, and its surrounding metropolitan area. Powell's headquarters, dubbed Powell's City of Books, claims to be the largest independent new and used bookstore in the world. Powell's City ...
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Scribd Scribd Inc. is an American e-book and audiobook subscription service that includes one million titles. Scribd hosts 60 million documents on its open publishing platform. The company was founded in 2007 by Trip Adler, Jared Friedman, and Tikh ...
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Smashwords Smashwords, Inc., based in Los Gatos, California, is a platform for self-publishing e-books. The company, founded by Mark Coker, began public operation in 2008. Authors and independent publishers upload their manuscripts as electronic files t ...
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Wattpad Wattpad is an online literature platform intended for users to read and write original stories. The founders Allen Lau and Ivan Yuen say that the platform aims to create social communities around stories and remove the barriers between readers a ...


E-book digital distribution platforms

* Amazon Kindle * Archive of Our Own *
Barnes & Noble Nook The Barnes & Noble Nook (styled nook or NOOK) is a brand of e-readers developed by American book retailer Barnes & Noble, based on the Android platform. The original device was announced in the U.S. in October 2009, and was released the next m ...
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FanFiction.Net FanFiction.Net (often abbreviated as FF.net or FFN) is an automated fan fiction archive site. It was founded on October 15, 1998, by Los Angeles computer programmer Xing Li, who also runs the site. It has over 12 million registered users and hos ...
(aka Fiction Press) *
Google Play Books Google Play Books, formerly Google eBooks, is an ebook digital distribution service operated by Google, part of its Google Play product line. Users can purchase and download ebooks and audiobooks from Google Play, which offers over five million ...
* Hoopla Digital * iBooks Store *
Kindle Direct Publishing Kindle Direct Publishing is Amazon.com's e-book publishing platform launched in November 2007, concurrently with the first Amazon Kindle device. Originally called Digital Text Platform, the platform allows authors and publishers to publish their ...
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Kindle Store The Kindle Store is an online e-book e-commerce store operated by Amazon as part of its retail website and can be accessed from any Amazon Kindle, Fire tablet or Kindle mobile app. At the launch of the Kindle in November 2007, the store had mo ...
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Kobo Kobo may refer to: Places * Kobo (woreda), a district in Ethiopia ** Kobo, Ethiopia, a town * Kōbo Dam, Hiroshima Prefecture, Japan * Mount Kōbō, Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan People First name * Kōbō Abe (1924–1993), pseudonym of Japanese w ...
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Lulu.com Lulu Press, Inc., doing business under trade name Lulu, is an online print-on-demand, self-publishing, and distribution platform. By 2014, it had issued approximately two million titles. The company's founder is Red Hat co-founder Bob Young. Lu ...
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NoiseTrade NoiseTrade is a global online audio and book direct-to-fan distribution platform. It is based in Nashville, Tennessee. It enables its users to upload original music and books and give away for free without digital rights management to anyone w ...
* OverDrive, Inc. *
PocketBook Reader PocketBook is a multinational company which produces e-book readers based on E Ink technology (an electronic paper technology) under the ''PocketBook'' brand. The company was founded in 2007 in Kyiv, Ukraine, and its headquarters were shifted t ...
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Scribd Scribd Inc. is an American e-book and audiobook subscription service that includes one million titles. Scribd hosts 60 million documents on its open publishing platform. The company was founded in 2007 by Trip Adler, Jared Friedman, and Tikh ...
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Smashwords Smashwords, Inc., based in Los Gatos, California, is a platform for self-publishing e-books. The company, founded by Mark Coker, began public operation in 2008. Authors and independent publishers upload their manuscripts as electronic files t ...
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Wattpad Wattpad is an online literature platform intended for users to read and write original stories. The founders Allen Lau and Ivan Yuen say that the platform aims to create social communities around stories and remove the barriers between readers a ...
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Wikibooks Wikibooks (previously called ''Wikimedia Free Textbook Project'' and ''Wikimedia-Textbooks'') is a wiki-based Wikimedia project hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation for the creation of free content digital textbooks and annotated texts that an ...


Discontinued

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Sony Reader The Sony Reader was a line of e-book readers manufactured by Sony, who produced the first commercial E Ink e-reader with the Sony Librie in 2004. It used an electronic paper display developed by E Ink Corporation, was viewable in direct sunlight, ...
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Oyster Oyster is the common name for a number of different families of salt-water bivalve molluscs that live in marine or brackish habitats. In some species, the valves are highly calcified, and many are somewhat irregular in shape. Many, but not al ...
* Pronoun


Print on demand books

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BiblioBazaar BiblioBazaar is, with Nabu Press, an imprint of the historical reprints publisher BiblioLife, which is based in Charleston, South Carolina Charleston is the largest city in the U.S. state of South Carolina, the county seat of Charleston C ...
* Books LLC * DiggyPOD *
Lightning Source Lightning Source is a printer and distributor of print-on-demand books. The company is a business unit of Ingram Content Group. Originally incorporated in 1996 as Lightning Print Inc., the company is headquartered in La Vergne, Tennessee. Its UK ...
* Llumina Press *
Lulu Lulu may refer to: Companies * LuLu, an early automobile manufacturer * Lulu.com, an online e-books and print self-publishing platform, distributor, and retailer * Lulu Hypermarket, a retail chain in Asia * Lululemon Athletica or simply Lulu, ...
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Powell's Books Powell's Books is a chain of bookstores in Portland, Oregon, and its surrounding metropolitan area. Powell's headquarters, dubbed Powell's City of Books, claims to be the largest independent new and used bookstore in the world. Powell's City ...


Self-printing products and custom merchandise

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Cafe Press CafePress, Inc. is an American online retailer of stock and user- customized on-demand products. The company was founded in San Mateo, California, but is now headquartered in Louisville, Kentucky along with its production facility. In 2001, Caf ...
* CustomInk *
Redbubble Redbubble is a global online marketplace for print-on-demand products based on user-submitted artwork. The company was founded in 2006 in Melbourne, Australia,
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Shopify Shopify Inc. is a Canadian multinational e-commerce company headquartered in Ottawa, Ontario. Shopify is the name of its proprietary e-commerce platform for online stores and retail point-of-sale systems. The Shopify platform offers online ret ...
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Shutterfly Shutterfly, LLC. is an American photography, photography products, and image sharing company, headquartered in Redwood City, California. The company is mainly known for custom photo printing services, including books featuring user-provided im ...
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Spreadshirt Spread Group (legally sprd.net AG) is the umbrella brand of five internationally active e-commerce platforms with headquarters in Leipzig, Germany and Greensburg, Pennsylvania, United States. It operates production sites in Legnica, Poland, ...
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Teespring Teespring (Spring, Inc.) is an American company that operates ''Spring'', a social commerce platform that allows people to create and sell custom products.Rich, NathanielSilicon Valley's Start-Up Machine''The New York Times''. May 2, 2013. The c ...
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Vistaprint Vistaprint is a Dutch global, e-commerce company that produces physical and digital marketing products for small businesses. Vistaprint was one of the first businesses to offer its customers the capabilities of desktop publishing through the int ...
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Zazzle Zazzle is an American online marketplace that allows designers and customers to create their own products with independent manufacturers (clothing, posters, etc.), as well as use images from participating companies. Zazzle has partnered with ma ...


See also

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Amateur press association An amateur press association (APA) is a group of people who produce individual pages or zines that are sent to a Central Mailer for collation and distribution to all members of the group. History The first APAs were formed by groups of amateur pr ...
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Article processing charge An article processing charge (APC), also known as a publication fee, is a fee which is sometimes charged to authors. Most commonly, it is involved in making a work available as open access (OA), in either a full OA journal or in a hybrid journal. ...
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Author mill An author mill is a publisher that relies on producing large numbers of small-run books by different authors, as opposed to a smaller number of works published in larger numbers. The term was coined by Victoria Strauss of Writer Beware, as a parall ...
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Custom media Custom, customary, or consuetudinary may refer to: Traditions, laws, and religion * Convention (norm), a set of agreed, stipulated or generally accepted rules, norms, standards or criteria, often taking the form of a custom * Norm (social), a ...
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Dōjin In Japan, is a group of people who share an interest, activity, or hobby. The word is sometimes translated into English as "clique", "fandom", "coterie", "society", or "circle" (as in "sewing circle"). Self-published creative works produced b ...
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Fan fiction Fan fiction or fanfiction (also abbreviated to fan fic, fanfic, fic or FF) is fictional writing written in an amateur capacity by fans, unauthorized by, but based on an existing work of fiction. The author uses copyrighted characters, settin ...
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Fanzine A fanzine (blend word, blend of ''fan (person), fan'' and ''magazine'' or ''-zine'') is a non-professional and non-official publication produced by fan (person), enthusiasts of a particular cultural phenomenon (such as a literary or musical genre) ...
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Independent music Independent music (also commonly known as indie music or simply indie) is music that is produced independently from commercial record labels or their subsidiaries, a process that may include an autonomous, do-it-yourself approach to recording a ...
* Mimeo Revolution *
Predatory open access publishing Predatory publishing, also write-only publishing or deceptive publishing, is an exploitative academic publishing business model that involves charging publication fees to authors without checking articles for quality and legitimacy, and withou ...
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Print on demand Print on demand (POD) is a printing technology and business process in which book copies (or other documents, packaging or materials) are not printed until the company receives an order, allowing prints of single or small quantities. While oth ...
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Samizdat Samizdat (russian: самиздат, lit=self-publishing, links=no) was a form of dissident activity across the Eastern Bloc in which individuals reproduced censored and underground makeshift publications, often by hand, and passed the document ...
* Self Publish, Be Happy *
Self publishing Self-publishing is the publication of media by its author at their own cost, without the involvement of a publisher. The term usually refers to written media, such as books and magazines, either as an ebook or as a physical copy using POD (pr ...
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Small press A small press is a publisher with annual sales below a certain level or below a certain number of titles published. The terms "indie publisher" and "independent press" and others are sometimes used interchangeably. Independent press is general ...
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Vanity award A vanity award is an award in which the recipient purchases the award and/or marketing services to give the false appearance of a legitimate honor. Pitches for ''Who's Who''-type publications (see vanity press), biographies or nominations for award ...
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Vanity press A vanity press or vanity publisher, sometimes also subsidy publisher, is a publishing house where anyone can pay to have a book published.. The term "vanity press" is often used pejoratively, implying that an author who uses such a service is publ ...
or vanity publishing


References

{{Self-publishing, state=expanded DIY culture
Self Publishing Self-publishing is the publication of media by its author at their own cost, without the involvement of a publisher. The term usually refers to written media, such as books and magazines, either as an ebook or as a physical copy using POD (pr ...
Self-publishing Self-publishing companies Self-publishing online stores