ebook publishing from...
mercury web publishing london

“Getting people

published online”

We are seeking established authors, with books in print, or new authors with a high quality, finished manuscript. If you’re serious, so are we!

The Growth of the eBook Market

I know what you are thinking - eBooks don't really sell well.  Well, in my experience they do! In starting up Mercury, I market tested the proposition with my own books. The SEO Expert Guide sells two copies a day in the UK and US and ranks (most days) in the top 120,000 books on Amazon.com.

Members of the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) reported $3.2m of sales in Q3 2004, a 25% increase over the same period in 2003. The equivalent volume increase was 11%, so eBooks are commanding higher prices as consumer acceptance grows.

Whilst starting from a low base, the eBook market grows by 20-30% per year and Amazon continue to make acquisitions, including Mobipocket and Booksurge, to grow their eBook sales.

Many readers find the instant gratification of downloading a book straight away a real winner. Think about it... even if you only sell one tenth of the books, you will still make more money! Surely that's worth exploring.

Amazon SalesRank Possible sales per annum 50,000 1,000 100,000 550 500,000 50 1,000,000 10

The table above is a very rough guide (based on our experience) of what eBook sales you might hope to achieve online.
 

We want to work with working authors

Our focus is getting your book from desktop to Amazon as quickly as possible. Unlike traditional authors or agents, we will rarely work with an author to develop their ideas from pitch to proposal and beyond. The flipside is that we do not interfere editorially with the integrity of your work.

Mercury is not a vanity publisher. We only directly approach authors already in print. You might have a book soon to go out-of-print and wish to extend it's life my making it available as an eBook. Alternatively, you may have a niche work that a more traditional publisher doesn't value and has rejected.  Yet again, you may be interesting in publishing a much smaller work (on a focused topic) that is not large enough to justify a fully printed book. For any of these reasons and more, Mercury ePublishing may well be the solution you are seeking.

Established authors with books in print

If you already have a book in print (included in the Amazon.com catalogue) and that book has an Amazon SalesRank of 850,000 or better then will will almost certainly accept your new title for publication. We will consider, by exception, fine manuscripts from in-print authors selling outside the top 850,000.

New authors with finished manuscripts

If you are a new author and have a finished manuscript then we will consider your work. If it is in a category likely to sell well (see below) then there is a strong chance we will accept your title for publication. We do not accept unsolicited pitches or proposals from new authors.

What sells well as an eBook?

eBooks are particularly suited to the distribution of business, computing and academic works (with a small but high value niche market). They have also proved to be a viable complimentary channel for popular mass-market paperback titles (including works of fiction from established authors). Check out the IDPF’s
2005 Best-seller list for further information.

How many copies might I sell?

In the panel left, you can see our rough estimate of what you might hope to sell (based on the Amazon SalesRank of your current best-selling book or, for a new work, the closest competiting title).

The analysis is based on four data points from our own experience and the mathematical formula first developed by Morris Rosenthal in 2004 (demonstrating a logarithmic sales curve by rank).

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