With more than 1,200 publishers and self-publishing authors from 50 countries, the Budapest-based self-publishing platform PublishDrive has been singled out by Google Developers Launchpad for its coveted six-month accelerator program, which comes with an equity-free $50,000 to spend on the company.
We first met the startup’s co-founding CEO, Kinga Jentetics—now a Forbes “30 under 30” business leader in European media—when she participated in a program for authors at Frankfurt Book Fair in 2015. She and her colleagues have grown the business today to the point that it has produced roughly 30,000 ebooks in more than 30 languages. “Last year we grew by 300 percent,” Jentetics tells us, “and we’re growing by 15 percent monthly this year.”
She and two team members will fly to San Francisco on July 17 for a two-week mentoring and training stint at Google headquarters. This is the opening to their six-month accelerator program, during which, Jentetics says, she wants to work with Google “to help authors get more marketing options in the Google Play bookstore.”
As a gauge of how impressive it is for this startup to have cinched this spot in Google’s accelerator, only 33 companies were accepted for the group. Jentetics was told by a Google mentor who was on the jury that more than 15,000 companies applied.
The royalty model at PublishDrive, because of its base in continental Europe, is affected by varying VAT levels, but on the average works out to about 60 percent of net, and the platform takes 10 percent of net sales to cover its costs, similar to US-based ebook distributors. There’s an offer now of 70 percent royalties on Amazon sales for new users registering by July 31. PublishDrive also features an earn-as-you-sell approach to payments, advancing authors’ income to them the month after sale, even if PublishDrive hasn’t yet received that money from retailers.
Bottom line: PublishDrive includes more than 240,000 international libraries in its distribution range, along with all major retailers. We think it’s worth consideration, especially for authors interested in an international stance. Jentetics says she’s happy to meet writers who will be in the San Francisco area in late July. Drop a line to kinga.jentetics@publishdrive.com with the subject line “Kinga meetup in SF” if you’re interested in talking with her team.
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
