There’s now a one-stop portal for authors who want to enroll their ebooks into many different subscription services at once: Palatium Books, run by Rie and Claus Lund Rosenkilde in Copenhagen. Palatium says its subscription partners comprise as many as 6 million readers, all told.
These partners include companies such as Madrid-based 24symbols and Germany’s long-running Skoobe. When authors enroll their titles, they receive an advance of $50 per title against royalties, and they get statements and payments on a monthly basis thereafter.
What Palatium is working to get around is the principle of publishers as suppliers of content to the ebook subscription programs. “Normally there’s no easy way into these services for indie authors,” Claus Rosenkilde says in a Publishing Perspectives interview. “The subscription services are understandably not geared for handling accounts from individual authors. The subscription services also look upon the huge wall of content that indie authors, combined, contribute to, and our curated list helps them break through.”
Palatium also offers some flexibility in its deals—such as agreeing on a royalty on a case-by-case basis—to take into account how many titles an author may have to offer and in what genre. Palatium also stresses its non-exclusive status: you can test out its effectiveness for your books without having to give up your existing sales channels (unless you’re enrolled in Amazon KDP Select, which, of course, does require exclusivity).
Bottom line: It’s early yet, and the devil is in the details, but Palatium has an interesting model worth authors’ attention. Palatium can get your ebooks into multiple subscription services without all the legwork you’d have to do yourself, and it’s interested especially in English-language work, as well as Spanish. Palatium is choosing which books it offers, and would like to have 5,000 in two years’ time. This is a good moment to check it out, while this new offering is in its beginning stages.
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.
