Forget the middlemen. For $40, MyISBN will publish your physical book and sell it on Amazon Japan

Despite the rise of ebooks and relatively easy epublishing outlets for authors, some people would just rather have a thoughtfully-stocked bookshelf at home than a Kindle.
Count the Japanese among those who decline to embrace digital reading over paper. According to a recent study, only eight percent of Japanese had downloaded and paid for an ebook, compared to 20 percent of Americans, representing the lowest rate of ebook adoption in the developed world.

“Japanese people love analog, physical things,” explains Yukihiro Sada, founder and CEO of Osaka-based DesignEgg. The startup’s MyISBN service allows anyone to self-publish a real book and sell it on Amazon Japan, all without the minimum order requirement enforced by traditional publishing distributors that act as middlemen.

Why do the middlemen hold so much power in the Japanese market? In order to contract with Amazon Japan directly, you need to produce a minimum of 50 titles per year – something that even the most prolific solo writers would have a hard time committing to. Small-scale indie publishers could also be deterred by the minimum requirement, which forces most of them to contract through an existing publishing house and pay a percentage for the privilege of appearing on the world’s largest online book retailer.

“In the US, individuals can deal directly with Amazon subsidiaries [to self-publish], but in Japan, only publishers can go straight to Amazon,” Sada explains. “No subsidiaries exist yet. The fact that there’s no way to publish a book without going through a distributor is bad.”

From PDF to your bookshelf

MyISBN charges authors a flat rate of JPY 4,980 yen (US$41.40) for its services. Authors set their own price on Amazon, usually about JPY 1,000 (US$8.31) per 100 pages, and keep 10 percent of each sale. MyISBN, Amazon, and the printing company divide up the rest.

“[Independent authors] have to pay about US$20,000 to US$30,000 for just one title, because they’re required to print at least 1,000 or so copies,” Sada says. “Part of that cost is because professional books are edited, arranged, and so on. We leave it up to our writers to edit and arrange the book themselves.”

In order to get published, all a potential MyISBN author needs is a PDF document of their work.

Just one and a half years after launching the service, MyISBN has published more than 250 titles. Its best seller, a self-help book, sold more than 1,000 copies. “The writer earned about US$3,000 with zero risk,” says Sada.

So what kind of books can you find on MyISBN’s Amazon store? “We have everything from academic textbooks to autobiographies by old folks before they pass away,” Sada says. “Generally speaking, topics can range from S&M to religion, and everything in between.”

Design Egg has been fully bootstrapped from the beginning. Sada says that his ultimate goal is to completely cut the middlemen out of Japan’s independent publishing market.

“I honestly don’t care about the money,” he adds. “I just wanted to help people share their information. Our system can accelerate distribution and promote education.”