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continental Europe have launched their own selfpublishingservcies of various kinds and profiles, like RCS in Italy,which addressed authors with writing competitions forgenre fiction (Marcello Vena in a blog post at FuturebookinOctober 2013), or the German traditional publisherOetiner with its Oetinger34 concept of a mix of selfpublishingoffer, writing competitions, and classical editorialservices, all focusing on authors of childrens’ and youngadult books. (buchreport, 12 March 2014).But also US selfpublishing services aim at the internationalmarkets, such as Smashwords, or, since March 2014, Barnes& Noble with its Nook Press selfpublishing platform, whichhas been made available for the UK; France, Germany,Spain, the Netherlands and Belgium. (Press release, 18March 2014).Developments in 2013 and beforeAs recently as the summer of 2011, a headline such as thefollowing could still appear: “German Self-Publishing,Where Innovation Meets Angst,” pointing to the country’saversion to risk (Amanda DeMarco, Publishing Perspectives,4 August 2011). A year later, an initially self-publishedtitle, Fifty Shades of Grey by E. L. James (albeit now in anedition published by Random House) was by far the definingbook event of 2012 in Germany just as almost anywhereelse, and a German self-published author made theheadlines with Liebe, Sex und andere Katastrophen—Meineabenteuerliche Suche nach dem Mann fürs Leben (Love, Sexand Other Catastrophes—My Adventurous Quest for the Manof My Life), a book that blends well in the current flood ofromance fiction. A mere 20,000 ebook copies sold at €3.49were enough to generate broad media coverage exploringthe new model for success. “Never had it been easier topublish a book” was the new gospel sung by mainstreammedia such as Der Spiegel,(Mein Verlag und ich, 17 July2012).The Angst article and the bestselling Love, Sex, and OtherCatastrophes book originated at epubli, the print-ondemandand self-publishing platform of the Holtzbrinckgroup, Germany’s second-largest publishing venture, butnot the market leader. This position is held by BoD (orBooks on Demand), the service arm of Libri, Germany’slargest wholesaler by far, which has explored customizedsolutions to production for 10 years, claiming a marketshare of 80 percent in the print-on-demand segment witha backlist of 420,000 titles and some (10,000 new releasesper year).By early 2011, author Amanda Hocking had sold one anda half million copies of the self-published version of herdebut work My Blood Approves, which was then picked upby traditional publishers for global sales (Livres Hebdo, 25April 2012). In the summer of 2012, four self-published titleswere on the New York Times bestseller list (The Guardian,3 August 2012).However, self-published ebooks quickly came to provehow powerful the new concept of publishing was not justwithin the huge English language arena but allowing evenauthors from other countries and linguistic backgroundsto develop an international audience.German Jonas Winner, an author for television, holding aPhD in game theory, and a talented promoter of his work,decided to release his 1200 novel Berlin Gothic as a seriesof seven ebooks through Amazon’s self-publishing platform,Kindle Direct Publishing and the attached servicearm Amazon CreateSpace. Between September 2011 andFebruary 2012, he sold 55,000 copies of the books or, onaverage, 1,000 every day, earning for each one 30 centsout of the retail price of €0.89.Another line of service, Amazon Crossing, is technically nota platform for self-publishing, but the US giant’s own publishingdivision, though it offers another channel forauthors to jumpstart their international career while bypassingthe traditional gatekeepers of literary agencies.For German writer Oliver Plötzsch and his novel The Hangman’sDaughter, which was published by Ullstein, a conventionalpublisher in the German original, going throughAmazon Crossing for the English edition meant all the differencefrom having a midlist title to having sold over onemillion copies in the US by the summer of 2013. (buchreport,18 June 2013).In 2009, BiblioBazaar, a US-based company in the new selfpublishingsegment, was already producing 272,930 titles(according to Bowker, quoted in Publishers Weekly, April 15,2010). In 2011, BiblioBazaar alone (processed 773,857ISBNs).In 2012, Kelly Gallagher of Bowker Market Research proclaimedthe “golden age of self-publishing,” with 211,269titles published in 2011 (up from 133,036 in 2010), and bythe summer of 2013, Bowker reported that 12% of the totalebook market and 20% of the genre segment, comprisingscience fiction, romance and humor, were self-publishedtitles in 2012 (quoted in The Guardian, 11 June 2013).However, self-publishing, notably with regard to ebooks,reaches far beyond the fulfillment of production services109 The Global eBook Report