Peeling the e-onion

As part of my presidential duties for Leicester Writers' Club, in conjunction with Creative Leicestershire, I am trying to organise a panel discussion on e-publishing, with the focus on mono-media ebooks that may or may not be published alongside their paper back counterparts. I would have preferred a discussion on multimedia productions for tablets but realised that is a subject too large for a single evening.

For this event I wanted an e-novelist, an epoet, an elibrarian and a British epublisher.

During the past fortnight I have wasted a great deal of time trying to find a British e-publisher, i.e. a firm that selects and edits mono-media books for free, publishes them online, markets them, takes the profits and pays the authors a small royalty.

I thought the task would be easy - I would just have to put the words British epublisher or perhaps UK epublisher into Google and up would pop a list. I would then be able to trawl through it, and send out an invitation to the firm I thought most idealistic, most successful and/or most local.

The first obstacle I came across was that the word epublisher often refers to a piece of software enabling authors to format their works; the second, authors who use that software to upload their books are often called epublishers .

After filtering out both software and software users I found lists of firms who claimed to epublish authors' work.

Most firms turned out to be ones offering commercial assistance to self-publishers, where authors pay for services like copy editing, formatting, marketing. Many of the firms also offered to produce a limited run of paper copies in conjunction with each eformat book.

Having paid the firm to produce the books and ebooks, the authors then takes all profits from sales, except where they sell their work through e-retail shops such as Amazon, ibooks or kobo, when they have to pay the retailers a percentage of the sale price.

Once I'd filtered out firms enabling self-publishing, I was left with lists of firms claiming to publish authors' works and to pay royalties.

A few of these firms turned out to be vanity publishing, basically firms retaining the copyright but asking authors to pay a contribution to publishing costs and offering small royalties on the sales. They tended to employ a good measure of flattery to make authors feel as if they were being published by a reputable firm who admired their work. Often these ' author contributions ' were higher than the charges made by genuine self-publishing firms.

I filtered the vanity publishers out to leave the firms that offered to publish for free and pay royalties. However I discovered that although I had included the word British in my Google search the lists did not consist of British epublishers. Most epublishers' websites gave no indication of the owners physical location. I only found out after contacting them, that the firms were based either in the States or in Canada. Admittedly this wouldn't make much difference to an author publishing an ebook but makes an awful lot of difference for someone wanting to bring a member of a publishing team to Welligton Street on March 22nd to take part in a panel discussion.

Having trawled through the lists without finding a single reputable British firm I feel as if I have finished peeling an onion and have found nothing at the centre.

Have I overlooked an obvious text-only only British epublisher because all along I wanted to be looking for a multi-media proponent or are there no real British epublishers in existence?