When I read about Penguin Random House and self publishing in the US, I don’t find many good things being said about the solutions they offer authors with their Author Solutions platform. Now, it seems, the Random House is going into a similar direction in Germany. At Frankfurt Book Fair, they are opening their own self publishing portal “Twentysix” here. That’s not unusual by itself. Publisher Holtzbrinck, for example, is pretty successful with their ebook aggregator Neobooks, and Bastei Lübbe recently acquired aggregator Bookrix.

The interesting part in case of RandomHouse is how they are planning to earn with Twentysix: By charging authors a premium for the simple hope to get published under the RandomHouse name. They use the technology of print on demand service BoD (quite a good name and a strong competitor to CreateSpace in Germany) – but sell it for a higher price. In exchange, they promise authors that editors of the company would regularly look at all the titles that are published with them. Also, they are planning to offer “exclusive services” in the future.