The best self-publishing companies in the UK (2026): 10 options compared, in pounds

How we compared them

Ten companies, the same seven facts for each — what it costs to publish, the ebook royalty, print, distribution reach, how and when you are paid, exclusivity, and who owns the ISBN — taken from each company’s own pricing and help pages on 23 August 2026 and linked in the sources. Prices are quoted as the company states them; UK company packages are quoted with the VAT treatment the company states. We do not score editorial quality or customer service, because we cannot verify them.

One disclosure: Ebokio Publishing is our platform. It appears below on the same terms as everyone else, described as what it is — a single-store retailer-platform with a UK bookshop, not a distributor — and it is not ranked above services that do things it does not. For the global comparison of fourteen companies, the earnings table and the vanity-press red flags, see the best self-publishing companies guide; this page is the UK layer on top of it.

The UK self-publishing companies at a glance

Ten options for UK authors, as of 23 August 2026

Figures from each company’s own pricing/help pages, fetched 23 August 2026, linked in Sources. Amazon’s exact UK price band and Kobo/Apple payout mechanics are detailed in the global guide.

The four UK-only things every list forgets

1. E-book VAT is zero

Since 1 May 2020 the UK zero rate of VAT applies to e-books, e-newspapers, e-magazines and academic e-journals; before that, e-books carried the standard rate while print was zero-rated. Two practical consequences: a UK reader pays exactly the price you set, and on platforms that pay a share of net receipts — Ebokio, for instance — nothing is deducted for VAT on UK sales. E-audiobooks are the exception: they remain standard-rated at 20%, so an audiobook priced to UK listeners has VAT inside it.

2. ISBNs come from Nielsen, and you rarely need one for an ebook

The UK ISBN agency is Nielsen. A single ISBN is £93; a block of ten is £174; a hundred is £387; a thousand is £994 — all inclusive of VAT. There is no legal requirement for an ISBN in the UK and it gives no copyright protection; it is a trade identifier. Every retailer in this guide sells ebooks without one (Amazon assigns an ASIN; Ebokio an internal ID). You need an ISBN for a print edition you want bookshops to order, for Nielsen’s trade database, and — see below — for PLR. If you want one, buy the block of ten: each format needs its own number, and a free ISBN from a platform makes that platform the publisher of record.

3. Legal deposit applies to you

Anyone who publishes in the UK, including self-publishing authors, must give one copy of each published work to the British Library, free of charge, within a month — a rule that has existed since 1662 and was extended to electronic publications in April 2013. For a print book, send one copy to the Legal Deposit Office at Boston Spa and the other five deposit libraries can claim copies through the Agency for the Legal Deposit Libraries in Edinburgh. For an ebook-only title, a single electronic deposit covers all six libraries (publishers outside Scotland contact LDO-Electronic@bl.uk). You do not need an ISBN to deposit. If you publish both formats, the duty attaches to the print edition unless you have agreed electronic deposit.

4. Public Lending Right pays you for library loans

If your book has an ISBN and you are named on the title page, you can register it with the British Library’s PLR scheme and be paid each year for loans from UK public libraries — print, e-books and e-audiobooks, including remote e-lending, which was added in July 2018. The rate for 2024/25 loans was 12.40p per loan, with a £1 minimum payment and a £6,600 annual cap, paid in February; register by 30 June to be counted that year. One catch that bites self-published authors: Amazon’s ASINs are not eligible, so a Kindle-only edition cannot earn PLR. Buy an ISBN, publish an edition libraries can buy (IngramSpark and the aggregators’ library channels), and register.

And the tax HMRC treats an author’s profits as income from a profession (or, for occasional writing, miscellaneous income), reported through Self Assessment. If your gross trading income is £1,000 or less in a tax year the trading allowance means you need not tell HMRC at all; above that, register by 5 October following the tax year. Every platform here pays you gross — nothing is withheld, so keep the money for the bill.

Free platforms UK authors use

Amazon KDP

Still where most UK ebook readers are, and free to publish to. You earn 70% of list price inside Amazon’s price band and 35% outside it, minus a per-megabyte delivery fee on 70% sales; amazon.co.uk sales are paid in pounds to a UK bank around sixty days after the month of sale. KDP Print makes paperbacks for Amazon’s own store. The trade-off is the pull toward KDP Select — 90 days of ebook exclusivity for Kindle Unlimited — which rules out every other platform on this page for that period; the KDP alternatives guide weighs it.

Kobo Writing Life and Apple Books

Both free, both direct, both paying around 70% of list without Amazon’s delivery fees — Apple at any price, Kobo on most. Kobo matters more in the UK than its US share suggests (it powers the ebook stores of several UK and European retailers and the Kobo Plus subscription), and Apple Books is the default on every iPhone. The price of publishing direct is a dashboard each; the alternative is the aggregator below.

Draft2Digital

One upload to Apple, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, Tolino, Bookshop.org, Everand and the library services (OverDrive, BorrowBox — the one UK libraries use — cloudLibrary, Hoopla), with Gardners for UK trade ebook supply. D2D keeps roughly 10% of the retail price, so you receive about 60% of list at the 70% stores, and it hands out free ISBNs. Two things changed in 2026: new accounts pay a one-time $20 activation fee, and accounts earning under $100 a year pay $12 a year from 14 May 2026. Payouts are monthly once you pass a $10–$20 threshold by bank transfer or PayPal; thresholds are in dollars, so budget for a conversion.

Ebokio Publishing (ours)

A UK retailer-platform: you upload an EPUB or DOCX, a human reviews it, and it goes on sale as a product page in the Ebokio bookshop at ebokio.com, where readers buy and read in the Ebokio reader. Free to publish (up to thirty titles), non-exclusive, ISBN optional, and you keep 70% of net receipts on the Free plan, 80% on Premium (£13.99 a month) or 90% on Pro (£19.99 a month) at any price — net receipts being the price minus the reader’s VAT (0% in the UK) and the card-processing fee, with no delivery fees. You are paid in pounds at the end of the month two months after the sale month, with a £30 minimum that rolls forward. It sells on ebokio.com only, so it belongs alongside the retailers above rather than instead of them: the extra non-exclusive storefront with the higher royalty. How it works and plans.

Print in UK bookshops: the distributor route

IngramSpark

The print distributor behind most UK self-published paperbacks, with a printing facility in the UK, no setup fee since 2023 and — from 1 February 2026 — no revision fees either. You set a list price and a wholesale discount (IngramSpark suggests 48–55% for the UK, Europe and Australia so shops get their usual trade terms), and receive the wholesale price less the print cost less a 1.875% market-access fee; ebooks earn 85% of the net Ingram receives. Books enter a network Ingram puts at more than 45,000 retailers and libraries, which in the UK means Gardners and the wholesalers Waterstones and independents order from — availability to order, not a promise of stocking. UK authors are paid in pounds by BACS with no minimum, ninety days after the end of the month in which the sales are reported. It is non-exclusive, needs an ISBN per format (a free one registers the imprint as "Indy Pub"; your own Nielsen number keeps you as publisher), and pairs naturally with KDP Print for Amazon.

Lulu

Free to publish and sell on Lulu’s own store, where you keep 80% of the profit on print and 90% on ebooks; a one-off £4.99 puts a title into global distribution through Ingram and Amazon, where the channel takes 50% of retail before Lulu’s 20% — so distributed print margins are thin and listings take around twelve weeks to appear. The reason UK authors use it is Lulu Direct: print-on-demand fulfilment plugged into your own Shopify, WooCommerce or Wix shop, paid monthly by PayPal in pounds from a $5 balance.

UK full-service companies, and how to read their prices

A full-service company does the production for you — editing, design, typesetting, ISBN, printing, listing — for a package price. In the UK the legitimate ones publish their prices, leave you the rights, and tell you who is publisher of record. Three pass that test today; one well-known name did not survive the summer.

Troubador Publishing (Market Harborough, since 1996)

The most established UK full-service self-publisher, with around 600 new titles a year, its own distribution warehouse in Leicestershire, stock held at Gardners, and — since May 2024 — direct supply to the Waterstones group. (Its self-publishing imprint was called Matador for two decades; the name was retired in 2023.) Quotes are bespoke; Troubador’s own worked examples are roughly £650 to make a book available as an ebook, £3,000 to get it printed and on the market, £6,000 to get it into bookshops and £7,500 for maximum exposure, with a £500 deposit on contract. You are paid net receipts after retailer discounts and a distribution fee that is not published, quarterly, under a two-year distribution agreement; rights stay with you, and most authors use a Troubador ISBN, which puts Troubador’s imprint in the trade databases. It is the option if physical bookshop presence is the goal and you have the budget.

PublishNation (London, since 2011)

The cheapest verified route to a professionally formatted ebook and paperback: £215 for a Kindle ebook, £295 paperback, £325 hardback, £495 for paperback plus ebook, £725 for all three formats, and marketing packages at £699 and £899. PublishNation takes no royalty — its own examples are about £1.00 on a £7.99 paperback and about £1.20 on a £2.99 ebook, which are the retailer’s rates — and you pay after publication. Distribution is through IngramSpark, which means worldwide availability to order rather than a sales effort; there is no Gardners stocking or Waterstones relationship, no editing beyond proofreading and critique, and the site does not say who is publisher of record on the ISBN it supplies. Ask before you sign.

SilverWood Books (Bristol, since 2007)

A small editorial team with published, all-in packages: Silver £3,197 (up to 80,000 words), Gold £4,297 (100,000 words, 30 images) and Platinum £7,497 (120,000 words, 50 images), all plus VAT and all including cover, typesetting, proofreading, ISBN and a Kindle ebook; a bulk print run is priced separately. On trade sales SilverWood fulfils it takes a 15% distributor discount; you keep 100% of copies you sell yourself. On a package ISBN SilverWood is the publisher of record — but it also offers a "to the point of print" route that hands you print-ready files for your own KDP and IngramSpark accounts under your own imprint, which is the version to choose if you want to be the publisher.

The cautionary tale: The Self-Publishing Partnership The Bath-based Self-Publishing Partnership, which handled distribution and royalty collection through Gardners for hundreds of authors, told its authors at the end of June 2026 that it was ceasing to trade. By August the Alliance of Independent Authors and The Bookseller were reporting royalties unpaid and "in limbo", no administrators appointed, and the Society of Authors running a recovery campaign for members. The lesson is not "avoid full-service companies"; it is that a company which collects your royalties before paying you is a counterparty risk. Prefer arrangements where the retailer or distributor pays you directly, keep your own ISBNs and files, and read the contract for what happens if the company stops trading.

Which UK self-publishing company should you use?

• An ebook, as many readers as possible, no budget: Amazon KDP plus Kobo and Apple direct (or Draft2Digital for everything but Amazon), plus Ebokio for the higher-royalty UK storefront. Cost: £0.

• A paperback UK bookshops can order: IngramSpark with your own Nielsen ISBN and a 50–55% discount, KDP Print for Amazon. Cost: the ISBN block (£174) and your proofs.

• A paperback actually stocked in bookshops: Troubador, with the budget to match, or a hybrid: IngramSpark for availability and your own legwork with local independents.

• Someone else does the production, on a budget: PublishNation for the formatting and listing; hire your own editor separately.

• Someone else does the production, with editorial care: SilverWood, ideally on the own-imprint route.

• Whichever you pick: buy your own ISBNs, send the legal-deposit copy, and register for PLR.