Member Article

South Shields entrepreneur looks to Pastures Moo

A South Shields entrepreneur is encouraging businesspeople to become published authors in a matter of weeks, with the launch of an online crowd-steered bookstore.

Paul Slater, a technology entrepreneur who founded South Shields creative design agency Urban River and is a non-executive director at Ground Six, is growing his latest venture - Pastures Moo.

As a self-publishing bookstore, Pastures Moo allows novice and experienced authors to validate their in-progress work with pre-orders from readers and fans.

The idea is to empower potential authors with knowledge of the market for their books and avoided wasted time.

An avid reader, Paul developed the idea for Pastures Moo after researching the global ebook market - estimated to be worth $8.2 billion by 2017, in one recent PwC study.

20% of the top 100 books on Amazon are self-published and the market shows no signs of slowing.

Paul said: “Self publishing and crowd-funding really interest me, so I decided to combine the two with Pastures Moos. I love working with, and helping, creative people and projects so indie authors are a great fit for me.”

Authors can also use Pastures Moo to sell their ebooks direct via a page that is optimised for all mobiles, tablets and desktop customers.

He added: “Whilst similar to crowd-funding, collecting pre-orders doesn’t limit the author to achieving set goals at the risk of the project failing to go ahead. They set a pre-order goal as a guide to readers and all pre-orders placed are only charged upon the ebook release date.

“This gives readers the chance to pledge their support by committing to order the book automatically upon its release and be confident that they’ll never pay for ebooks they don’t receive.”

Paul now aims to add new features for self-publishing authors such as a beta-readers function and a process that will disseminate royalties to authors on the same day as purchases.

Check out Pastures Moo here, and tweeting @PasturesMoo

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Tom Keighley .