The primary criticisms are that Book Country’s services, which range from $99 to $549, are much too expensive—“vanity press, pure and simple,” writes one commenter at The Passive Voice—and that Penguin takes a cut of 30 percent cut of royalties authors earn from third-party retailers like Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN). In other words, an author who directly uploads his or her work to Amazon receives a 70 percent royalty. An author who uses Book Country to upload his or her work to Amazon receives 70 percent of that 70 percent. An author who publishes a $2.99 e-book directly on Amazon will receive $2.05 for each sale. An author who publishes an e-book to Amazon through Book Country will receive just $1.47 for each sale.

SEE ALSO: Penguin Adds Self-Publishing To Writing Community Site Book Country

Well-known self-published author David Gaughran, who writes the blog “Let’s Get Digital,” describes this as “out-and-out gouging.” He expanded on that to me: “Formatting and uploading are one-time jobs. There is no justification for taking an ongoing fee in the form of 30 percent of the author’s royalties. That is, quite simply, gouging.”

In a statement, Penguin says, “Like many sites, Book Country takes a percentage of each sale of a book.”

“I’ve sold 500,000 e-books,” writes Joe Konrath, an extremely successful self-published author who has a deal with Amazon Publishing for some of his books. “If I’d published with Book Country, they would have taken $290,000 in royalties from me.

Self-published authors accuse Book Country of preying on inexperienced authors who do not realize how easy it is to publish their books themselves, designing them and uploading them directly to Amazon, Barnes & Noble (NYSE: BKS) and other etailers, or outsourcing the formatting work for much less than Book Country charges. (Uploading books to the major etailers is free.) Worse, he says, these authors may use Book Country in the belief that Penguin will discover them and give them traditional publishing contracts—which seemingly has not happened yet. (HarperCollins has signed up authors it found through its community writing site Authonomy, however.)

Penguin responds that the tools offered by Book Country “are not intended to be the least expensive in the market—the free, instant e-book sites exist and they may be the best choice for some writers. However, what you get on Book Country is not the same as what you get at these other free sites. On Book Country, you can publish high quality e-books and print books, and you don’t have to upload your books in multiple places, manage multiple ISBNs, or manage multiple accounts. In all three packages offered by Book Country, our e-books are individually hand-coded, not run through a software program with no human intervention.”

“The main reason that I am concerned that Penguin are behind this is because that will make it more significantly attractive to those newer, less experienced writers,” Gaughran told me. “A much-desired carrot is being dangled in the form of a potential publishing deal with Penguin. Their logo is all over the site. And their backing will lead to some confusion. For example, the Guardian’s article about Book Country on Wednesday presented it as a way to get published ‘by Penguin’ for only $99. That, obviously, is not the case.” Penguin says “the Penguin logo is in the footer of the Book Country site so you can easily click to get an explanation of the fact that Book Country is a subsidiary of Penguin’s with its own dedicated staff.”

Gaughran said he “can’t imagine” why anyone who has already self-published would use Book Country, but “I am afraid that less experienced writers will go for it because it is backed by Penguin. That dream of a Big 6 publishing deal is widespread, and hard to shake.”

For Penguin’s full statement, see the next page.