Having looked at more English-language titles I have to wonder who Pentian's "amazing" editors are and what exactly they do. Most of the books are littered with errors (especially regarding punctuation and dialogue), and quite a few of their would-be authors clearly speak English as a second language. Many titles have raised no money whatsoever and have only a week left in which to do so. I wonder how many poorly-informed people will be tempted to put up the money themselves rather than lose the opportunity of being part of Pentian's "publishing revolution"?
Rather oddly, one of Pentian's "bestsellers" is a novel by Mary Sheldon, daughter of Sidney Sheldon. It was crowdfunded to the extent of a record-breaking $10000, but POD being what it is the book has a less than impressive Amazon ranking of 8,045,189.
ETA: I just noticed this:
Pentian works with global distributors for real bookshelves as well, and if that's where we think your book will do well, that's where it will go.
I wonder if Pentian can provide some examples of this.
In answer to the question "How much can I expect to earn from my book?"
That depends entirely on your book. If you've written the next Harry Potter or Gone Girl, the sky's the limit.
https://pentian.com/main/faq
The obvious response to this is that if J K Rowling or Gillian Flynn had published with Pentian nobody would have heard of them.
It's not just the editors who seem to have an easy job at Pentian - the "marketing pros" can't be overstretched if the authors have to "self-promote to the max", and although quite a few of the covers aren't bad they're no better than stuff I've seen on Fiverr.
Finally, Pentian claims to be "the crowdfunding platform that allows every reader to become a publisher". But if Pentian handles "allocation and management of ISBN" the reader (don't they mean "writer"?) isn't the publisher. If you don't own the ISBN you haven't self-published.
