Launched by Utahn Roice Krueger, a co-founder of the former Covey Leadership Center with Stephen Covey, and two authors of motivational books, Youpublish.com in May launched an effort that has it competing with the likes of Amazon.com, the king of Internet retailing.

But what Krueger and co-founders James Skinner and Mark Victor Hansen (of Chicken Soup for the Soul fame) offer that they believe is distinctive is the ability to publish any digital file at no cost to the creator. The latter retain copyrights, can distribute their products for free or can set a price and receive 50 percent of any sales revenue.

"It's literally any digital file," said Krueger, a Springville resident, speaker and authority on managing international business alliances.

The new company, though, has its work cut out for it. Self-publishing is available from a number of companies and their Web sites, including Amazon.

Mike Larsen, a San Francisco literary agent and co-founder of the San Francisco Writers Conference, said agents and traditional publishers receive thousands of submissions a year. He estimates the rejection rate is close to 100 percent, with only a tiny percentage making it into print

"This is part of the reason for the huge explosion in self-publishing made possible when technology and print-on-demand publishers gave writers the keys to the factory," said Larsen, author of How to Get a Literary Agent.

Amazon's CreateSpace offers on-demand books, music CDs and video DVDs that are manufactured only when ordered by customers. The company sees one of its big advantages over other self-publishers as providing access to the huge marketing machine that is Amazon.com.

"Many customers choose CreateSpace for the fast availability," said spokeswoman Amanda Wilson.

CreateSpace keeps 20 percent of the sale price of a book when it is sold through its e-stores or 40 percent when sold through Amazon.com, plus a fixed fee for printing charges. For a black-and-white book with 110 to 828 pages, the fee runs $1.50 per book plus 2 cents per page.

By contrast, Youpublish.com hopes to prosper by publishing online - quickly, easily and freely - anything in a digital file, and by providing the creator a 50 percent commission. Customers can create their own online libraries and add comments to various works.

Marika Connole, who lives in the Phoenix area with her seven children and husband Kevin, has 188 products on Youpublish.com, including sheet music, CDs of her recordings, articles on home schooling and even a chart one of her sons created to make it easy to track baseball statistics.

"You can publish pretty much anything you can think of," she said. "I think we've just scratched the surface. We've got a hundred million ideas of things we want to do."

Once books or other files have been uploaded to the site, it is up to the creators to market their products. Youpublish.com offers marketing advice, and users get a Web site address to which they can direct potential customers.

The greatest value of the service so far has been to drive traffic to the family's Web sites, Connole said.

Youpublish.com grew out of conversations Krueger had with Skinner in Japan, where Skinner is known for a book called 9 Steps to Success and for seminars on leadership and motivation. That talk led Krueger and Skinner to join Hansen - co-author of Chicken Soup for the Soul and The One Minute Millionaire - for meetings in the Maldives and Singapore to write 100 electronic books in 100 days about "ideas that can change your life." The books can be read in 15 minutes to 20 minutes, said Krueger.

The trio ended up writing 101 books in 97 days but then needed a way to distribute them. That's when Youpublish.com was born, designed as an outlet for all aspiring authors, musicians and creators of other digital works.

Because traditional publishers reject a high percentage of manuscripts, many Americans who would like to write books see too many barriers, said Steve Conlee, Youpublish.com's marketing director.

"The revolution in publishing is self-publishing. An author, a creator of any kind can now take their fate in their own hands."

With no central office, the company is run with independent consultants. Web developers work out of an office in Salt Lake City and two marketing-support people are in Los Angeles. The company is owned by an entity in the British Virgin Islands called ITCCYL Ltd., a consortium that includes Buckingham Group, a private-investment advisory firm from Chicago.

Krueger, Skinner and Hansen are called "senior advisers," who have taken on management of different aspects of the company.

Dan Poynter, who conducts numerous seminars on self-publishing and is the author of The Self-Publishing Manual, thinks the self-publishing route is the best path for many authors.

"Most should self-publish to make more money, to get to press sooner, to keep control of their work," he said.

The International Digital Publishing Forum (www.idpf.org) has collected statistics that show U.S. wholesale revenues from e-book sales have risen from $1.5 million in the first quarter 2002 to $10 million in the first quarter 2008.

Despite the growing use of e-books - those downloaded from online and read on computers or devices such as Amazon's Kindle - Poynter thinks that having a printed version provides the author with an aura of respectability.

"You get more credibility for a printed book than for an e-book," which comes from making it through an approval-and-editing process and from the financial investment of the publisher.

Youpublish.com, on the other hand, permits readers to leave comments about the quality of the work for others to see, much like Amazon.com's comments.

"We'd prefer the public to do the vetting," Krueger said.

Youpublish.com is still evolving. The founders hope to improve the search engine and add more social networking features and perhaps on-demand printing. The site might even include the ability for a group of people to come together and write a book, much the way Wikipedia is put together.

Ultimately, Krueger would like to see works in many languages and people from around the world forming communities of interest around various works. "I truly see this a being a wisdom exchange of the world."

tharvey@sltrib.com