Going to publish my first book; publicity and publishing advice, please?

I looked at their site and they are very coy about their status. Are you paying to have your book published, or are they offering you a royalty contract? It looks to me like a purely online publishing company - at least their books are only distributed online to the booksellers they list, not distributed as printed books. And you can do the same thing yourself, for free, at Smashwords.com - they, too, have connections with amazon.com and the others listed by peppertree.