Winter Goose Publishing

frimble3 said:

And for that matter, does 'family' automatically give everyone the warm fuzzies?

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For me, business and family are like church and state - meant to be kept separate.

And yeah, a business claiming "We're like family" makes me extra cautious.

We are family reminds me of the Sacksville-Baggins. They wasted no time selling all of Bilbo's stuff while he was off adventuring.

Sometimes family is best admired from afar. *grin*

Frimble3 & Richard White & Marian, Funny! True. And my novel features such a family. MRSMIG, thank you for these insights. Very helpful! I need to find a publisher that is not limited to Print on Demand. Some of the publishers that might move quickly (Literary Wanderlust?) provide returnable books and marketing, but no real distributor other than Ingram. How important is a separate distributor, I wonder? Or maybe it is an unrealistic hope combined with my hope of fairly fast publishing in order to capitalize on my current national tour with my daughter? And, yes, Fin is the child star in Miss Saigon! Her last performance at the Kennedy Center was last night! Monday we head to the Carolinas and the rest of the country! I will blog soon about the bookstores we hit up in DC: @karenmouldingwriter on instagram...

Still wondering a little though whether advance printing/returnable copies is something I could negotiate? Especially given the national tour situation? I just send the manuscript last week so we'll see if they even want it.

I do have to say that a friend of mine published with them, and, though being a harried single mom I am a little out of it, it seems like his book has done fairly well with reviews and acclaim. (I loved it myself.) I suppose it is hard to say though how much that is due to his own reputation and marketing, etc.
"This is Not Happening to You" (Tim Tomlinson)
Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars 14 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #524,301 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
#76 in Books > Literature & Fiction > History & Criticism > Genres & Styles > Short Stories
#7432 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Short Stories & Anthologies > Short Stories
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mrsmig said:

I think the term you're looking for is "Print on Demand," or POD. POD books are not generally carried in brick and mortar stores because the distributors for POD don't usually take returns - so if the bookstore orders ten copies of a new release and only sells a couple, they're stuck with the remaining stock.

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Many small presses use Ingram Spark as their distributor (a subdivision of behemoth distributor Ingram which specializes in self-publishers and small presses). However, Ingram Spark will not get your books on the shelves in brick-and-mortar stores, either, although your book will be available for special order from the Ingram catalog.

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I think you may be conflating Ingram Spark and IPS (Ingram Publisher Services). Ingram Spark is not a distributor - it is for self-publishing, similar to CreateSpace (ie it will print books POD and get them listed on e-book and book retailers like Amazon, B & N, etc). Ingram Spark titles are generally listed in the regular Ingram on-line ordering system for bookstores, although afaik the self-publisher can decide on the discount to bookstores (eg standard or short) and whether or not it is returnable (at their own expense).

Ingram Publisher Services is Ingram's full-service distribution arm for independent publishers ranging from well-established houses like Grove Atlantic to tiny ones with 10-book catalogs. (lately they have been adding some 'hybrid' presses and borderline-vanity presses which concerns me a bit). IPS has sales reps that visit bookstores to go over publisher catalogs, give out ARCs, etc.

And a note about POD - Ingram does the POD printing for the Ingram Spark titles as well as other POD books, including those from some small trade publishers. In some cases these are listed as returnable if the publisher sets it up that way (at their expense). So in and of itself, POD is not as much of a barrier to getting into bookstores as it was even 5 years ago. There are a number of great little niche presses that use POD rather than offset but the quality of the finished product is high, the marketing to stores is good, and they make sure their books are returnable through Ingram.

In any case, I checked Ingram for Winter Goose books, and there are just over 100 listed going back to pub dates in 2011. The discount? NET, non-returnable. This means that if a book has a list price of $10.99, a bookstore has to pay $10.99 to get it. How's that for "not gonna happen!"? I'd maybe order it for a loyal regular customer special order situation, but otherwise no way. I wonder why they even bother putting them on Ingram. Just to say they can? (Oddly, of the 6 or 7 I checked, one had a 5% discount. That's almost worse than NET, an insult to bookstores - our margins already suck. 5%? Come on.).

karenmoulding said:

Still wondering a little though whether advance printing/returnable copies is something I could negotiate? Especially given the national tour situation? I just send the manuscript last week so we'll see if they even want it.

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A publisher that isn't set up to do offset printing and get books into bookstores will not be able to suddenly have that ability. I know you really want this to work and you really want everyone to be wrong and for this to be the easy solution... but it's not going to go down that way.

Your friend has the sort of stats that are a reasonable start for someone who is self-publishing. My guess would be paperback stats are higher than ebook because he promoted it to people he knew and possibly bought copies to handsell. There's nothing wrong with that, but you can't attribute those sales to the publisher. The ebook sales are very low, which is the area where I'd expect a tiny press focused on POD/ebooks to really excel at selling books. They have not excelled.

This press is the worst of both worlds, where you'll have the availability of self-publishing and have to do all the marketing like self-publishing, but in return you'll give up profits and control.

C Alberts, Polenth (and everyone else who commented above too)... Thank you. Incredibly helpful and informative. Yes I wanted it to work, but thanks to you all I can see that, for my situation especially, it's not a. good fit. Now to continue my search for a publisher...!