Need Comments on IngramSpark

As I understand it, the person placing the order with IngramSpark has to pay at that point. Then the book is printed and delivered.

So, if you order a batch of books to hand-sell, you'll pay for them when you place your order.

If a reader orders your book they'll pay.

Note that they don't offer distribution in the way trade publishers have distribution: there's no sales push made, no effort is taken to get people to actually buy your book. They just make it available for people who already know about it.

Why are you determined to self-publish the book? I know it's not easy, but if you were to find a good trade publisher willing to take it on they'd handle all the sales and marketing for you.

TommyWilkens said:

Thank you Old Hack.The reason we are thinking of self publishing is because from all we have researched tells us we make very little $$$ from each sale when we use a service to sell our book compared to using Ingram Spark. From our findings the standard is 10% when not self publishing which means if the book sells for $10 we make $1 from each sale.That to us does not seem fair or right.Are we not on the right track here? Any thoughts you have or advise is welcomed and appreciated.

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The thing to remember here is that 100% of zero sales is still $0.

As Old Hack said, the difficulty with self-publishing, be it through IngramSpark or another service, is usually distribution and discovery. How do you get people to find out about your book? Thus, because AW has many self-publishers who have done it for a long time and done it well, the Book Promotion sub-forum.

I'm a big fan of this thread, which I think is one of the most useful on all of the forum.

The trouble with promoting your book on something like Online Book Club is that its 900,000+ members didn't come to hear about your book, they came to discuss books they have already heard of and read. So your promotion efforts will come off as spamming. Same with social media, which generally isn't an especially effective sales tool for a book post-launch.

What typically happens--and I'm simplifying a lot here--is that self-published books sell far, far fewer copies than trade published books. Often only to friends and family--most of us only have human-to-human networks of about 150-200 people. It can be slightly easier if you have a large pre-existing following, and a lot of successful self-published authors are authors who built up a long-time fanbase over the course of a writing career, or debut authors who had a large following in fan-fiction or Wattpad-like communities. So, generally, you will get a larger cut but you would also expect, even in the best-case scenario, to sell fewer books.

Whereas a trade publisher buys a book for an advance--that's money you keep. The publisher also has access to distributors (including a different sub-section of Ingram--this gets people confused) that will get the book in front of the browsing public. So while you only get 10 or 15% of the royalties, it's 10 or 15% of a much larger number, plus you have that advance. (For complex reasons, most authors make their money on advances, not royalties.)

So really it's a mathematical question. You have to be careful with online research into any kind of publishing as there are a lot of bad actors out there. There are legitimate reasons to go one route or the other, often dependent on the given book, any built-in following, etc. But unless you have experience self-publishing and/or ready access to a fairly large market, I'd guess the math is going to work out better for you with a trade deal, because it comes down to the access you have to market, which as a solo author isn't usually that much.

Hope this helps clarify.

Sat Nam! (Literally "Truth Name"--a Sikh greeting)

What VeryBigBeard said. With a few exceptions:

If your book is for a niche market, you may be better off with the sort of niche trade publisher that only gives royalties, in which case, your money comes from those royalties.

The one group that does well with self-publishing are those with a large niche market that doesn't show up in bookstores. If you have contacts for the online markets for this niche, then you sell directly to them. And you promote the book by getting some review copies into the hands of people who will use it in workshops/classes/etc.

Otherwise, unless you really have a flair for market and promotion, self-publishing doesn't make much financial sense.

Blessings,

Siri Kirpal

TommyWilkens said:

Thank you Old Hack.The reason we are thinking of self publishing is because from all we have researched tells us we make very little $$$ from each sale when we use a service to sell our book compared to using Ingram Spark.

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When you trade publish you're not "us[ing] a service to sell our book": you're working with a huge team of highly-skilled professionals who will ensure your book is published to the very best standard, and sold into as many outlets as possible. Yes, you earn more money per copy sold if you self-publish; but if you get a good contract with a good publisher (and I'll admit, it's not easy to do this) then you'll probably sell far more copies and earn more money even at that lower rate per copy than if you self publish. And you'll probably reach more readers, too, which will have knock-on effects for anything you write in the future.

From our findings the standard is 10% when not self publishing which means if the book sells for $10 we make $1 from each sale.That to us does not seem fair or right.Are we not on the right track here? Any thoughts you have or advise is welcomed and appreciated.

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I used to run a blog about publishing and I once got hold of statistics about self-published sales. If I remember rightly, the average number of sales per title for self-published books was less than 100 copies. So if you sell your book at $10, and earn a 70% royalty, on sales of 100 copies you'd make $700. But you'd have to pay your editor, your jacket designer, and anyone else involved in the publishing, out of that $700. As good editing is going to cost you more than $700, you'll not see much of a return on your investment.

Now, if you work with a trade publisher, and your book sells at the same $10, and you get paid a 10% royalty, it does sound as though you'd earn less money from the book. But you'd get an advance against royalties: that could be anything from, say, $1,500 to $800,000. And that's all yours to keep: you don't pay anyone out of that, it's all yours. Except for your agent's commission, which would be about 15%.

If you ignore the advance, and focus on sales: I'd usually be embarrassed if a book I'd signed sold less than 10,000 copies. At 10% royalty, that level of sales would pay you royalties of $10,000.

On top of that, your agent would work on selling foreign, translation, and subsidiary rights, which would earn you further advances, further royalties, further money. All without you doing anything other than promotional work and writing your next title.

Of course, all of this is dependent upon you having written a great book, and finding a good agent to represent you. None of that is easy. But don't discount it just because you've read something online which obviously hasn't given you the full picture.

POD books are printed in smaller numbers and as such end up being more expensive. So you'll need to not only convince your readers to pick your book, you'll also have to convince them to pick up a book that will be more expensive compared to similar books. You'll notice that on Amazon a lot of self-pub authors choose to sell their books for a very low price as means to attract readers while you are going to be selling for a very high price... You'll just have to make double effort to sell your stuff. So there's that.

Your book isn't unique. No book is unique in the market. And even it were, its being unique is a very bad thing. It means it has no easy comparisons, which makes it hard to recommend. "If you liked this book, you might like this one too."

Even on Amazon, your book has to have a category, and sub-categories. That's how people find books on Amazon. It's also how agents and publishers sell books to bookstores.

What you have is historical non-fiction, and by the involvement of Lee Oswald, I'd guess you fit at least adjacent to the fairly large genre of American presidential history.

Note that, on Amazon, your book will be "shelved" along with all the conspiracy books about Lee Harvey Oswald. There are many. If yours is really based on extensive research and hitherto unknown diaries, that's a selling point. It's the sort of thing you can mention in a query letter to an agent, and it gives the book legitimacy and a chance to stand out.

You do not sell books, as the author, by explaining to everyone how "explosive" or "unique" your book is. Nobody is going to take your word for it. Go read the thread I linked above. Here, I'll link it again: "How to promote your book like an intelligent human being and not an SEO dweeb". The poster who started that thread, aside from being the forum's admin, is also well-versed in book publishing and promotion, particularly for academic and technical books for specialist markets.