Book Distribution Masterclass: The Ultimate Guide for Self-Publishing Success #bookdistribution

Once a month we do a two hour deep dive training session on topics to help you with your self publishing journey. Covering everything from writing to editing to designing and of course marketing your book. Recently we did a deep dive into book distribution. All the ways to get your book into readers hands, including but also well beyond Amazon. If you missed that deep dive, but you want some book distribution knowledge, well, you're in the right place because this video is for you. Hey there. I'm Julie the book Broad, founder of Book Launchers, a full service self publishing company with courses, coaching groups and of course an entire team of professionals who will help you write, publish and promote a nonfiction book to grow your brand, your impact and your income. Book distribution is a big subject and for many authors they mostly just focus on Amazon. But for many reasons, I think focusing on Amazon alone is not a good business decision. Amazon can shut you down at any time. It's the platform that reaches many, but definitely not all readers. And Amazon has a lot of power and the more you focus solely on them, the more power they get. And that is risky business. But where else can you reach readers with your book? Well, Alyssa Graser, our production manager, spent two hours taking people through this and I've cut out some of the highlights for you. Without further ado, take it away, Alyssa.

I want to very briefly touch on and clarify that we are talking exclusively about self publishing distribution today. And self publishing, to be clear, is when you have a book that you are maintaining full rights to and that you are publishing yourself, you are not going through an external publisher. Traditional publishing is a whole different beast. They have their own built in distribution networks. There's an entirely different process, usually involving literary agents and editors. But today we are speaking specifically about self publishing and distribution. And as a reminder, you know, we're big on self publishing over here and the big part of the reason why is that you get to maintain such pure creative control. You retain full control over your content, your cover design, any marketing that you want to do. And for a lot of the authors that we work with at Book Launchers who are wanting to be thought leaders in their spaces, it's really important that their words are what they intend for them to be in their books. And with traditional publishing you have to release some of that control. You also get higher royalties as a self publishing author and your book will get to market more quickly. And then of course ownership is really important because you do retain all rights to your work. And that's actually an important piece that we'll talk about. As we talk about different distributors, because some of them you give up not rights to your work, but some of your rights to distribute freely. So we'll talk about that when we get to it. So what are we talking about when we say distribution for self published authors? So self publishing distribution refers to the various platforms and channels through which authors can make their books available to readers. Not so long ago, really, your only option was to pay a lot of money out of pocket to do what's called offset printing and basically buy thousands of copies that you store in your garage or wherever you have space. And then you are responsible for selling those books. And there were a few people who were really successful at that, but it was an extremely expensive and labor intensive way to distribute books. Thankfully, we have a lot of better options now than where self publishing started not so long ago. And I want to emphasize here that the importance of choosing the right distribution options for you and your goals cannot be overstated. What you'll hear me say over and over again today is that there is no single answer that is perfect for everyone. I'm going to spend a lot of time today focusing on how we do things and what's kind of in general best practices. But even within that, there are a lot of smaller decisions to be made to set your book up for success.

All right, so you can see why this was a two hour broadcast. And you can, by the way, purchase the replay of the entire thing or any other deep dive we've had for only $35. There's a link below for more information on that. But of course, at any time you can join our deep dives for free. You just need to be on our newsletter list to get the invites so you can make sure you catch our next one@book launchers.com newsletter. All right, so Alyssa is going to break down options one by one. The first one she touches on is Amazon's publishing arm, kdp. This, by the way, is not to be confused with any of the scam companies out there like AMZ Publishing, Amazon Publishing Services, which are implying they're Amazon companies, but they are not. KDP is their publishing arm and they print and distribute print and ebooks. With that clarification in mind, take it away, Alyssa.

There are a lot of benefits to publishing through Amazon, kdp. Obviously it is Amazon. So they have a massive global reach through their Amazon.com and other marketplaces, right? Like.ca.uk they have massive global reach on the retail side, specifically in Amazon. They also have a pretty simple and user friendly interface. I wish I could say this about every distributor that we have here, but some of them, there's much more of a learning curve between deciding you want to put your book up for sale and actually getting it up. But Amazon's is pretty straightforward and they do provide extensive information on how to do it and how to do it right by their system, which is great. They do have a pretty fast publishing process. They average at about 72 hours from the time you upload something for review before it begins to go live on the retail side.

Now, I'm going to interrupt Alyssa right here just to cut this back, because Amazon is the main platform we discuss here on Book Launchers tv. But she does talk about their promotional tools. And then she goes into the cons on Amazon, which is really we've discussed recently with the five issues with publishing on Amazon, which was a live stream I did at the start of July. But because I want to make sure you get all the good stuff that was in this and not just recapping material that we've covered in other videos, I'm going to jump ahead to when she talks about royalties and fees.

So let's talk about royalties and fees. So this is another area that is vastly different for self publishing versus traditional publishing. The actual numbers you get in terms of royalties per book are wildly higher for self publishing versus traditional publishing. So with ebooks on Amazon specifically, because every distributor is going to have slightly different fee structures. And so we'll talk about that for each one. But for Amazon, for your ebooks, you will either get 35% of the retail price that you set or you'll get 70% of the retail price that you send for each sale. And that's determined by how you price your ebook. Amazon has decided that between 299 and 999 is the sweet spot for their ebooks. So they have tried to incentivize self publishers to stay within that range. So to do that, they've changed their royalty rates depending on what you set. So if you set your ebook between $2.99 and $9.99, then you will get 70% of the retail cost for every purchase, minus the delivery fee, which is usually about 10 to 15 cents per per book. It's pretty negligible. However, if you want to price your book below $2.99 or above $9.99, then they drop your royalty rate down to just 35% of that retail price that you set. It's a pretty big difference. And it is a Very powerful incentive to stay inside that category or inside that range of pricing with our authors, Very, very seldom is there a reason to fall outside of that category. We want to try to hit that sweet spot of value and profit for our authors. For print on Amazon KDP, it is a fixed 60% royalty for paperbacks and hardcovers. They actually don't care how what your retail price is. For that, you will get 60% of the retail cost. But they do subtract all print costs from your royalties. So let's say, just to make the math easy for me, let's say that you had your book set at $10 for the paperback and you would get $6 of that. However, if it costs about $3 for that book to be printed, then that'll be subtracted from your royalty and what they would actually pay out would be roughly $3. That's a highly simplified version of it, but that's roughly how it works out. So when you're pricing print, you want to try to keep in mind how expensive your book is to print. And considerations like color, images or length of the book, trim size in some cases can all factor into how expensive your book is to print. But Amazon does a good job behind the scenes that as you're actually going through the upload process, you actually see what the cost will be to print your book before you get to the step where you're supposed to set your pricing.

All right, let's speed ahead to ingramspark. We don't recommend KDP for expanded distribution. It is not effective. So what we use for print distribution outside of Amazon for book launchers authors is IngramSpark. You can use them for ebook distribution as well, but we don't recommend that only print. She will talk about the service we recommend for wide ebook distribution shortly. Now, you can see from her chart a lot of what she covers. But we'll jump right in where Alyssa is talking about some of the benefits of Ingram's variety and some of the challenges with their service.

IngramSpark is what's known as a third party aggregator, which means that you are uploading all of your materials and things to them and they make this information about your book available to their network and then retailers and stores can opt to purchase through them and then they will print and deliver those orders on your behalf. They themselves are not a storefront in the way that Amazon is where you're going straight from uploading in the back to being available on the retail side. IngramSpark is more of a middleman than that. And they distribute widely to a lot of other places.

The distribution reach is wide and its print quality is slightly better most of the time than KDP. It's free to upload to them, but after 60 days there is a 25 revision fee. Now let's go to Alyssa for some cons of using IngramSpark and a few other core details.

It does have a more complex interface for beginners. It doesn't explain as well as Amazon what everything is and what you need to do and what settings might be best for you. There's definitely more of a learning curve and it's more technical. It expects you to have more knowledge going in, whereas Amazon is built with the novice in mind. There are also potential processing delays and issues. On Ingram side, it is easier to get in touch with a person through support, which is excellent, but they do have a slower processing time than Amazon. At best they're usually about five business days, but sometimes they will pull things for manual reviews that will take longer and they aren't as good at communicating when that is happening or what you can expect. There's a lot more responsibility put on you to be tracking that and to reach out if you think it's been too long or you have a concern. So with Ingram, I generally say you should expect it to be between one and two weeks from the time you upload to the time it starts to show up on retailers compared to the 72 hours that's pretty standard over on Amazon. Still very fast compared to traditional publishing, but it's good to have the proper expectations in place. There is also a lot more complexity in terms of your royalty rate. This one is honestly the one that we spend the most time explaining to our authors over at Book Launchers is trying to understand the wholesale discount and how it impacts your royalties through IngramSpark. And this is another great example of how it is definitely less beginner friendly. So you can set your wholesale discount from between 40% and 55% in Ingramspark. And that wholesale discount is the discount that you're offering to retailers so that they can purchase your book for less and sell it at retail and still make a profit. And it does effectively determine how much you make per book. So if you were to set it at 40%, then you will make roughly 60% minus print costs and minus Ingram's fees. And it's not as transparent exactly how that breaks down, which makes it a little bit trickier as well. However, you also have the option of setting it at 55%, which is the industry standard for traditional publishing. And while this is not the best idea for every author, because it does absolutely cut into your profits, because then you are looking at making 45% minus print costs and any other fees, it does open the door to potentially getting into bigger retailers in their physical brick and mortar stores. In general, 40% is all you need to get into. Online retailers like barnes and noble.com will carry your book if you're at 40%. But if you're wanting to campaign to have your book in a brick and mortar store, you're going to need to offer that 55% to even have a shot at a conversation of getting that book into that physical store. Because it is so expensive and competitive and the overhead is so much higher for brick and mortar that you have to offer that full standard amount or you are very, very unlikely to be considered. And it's enough of an uphill battle as it is to get into physical bookstores, which we'll talk about a little bit later. Another thing to be aware of for ingramspark is that if a retailer does purchase copies of your print books, say they ordered 10 and they were only able to sell five, they have the option to return those that unsold inventory to Ingram. And if they choose to do that, then what they paid comes out of your royalties. So Ingram will refund them, but that refund actually will come from you. So if you have enough royalties that you've earned to cover it, they'll just subtract it from what they pay out to you. But if you haven't made enough, then they will actually charge your account for whatever the cost of that refund was for that retailer. And you don't have control over it, and you don't know that it's happening until they send you that bill or let you know that they subtracted it from your royalties. So it can be a little bit disconcerting. It is considered sort of the cost of doing business, especially wanting to be in different retail situations. There are sacrifices that you make there, but it's good to be be again aware of it up front and understand what you're getting yourself into.

We do have to cut out some of Alyssa's great content or this video would be a total repeat of her deep dive. But I do want to get into Draft two Digital. We do have a great video on this channel on Draft 2 digital and things you may not know about them. So I do recommend you check that out and I'll link to it at the end. I'm just going to have Alyssa Hop in here and share a few highlights for you so you know the important things. It is our recommended service for getting your ebook widely distributed to places that aren't Kindle, like Kobo, Apple, Google and more. You can see her pros on the chart that she shares and I'll pick up with one she didn't put on the chart in a minute.

The other thing that I should have put here as a pro is that they have really, really nice customer support. Really easy to get in touch with a person and to actually talk to them. I had an issue with a buck probably a year ago now and it had gotten flagged, adopted Digital that it would potentially not be accepted by retailers. And so they let me know that hey, just so you know, we aren't blocking it but some retailers are not going to accept it for this reason. And it was because there was one line in it, like just a physical line that made it look like someone might want to write on it. And a lot of retailers for ebooks these days think that gives a very negative reader experience. And so they, they won't let books come through that are ebooks that look like you're supposed to write in them. And I went through the book and I could for the life of me find that line that they were talking about. And so I reached back out to support and I was like I can you help me? Like I don't know what flagged, I can't find it. And the lady was so nice and she immediately responded and was like oh yes, of course, it's this page in this place. And it was just, it was such a nice interaction and experience. We were able to get it fixed and make sure that that book would get the widest distribution possible because their support had done the extra thing to reach out. So I have only positive things to say about Draft 2 Digital's like their people behind the scenes and also the way that they like their perspective on publishing. It feels very non predatory and very like they're wanting to equip you to do what you are wanting to do, which is great. The cons are that they don't have direct print distribution. So just like we use IngramSpark for print but we don't tend to use it for ebook. They do offer print through Draft Digital but we don't tend to use it. And that's because they actually use Ingram's network but have less full access to it. And because you are one more person removed from that distributor, there is additional layer of fees that take place and so even though it is an option, it is not one that we tend to use, but it is there. And you could just know that it will be less wide of wide distribution if you go through Draft two Digital. And I actually have not seen what their physical books look like, so I can't speak to print quality through draft 2 digital either. They do have a smaller network, like I said, compared to IngramSpark, which is interesting because they use Ingram's wholesale network for their distribution. But it does seem to be more limited compared to. The good news is though, where you price it doesn't matter. So you can have your book set at like 99 cents for a sale, for instance, and you would still get about 60% of that versus the 35% that you would get for a 99 cent book ebook sale over on Amazon. In terms of network size, they have an extensive reach in the digital market for ebooks. So while their print distribution is more narrow, they have really wide reach in digital markets. They can actually distribute directly to Amazon if you want them to, but it is generally speaking, you're going to lose again like that, 10%. You won't make as much per book if you choose to do that, but it is an option. But beyond that, they do distribute to big and small retailers plus libraries. They are very, very similar that way to what Ingram offers for print books. So for instance, with barnes and noble.com when you have your listing up there, if you were to go through both of these for your books, your ebook listing would be coming from draft to digital and your paperback listing would be coming from Ingramspark. But they will be combined and look like one listing on Barnes and Noble.com which is neat. But again, they're also available to smaller retailers and they also have extensive library reach as well. So other distribution options. So I didn't have this fully on here for audiobooks. They are definitely increasing in importance. We are seeing steady growth in the audiobook market over the last year and a half or so, which is really exciting. We would love to see that becoming a bigger deal again as the world opens back up after being shut down for so long with the pandemic. But your options here are kind of similar to what we've talked about with print and ebook. There are. There are some parallels. So Amazon's audiobook arm is acx. And ACX distributes to Audible, to Amazon's retail side and to itunes. However, you have two options. You can be exclusive to them for a higher royalty rate or you can choose to go wide for a lower royalty rate. If you choose to go wide, then you can go through a company called Authors Republic, which is who we're currently working with, or Findaway Voices, which is a company we've worked with before. And Julie has some of her her audiobooks available through Findaway Voices and they do wide distribution for audiobooks, similar to how IngramSpark and Draft2Digital do it for print and for ebook. They also do make your audiobook to libraries and to other audiobook places like Spotify, which has a subscription option as well as a purchase option. So again, it's a choice between exclusivity with Amazon or making a little bit less, but potentially having your book available so much more widely than if you were to limit yourself to Amazon's smaller network for audiobooks.

Whew. Well, that was a lot of amazing content. And she kept going for another hour after this and covered directly distribution and so much more. If you want all the content coming up on direct distribution or marketing, once you have the book in places, then you should make sure you're subscribed to this channel with notifications on, because we have a lot more content coming out on that. And please do click the like button in support of Alyssa's hard work on this one. Now this is the video all about Authors Republic, an alternative to Find a Way Voices, and this is the video on things you probably didn't know about drafting to digital. Both are going to be a great watch after this masterclass in distribution, so click on over and say hi when you do, I'll see you there.