KDP Print and Ingram Spark - Are they better together or separately?

If you want to be wide with your books, and I highly recommend you do so so that you're not giving Amazon all the power and control over your author business, you will likely want to publish your print books with KDP Print and IngramSpark. If you're wondering about whether you can do that and what else, you should know, well, this video is for you. Hey there. I'm Julie the Book Broad. I am an author and the founder of this fabric fabulous self publishing services company, Book Launchers. At Book Launchers, we have writers, writing coaches, editors, designers, publishing experts, and a team of marketers to surround you with support as you write, publish and promote your nonfiction book. Now, as part of our process, we generally publish our authors using Print on demand services like KDP Print and IngramSpark. A small number of our authors use an offset printer and we help them set up their distribution in other ways. If you're wondering what the heck Print on Demand and Offset Printing is, I have a really great video on that that you'll find linked to at the end of the video so you can watch that. Then for now, I'll just say that Print On Demand services essentially print books when ordered, which saves you from having to store a garage full of books or having to go to the post office and mail them as ordered. When someone buys the book from a store or online, the Print on Demand company funds and collects the money. Then they take out their costs for the wholesale to the store, production and distribution and then you get the rest. So why use both KDP print and IngramSpark? Well, given that both companies do similar things, especially when Amazon is essentially free to use, you might and I'm using free because obviously Amazon makes a lot of money off you, my dear author. But they are only making books. They're only making books, but they're only making money when you sell books versus IngramSpark does charge a $49 upload fee and a $25 revision fee for each revision. Although you can usually find codes around the world that will give you that upload for free, join organizations like Ally or register for the next 20 books to 50k. Those are all ways you can get codes for upload and sometimes revision. So given that you can upload and revise on KDP Print for free and they have this global distribution that says they distribute all over the place and ingramspark charges you, you might be wondering why in the heck am I recommending that you use both? Well, there are a few reasons, but the big ones are that to date and I actually think this will change. But to date, IngramSpark does print pre sale, but KDP does not. And the second big thing, bookstores won't order from Amazon. This is partly because Amazon has hurt bookstores badly, but also because they don't allow the book to be returnable and their terms aren't good enough. More on that in a second. So if you want your book anywhere but Amazon, really, you must be listed with Ingram. IngramSpark is part of the Ingram Content Group. Their distribution network includes physical bookstores, academic institutions and libraries. The Ingram catalog is a regular part of day to day ordering for these retailers. IngramSpark does not sell direct to readers with a storefront. It's selling to distributors and wholesalers that the retailers buy from. Books in the Ingram catalog are available to buyers worldwide. Now, that doesn't mean they will order it, just like getting a book on Amazon doesn't mean readers will buy it, only that it's available and can be purchased. It's up to you, dear author, to generate demand for your book. This is a big part of why book Launchers exist, because we layer marketing in throughout the process and then support you at the end with pitching ads and bookstore and library distribution support. So if you want that kind of amazing support, just set up a call@book launchers.com apply. Okay, so now you might be thinking, well, why wouldn't I just use IngramSpark? Well, you can, but then you are giving up more money on your Amazon sales than you want to because Ingram's going to take a cut before selling to Amazon. And sometimes Amazon and Ingram, they don't play nice in the sandbox.

Hey, what are you doing in my sandbox? You get out of here. What do you mean your sandbox? I can play in this sandbox too. Oh.

And there's glitches. So you're likely seeing most of your sales on Amazon, whether you want to sell there or not. And as a result, a glitch or disagreement between Ingram and Amazon can damage your sales significantly if you're only using IngramSpark. As far as what you get with each, well, both have a good selection of standard and non standard trim sizes, glossy and matte covers, hardcover soft cover paper choices. You can also choose white or cream. For what it's worth, the majority of nonfiction books are going to have white pages. Ingram has been in the hardcover space longer than kdp, so they have more options like a digital cloth bound with a dust cover or a case bound dust cover where the image is printed on the hardcover and covered with a dust cover. If all that doesn't make any sense, well, just hire my team. They'll take care of you. Now, if you're going for library distribution, having your book available in hardcover is a big advantage because they do prefer that format, but essentially the two are very similar. Now, cost factors and quality considerations with KDP print, I do find they are cheaper. I also find their quality reflects that a bit. Interestingly though, they also use IngramSpark and Lightning Source to to print their books if their printers are backed up. But the cost of printing with KDP print is fixed price per book plus a price per page multiplied by the number of pages. Books under 110 pages have a higher fixed cost per book than the ones that are larger than 110, and this total price almost always comes in just a little less than when you print with Ingram. To calculate your royalty, multiply the royalty rate by the list price and subtract the print price. The standard royalty rate for KDP print is 60%. It's not really a royalty, it's your distribution. For standard distribution, it's 60% times list price minus print costs. More details on how KDP calculates it Click on the link you'll see below in the description. When you upload your book to either platform, you can order a print proof. This is a smart thing to do. However, KDP's print proof will show print proof not for sale versus Ingram's will not. This is something we've covered before and I touched on already, but the IngramSpark system allows you to specify whether you will or will not accept returns. This is because the bookstores need to be able to return unsold books to its distributor for full credit. This is not a good thing for authors, but it's a system designed by the publishing trade to encourage booksellers to take risks with new authors and new titles. I'll link to a video on bookstore distribution at the end that will help you understand this piece. I'm a big fan of bookstore distribution, but there is a risk to the reward of bookstore distribution and returnable books, and it's something you should understand before you pursue it. Now, something else to be aware of with IngramSpark vs. KDP print is that you must specify a wholesale discount. Oh boy, I better link to that video too. There's going to be three videos you should watch next at the end of this, but the essence of this is that you must set a discount for the stores that they get in return for stocking your book in Their store. The thing to know is that you can set the low end of the range and still get online distribution through the bookstores, but you must give the full discount in order to secure physical distribution. And unfortunately, you're not able to say, okay, stores. When you sell it from your shelf, you can have this discount. And when it's online, you can have this discount. It's one discount for all sales. In other words, your money made, AKA your publisher compensation. I mean, a lot of people call it royalties, but royalties are technically earned when you license the rights to your book. Okay, I'm going to ignore that rabbit hole, but your money made per book sold does get smaller when you involve the bookstores and retailers that aren't Amazon and you want the physical distribution side. Again, this is because when you sell your print books through a bookstore, you're covering print costs and distributor costs or a wholesaler cost. And everyone needs to make money on this book. And of course, Ingram takes their cut too. Now, one little note about this. If your strategy varies by territory, for example, you're focusing on bookstores physical bookstore distribution only in the us you can specify different discounts and return policy by territory. So you could specify that for the US and then everywhere else, give them less of a discount. Okay? The last thing to know is they pay on different schedules. It's not sell book money goes into your account. IngramSpark pays every 90 days and KDP Print is every 60 days. A note on the agreements you have to sign to work with each company. Both require you to sign their publishing agreements, and this is not optional nor is it negotiable. Listing with Ingram doesn't mean you have to sell your ebook with them, by the way, although that is an option. The agreement kind of makes it seem like that's a requirement, but it's not. In fact, I would generally not sell your ebook through Ingram. Instead, I would upload to KDP and even direct to Kobo or Apple if you're up for it. Or use Draft2Digital as your aggregator for the distribution. Regardless, you do have to sign their agreement and you can't negotiate this. And that is the case for both. For both platforms, you'll have to be ready with all the files you need for your book and and the information metadata, my friends, which includes categories, book description, author, bio, author, picture, title, subtitle, your interior, and your cover files. Now, ISBNs, ISBNs, you must have an ISBN to list with Ingram, and you must use the same ISBN on both platforms and anywhere else you print the book. We always upload to Ingram first for print pre sale and then load to KDP print on launch. It doesn't actually matter what order you do it in. However, there are occasional hiccups where one of the platforms will reject an ISBN as already in use. If you've started on kdp, make sure you have not ticked extended distribution which can trigger this. Also, this can happen if you upload the wrong ISBN like the one you've used for the ebook or the audiobook. If you've uploaded to Amazon first with their free asin, you will need to unpublish before you publish it with the ISBN somewhere else. If you don't do this, you can trigger a lot of issues that can lead to an account suspension or termination. It's better to start with an ISBN from the beginning and use the same ISBN everywhere. It's one ISBN per format, not per outlet. There's a review period for both platforms, and sometimes the Amazon review in particular can be a lot slower than you'd like, especially if you've got things set up for a specific launch date that's coming up fast. This is another reason we like to do IngramSpark in advance so there are still books for sale on launch day, even if there's a glitch with the Amazon upload. That's a lot of points and there's so, so so much more to learn from here to make the right decisions, and that's why I just really recommend working with a team like Book Launchers. But this video right here on Wholesale discounts, this one on bookstores, this one on Offset versus Print on demand. Those are all good videos to watch. Be sure to say hello before you leave and when you get to the new video, because there's prizes for commenting the day a video comes out. See you soon.