Julie Broad (founder of Book Launchers) explains how to set the wholesale discount in IngramSpark to maximize bookstore and wider retailer distribution. She contrasts IngramSpark (recommended for bookstore/international distribution) with KDP (adequate for Amazon-only), defines the wholesale discount (quote from IngramSpark), and recommends setting a 55% wholesale discount to be competitive with traditional publishers (noting 30% is the minimum if you only target Amazon). The video includes brief anecdotes and CTAs.
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This topic comes up on a regular basis around our office because our author clients want to understand why the heck we're recommending that they discount their book by such a big percentage in IngramSpark's system. If you've heard about wholesale discounts or you're about to upload a book to IngramSpark and you want to make sure that bookstores will carry your book, this video is for you. Hey there, I'm Julie the Book Broad award winning author and founder of Book Launchers, your professional self publish team that will help you write, publish and promote a money making impact. Creating nonfiction book. When you self publish a book, you have control, which is awesome. But you also will find out that there are hundreds of decisions to be made around your book. One of the decisions is where do you want distribution and how can you set yourself up to get it? If you want bookstore distribution for your book or you want international retailers to carry your book, then you first need to be setting your book up with IngramSpark. Yeah, there's other ways to do it, but this is the simplest way for you to do it. Now, KDP has a global distribution option, but it's not going to work for the vast majority of places outside of Amazon. They just don't make enough money. Plus a lot of bookstores don't like Amazon so they just won't buy from them. So KDP is fine for Amazon distribution, but if you want wider distribution, you need to use IngramSpark for that. And when you upload to IngramSpark, they're going to ask you what what you want to set your wholesale discount at. Now this is straight from the IngramSpark website. What is a wholesale discount? The wholesale discount you set determines how much a wholesaler will actually pay for your book. Wholesalers include online retailers like Amazon as well as brick and mortar retailers like Barnes and Noble, Costco, and that's all they list. They sell your book at list price. The difference between the two is the compensation or profit. If they can't make a profit from selling your book, they won't buy it. In other words, the retailers are doing a Jerry Maguire on the books they're buying you yelling show me the money. And did you know that movie came out in 1996? There are people watching this video right now that weren't born when that movie came out. And I remember it like it was yesterday. You complete me Back to the wholesale discount. If you're pursuing bookstore distribution, you're not just competing with self published books. In fact, your biggest competitors are the ones published by traditional publishers. They already have a little spot carved out on the shelf, so you had better not try to be more expensive than them because you're going to lose unless your book is Martian level amazing. So you need to be offering a 55% discount, which I believe ends up being a 40% discount to the retailer once IngramSpark takes their piece. But regardless, when you're choosing what to set it up as you need to select 55%, that's what the big guys and gals are doing. You can set it at 30%. If you do not care about bookstores ever carrying your book, that's totally fine. 30% is legit if you're just going to worry about Amazon and even to a point online distribution. If you don't care about bookstores online or on the shelf, then fill your boots. Take the minimum Ingram offers, which is 30%. But do know that you're basically selling to Amazon only at that rate, so why not just go with kdp? I have a few links on this subject down below if you want to go down the discounting rabbit hole with the other bunnies. But if you're happy and you know it, hit the like button. And if you had me at hello, subscribe to the channel and just scream at Jerry. Scream at Jerry. Unless you want to share one in the comments below. But if not, that's totally cool. I have ple of other Jerry Maguire free videos for you to check out, like this one and this one. I promise this is the only one where I went a little cuckoo about Jerry Maguire. Go ahead, click on your favorite thumbnail and I will see you there.
