As I slowly push forward as an independent publisher, learning the very basics of how to operate the knobs and levers of the business, I have learned a few important things that you probably didn’t know:
Barnes & Noble, Ingram Spark, Amazon KDP
Barnes & Noble Press is another Print on Demand service, but with this one, you get an automatic listing in the Barnes & Noble stores ordering catalog, which means your book can actually end up in book stores. The Barnes & Noble base cost for author’s copies is roughly what it costs to have Amazon KDP do it. For example, my 400 page book costs about $6 on both, plus roughly a dollar to ship it. That gives me about $7 straight profit per book sale when I do physical sales directly. Ingram Spark costs slightly more, and the quality is ever so slightly less, but still of outstanding grade. You get out what you put in.
I have read where people complain about how one print on demand service produces covers that don’t look as vibrant as another, but I have yet to see any evidence that this is true. So long as your CMYK format PDF files are prepared properly, you’ll get the colors you expect.
Remember that for all three of these, you really have to pay attention to your formatting, and to the best of your ability, do it right the first time. If you have pending orders, those will process before they apply new project settings. You are not going to get special treatment if you screw things up. They do allow updates, but doing them when books are in the queue means the books already in the queue will not get your changes. Don’t get your knickers in a twist over it. Print on Demand services are massive, massive systems, and it is nearly impossible to extract or alter data if it has already been submitted to the pipeline.
B&N, Ingram Spark and Amazon all allow you to order author’s copies so you can check the quality of the book before it releases. I have compared the quality of KDP to Ingram Spark, and they are very close in quality. Ingram Spark’s paper is a bit thinner, resulting in a book that’s also a bit thinner.
Each one of these POD services has a cover design template generator for you to use in creating your book covers. You cannot create one for Amazon KDP and then reuse that cover exactly as is on other POD services. You can reuse the version you design for Barnes & Noble and reuse it for Ingram Spark without issue, but it works only in that direction. The reason is that the crop zones for B&N are smaller and tighter than they are for Ingram Spark, so what works great for B&N is pretty much guaranteed to work for Ingram Spark, but not the other way around.
Book stores and libraries can order from either Ingram Spark or Barnes & Noble, but they won’t do this from Amazon because there is no way to get Amazon to sell at wholesale. The most prevalent one appears to be Barnes & Noble, since this is basically ordering from themselves when B&N bookstores order books.
Direct2Digital is another distribution platform, but it can only handle eBooks.
ISBN NUMBERS
No print on demand service allows you to reuse ISBN numbers they supply for use on competing POD services. The workaround is to buy your own. In that instance, you control the ISBN numbers, not them, so the chain of ownership is not conflicted that way.
The most cost effective way to get ISBN numbers is to buy them in blocks of ten. There’s only one place to get them in the United States, and that’s Bowker Publishing Services. Do not buy ISBN numbers from subcontractors, because they can’t actually sell you an ISBN number. They’re not transferrable. That third party vendor will then have absolute control over your book with no checks and balances, and that could be a disaster in the making.
Do not buy a single ISBN number, because that’s $125. You can get ten of them for $295. You are going to burn through them like nobody’s business.
Each edition of your book needs a separate ISBN number. So, eBook? That’s one. Paperback? That’s two. Paperback with a different cover, or on cream paper instead of white? That’s three. A hardcover is number four, and an audiobook is a fifth one. Want a coffee table version? You guessed it. That’s six.
ISBN numbers never expire, either, so you can use some on one book, then write another book and use the rest years later.
Getting Reviews: Book-Bounty, Revvue, StoryOrigin, Booksprout, Goodreads
Review sites are the only practical way to get fresh reviews, unless you start a mailing list and you have a team of beta readers (probably the very best way of getting reviews, by the way, much more efficient than Book-Bounty or Revvue or Booksprout or StoryOrigin or any of these other author’s support and development services).
Goodreads is great for developing community around your work, and there are forums there devoted to setting up teams of beta readers — in fact, that seems to be one of the primary activities there.
I find that reading other people’s books helps keep my own writer’s voice sharp and fresh, and I get a much better sense of what’s going on around me in terms of the publishing marketplace and not stuck in the tropes I learned when I was an avid reader 50 years ago. Reading other people’s work is good for you, and it’s part of the job for any publisher, editor or author.
There is So Much To This. So Very Much.
As I learn more about the business, I’ll be posting it. Not every piece of advice you get out there for marketing makes sense, and most of the YouTube channels are telling it like it is, but only from there extremely narrowly defined point of view. Keep an open mind, stay alert, get information from multiple sources and compare notes. Some of the stuff you’re reading may be years out of date, or might never have been true.
Stay frosty.