Should you use Ingram Spark to distribute your book?

Part 13 of becoming an independent author

The Question

I got this question from an indie author who’s just dipping their toes into these waters and thought it would be a good talking point for this week’s newsletter.

Simply put, you should probably upload your book to IS and take advantage of their connection and distribution to bookstores etc, but it’s not as straightforward as that, unfortunately.

First of all, I’d start by saying you should put your book up on Amazon KDP for distribution. Why? Because 70% of all online book sales happen via this one place - makes sense to have yours there because if I’m honest my friends who know little of publishing have this as their number 1 question:

‘Is your book on Amazon?’

Now, I know we should be supporting indie bookstores, and I agree with that sentiment, but it would also be ridiculous to be an indie author and not use Amazon. Facts.

But back to IS. And this is where we discuss indie bookstores and author royalties.

Most bookstores in the UK order their books via Gardners, and if you have your book on IS, it’s usually listed with Gardners, so if someone walks into any bookstore in the UK, they can request your book, the bookstore will order it and it will arrive at the store for the reader to pick up.

Great. But honestly is it?

I’ll use some numbers in a minute to back this up, but aside from having a happy reader who’ve bought your book from a local indie bookstore they want to support, there’s little else to cheer about.

So I have sold 157 books in total via Ingram Spark since February 2023 when I started with them. That’s books sold via bookstores, on the whole.

Total sales are £784.57, according to my dashboard.

That has netted me a grand total of £54.27 in royalties.

Yes, that’s right, about 33p a sale.

So from nearly £800 in sales of my book, I’ve got £50. So where’s the other £700 or so?

Well, let’s start with a quick look at how I’ve set my pricing on IS. I have 2 books that have sold most of those 157 copies, so I’ll show you those:

Ghosts of Mars (MG)

The Nameless (YA)

You can see I’ve set the retailer (bookstore) discount at 40%, so if they sell it at £7.99 or £8.99, they’ll get £3.20 or £3.59 in profit (well, probably not, there’s other costs etc but let’s keep it simple and from author POV) as they are buying the books at 40% less than the retail price (which I can change, of course, but you want to keep this roughly in line with other books and not price yourself out of sales).

So why don’t I get the remainder of the retail price, minus the 40%?

• Print cost of the book - higher as it’s POD. If I did a high quantity offset print, I could reduce this cost and make more per book, but that' requires up front capital and investment.

• IS take a cut, obvs.

• Their calculator, to be fair (don’t be fair to IS, Stu!), does clearly state up front your royalty when you set your market retail prices, so their argument would be to set those higher if you wish to make more royalty.

So it’s catch-22 - do you set a higher price and sell less or keep it in line with most books and sell a few more, but at a miserable royalty?

The key, as with anything in publishing, is quantity. The bigger, the better, certainly when it comes to cost of printing and accumulating enough royalties to pay for a nice dinner once a year! (Really Stu, you’re getting dinner for £54.27 in this economy?)

*you probably noticed Returns are all set at NO for my books - unless you are able to cover the cost of a hefty return bill from a bookstore not selling your books, keep this at NO. Obviously having YES will increase your chance of being stocked in a store, but you have to balance that with the potential BIG BILL that comes through for a return of 20 or even 50 books! Trust me, you don’t want that!

Conclusion

I said it up front - I’d put it on IS, but I also use other distributors - I use KDP, as mentioned above, but also BookVault (who are on the Great British Bookstore - an alternative place for bookstores to order from) and I sell direct, too.

Selling direct just involves buying in stock, keeping it at home and selling it via your website. It’s actually not that hard to do once you’ve done it once or twice and I still regularly sell a few copies a month of my books (signed with bookmark) via this route, without directing any traffic to my site or any advertising, so it’s worth it in the long haul.

And that’s the key - it’s a long game. You won’t make a profit tomorrow, but can you in 10 years?

If the answer is yes, then it’s all worth it.

I loved the suggestions for a newsletter last week, so keep them coming in the replies here, or on social media or wherever you like.

Until next time…

Do or do not, there is no try…