Hey guys! Megan Tennant here and welcome back to my channel.
Today I have an exciting topic for you guys. I know I've been promising this one
pretty much since I started my channel and I've been putting it off
because it is a huge group of topics that requires research and I really
wanted to know what I was talking about before I brought that information to you
guys. So I wanted to first tackle it myself get through it alive which I have
and then come to you guys with the information and stuff that I learned
from the experience. So here I am and we're finally gonna be talking
Ingramspark. Now this is going to be a video series because if I crammed all of the
Ingramspark frequently asked questions into one video it would kill
you guys. I'm gonna keep this first one kind of fun and light so you guys can dip your
toes in the water. This is going to be the pros and cons of Ingram spark. Now
for later videos in the series I'm going to highly recommend that you guys
consume these videos with a side of chocolate and alcohol. I feel that wine
pairs very nicely with Ingram spark but you can do any alcohol you want. I
have personally found that a couple shots of brandy in Cherry dr. pepper is
pretty nice. So that's what I do when I have to do Ingram Sparks stuff but it's
your choice anything goes. This first video it isn't required that you add the
chocolate but it is still suggested you have the alcohol and later videos you're
gonna want both. Ingram spark is ... complicated and
oh my god it's... I'm gonna start with the pros since that's the kind of person that I am.
So let's do that Pro number one. If you like big hard books
Ingram's got you covered. BAM. Hardbacks. Hardcovers. However you want to name the
books with the hardness. Yeah I'm getting very technical with my terminology here if you
can't tell. Hardcovers. Yes Ingramspark does hardcovers not only as an option but
also very nicely. They have cloth in blue and also gray. This is the blue one and
they will print your title on the spine or anything you put there. They give you
a box when create your title as to what you want on the spine. I suggest you go
with something related to your book but I mean you can put whatever text you
want here. It's your life I'm not gonna make a rule in regards to that. Pro
number two your book will be sold in all the places. Now if you want to go test
this you can go you know to your favorite book selling sites and go
search for Aletheia. It's not on all of them but it's in a lot of them and that
is because Ingramspark has a network of distributors and what they do is when
you list your title and enable it for distribution they send out the metadata
to all of those retailers that they're connected to. Those retailers then list
your book. Now not all of the retailers will list your book, but because of how
cost-effective and easy it is for them to have their website programmed to
automatically grab that metadata, list your book for sale, and have the book
drop shipped to customers, pretty much all of their online retailers will grab
your book and list it. So you'll get on websites like Barnes and noble.com Book
Depository, Indiebound, Alibris, other websites. Now along these lines we have
perk number three which is that if you list your e-book through Ingram spark
you'll get it on ereaders besides Kindle. So you'll get
it on the Apple products like Apple iPad and you'll also get it on Nook
Pro number four, now I hesitate to list this one because although it's possible it is
complicated and that is you can actually get your book in physical
brick-and-mortar book stores. Now this isn't black and white. It is
possible but it is complicated because it involves things like enabling returns
and wholesale discounts and all sorts of different things like that. So I'll do a
video later on on how to get your book in the brick-and-mortar bookstores and
it is possible with Ingram. I consider that a pro. Pro number five, it's very
easy to send out arc copies. omg. I always do that.
ARC copies... arc stands for advanced reader copy so when you put copies at
the end of arc you're saying copies twice. I always do that. Okay if you want to send
out arc books to reviewers you can either drop ship directly to the address
of those people or you can bulk order a carton of books and then resend them
out. Pro number six, pre-orders. With Ingram spark you can do
pre-orders both of eBook and also hardcover and paperback. You
should note that most websites consider pre-orders as sales made in the first
week. So that being said if you gather a lot of pre-orders over months leading up
to your book's release those count as sales in the first week and that jumps
your sales numbers up which can throw you into lists of best sellers. Now don't
expect to get on New York Times bestseller list this way because they
don't really count online sales and it'd be impossible to hit those
numbers as an indie author and on your first book but this can help a lot in terms of Amazon.
And the bigger the platform you have the more pre-orders you get the more that's
going to impact those first week of sales and help skyrocket your book and
get it more recognition and promotion. Next pro is higher quality.
Now when I say higher quality I'm comparing to the only other
print-on-demand site that I actually own books from that I know of which is
CreateSpace but comparing CreateSpace quality to Ingramspark quality there is a
pretty clear difference that goes towards Ingram. The next pro is worldwide
shipping. Now some... Some parts of this are just automatic for example
because your book is going out to all of these distributors some of these
distributors are international and so people will be able to find your book in
other countries. But Ingram spark itself has printing presses in a couple
different countries making it easier to distribute internationally. All right so
those are kind of the simple pros and now let's get into the cons.
Con number one, their user interface and their dashboards and their whole website set
up it's incredibly unintuitive. Just keep in mind there's a learning curve. I've
gotten over that learning curve now so it is possible to get over that
learning curve but just keep in mind that it is a little higher of a curb
than normal. Con number two there is less support availability than Amazon
but the times that I have had to contact support they've been as helpful as
Amazon. This doesn't mean they've always been as helpful as I'd like but that
flaw's both here and in CreateSpace. Next con, this is one that is going to
matter more to some people than others and that is that
setting up your titles isn't free with Ingramspark. You create a title you pay $49
upfront. Keep in mind that if you order 50 books within the first 60 days
after you list your title they do refund that $50 so that's nice. But anytime you
want to update a file you get charged $25 per file change .And this is
justified this isn't just them grabbing money. This is because every time you
upload a file they have to go process that file make sure it matches their
guidelines and I think there's actually physical people that do a quick look
over to make sure there's nothing wrong with it. Now as a little side add-on to
this the e-book is free if you add on your ebook to either your paperback or
your hardcover titles. You don't pay extra for that.
But if you do your ebook alone you would still pay about $49. But there's no real
reason to do your ebook alone as its own title and you can add it on to either
the paperback or hardbacks. The next con is another one that will affect some
people more than others and that is that you need to come with your own ISBNs.
They do not provide any for free and this is for some people a pro because if you
buy your own ISBN then you're listed as the publisher. You don't have the
thing that happens with Createspace where technically Amazon is your
publisher on Createspace books if you get your ISBN free through them. So I
view this kind of as a pro but you do have to go out and find a place to
purchase your ISBNs and bring them over yourself. The next con is higher
printing cost and again you're paying for quality. I do feel the quality is
higher in Ingram spark books compared to Createspace books but there is a difference in
printing costs between the two. Next con is terrible sales data the
sales data that you get is very limited. For example if you look at sales of your
book it's not going to tell you what distributor exactly purchased your book
and where the sale came from in terms of locality. It's just the data is basically
a mixed up chart with rows and you don't get a lot out of it.
The next con is one that you can avoid by listing your book really early but it
does take some distributors and the Ingramspark Network up to two months to
list your title. So this doesn't apply to the big two. Amazon picked up Aletheia
within 24 hours and Barnes and Noble picked up Aletheia within I believe 48. But
there are some other websites that did take up to the two months to start
listing Aletheia and some websites like Book Depository still don't have a cover
image up for Aletheia. I don't know why. So keep in mind that if you list your book
and immediately set it up for sale then it's not going to immediately be on all
of the different websites. It's gonna take a little while. Next con is one that
there is not a good solution to and it's really dependent. Some people have this
problem some don't and that is that Amazon will sometimes list your book as
out of stock. Now the reason for this is if your books selling well Amazon will
often buy a carton of them which is a kind of a bulk order of fourteen for
each carton and they'll stock that. But then if that runs out they go out of
stock and then Amazon has to place another order for a book carton and wait
for that to arrive before they list that it's in stock again. I so far haven't
had this issue because when the stock started to get low Amazon automatically
put in another order for a carton and and the stock went up again. But if
sometime for some reason I had a week where for example right now there's 14
books of Aletheia in stock on Amazon if someone bought all 14 then my book would
be listed as out of stock for about a week until Amazon got an order of more
books. So you guys watching this if one of you went out and bought 14 books
my book would go out of stock for about a week. And last con is one that isn't
frequent but I did want to mention it and that is that occasionally when you
order bulk orders of your book you will get an order with cosmetic defects. If
you go on to Cloud Kitten Market.com right now you will see that there are signed
copies of Aletheia on sale and there's also a discounted version which
is titled cosmetic defect. That is because we received an order of
books where the printing press was slightly unaligned and it didn't
affect the internals of the book but there's a small white line on the
bottom of the cover and the cover is not completely aligned. But Ingramspark
did handle it amazingly. We contacted them, they asked for us to provide
pictures, we did and from there they resent us an order completely covered
and paid for and they were very quick to respond to that issue. They do quality
check every single one of the print on demand books but in bulk orders they only
quality check a couple of them. So issues like this do sometimes get through.
All right so that's it for the pros and cons. Give this video a like, a share. Subscribe
button is right down there if you haven't clicked it already. I will see
you guys in next video.