Joanna is still self-publishing…
A few weeks back, I published a blog about my experiences of self-publishing ebooks on Amazon KDP and Draft2Digital (D2D). I promised I’d write another blog about how I got on with publishing my books in print. There, my direct experience is with Ingram Spark and D2D, but I’ve had a look at KDP’s print requirements so I’m including some notes about that route, too. And if I’ve got any of it wrong, please tell me in the comments below.
The image shown here is of the D2D paperback of one of my recent Regency historical publications. I think the result is handsome. But do you, the buying public, agree? (The image, by the way, is generated automatically by D2D. I didn’t have to stack up copies to create it, which was a bonus, though I did add the link to the page at Books2Read.com where all my books appear. Do go and buy. Pretty please?)
Pricing: Print Cost, Discounts, Author’s Share
When you’re pricing your book, you have to take into account how much it costs to print it—which depends mostly on how many pages it has—and how much wholesale discount you have to give to a retailer or bookshop.
Let’s assume, for ease of calculation, that your book costs £5 to print and you’re proposing to sell it for £9.99 (roughly £10 to make the sums easier.) If you give the bookshop a 40% discount, it pays £6 for the book (and sells it for £9.99). The print cost of £5 is deducted from the £6 received from the bookshop. So the balance, your share, your royalty, is £1. With me so far?
Discounts aren’t fair on authors?
In the example above, the author, who has done all the work, gets £1 or 10%. The retailer, who may simply be selling in response to a customer order, gets £4 or 40%. Fair? Doesn’t seem so. Fact of life? I’m afraid it is. Retailers demand a discount. Without one, they will not sell your book. [See also sale or return, in the next section.]
My example used a discount of 40% but—and this is the horrid reality—most retailers expect 55%. My example would have made NO royalty at all at 55% discount. For a £10 price, the retailer would expect to pay £4.50 for the book, but the print cost is £5, so you’d be making a loss of £0.50 on every copy sold. Which shows why it’s crucial to understand discounts before you work out your price.
Wholesale Discounts and Returns
Your options on wholesale discounts vary between distributors. With Ingram Spark, you have choices. With Amazon KDP and D2D, you have no choice. But first, the basics.
The standard discount from wholesaler to retailer is 55%. Retailers will say that is fair recompense for the costs of stocking your book (premises, staff costs etc) and hand-selling it to readers. If you want your book to appear on the shelves in bookshops around the country, you will probably have to offer 55%, although you might get away with 50%.
Bookshops also expect to get stock on sale or return. Only Ingram offers the choice of making your books returnable. Choosing to do so, plus offering 55% discount, will make it more likely that your books will be stocked, according to Ingram.
BUT you have to pay the printing cost for every book that is returned, even when the book has been destroyed. Since print cost per book may be many times your royalty on that book, you’ll have to sell quite a few more to make up the cost of one return.
With Ingram, I started off allowing returns for destruction, but I soon realised it wasn’t economic for a one-woman band like me. I changed to no returns. Did that reduce visibility of my books? I have no way of knowing, but it was the only sensible decision I could make.
In the USA, discounts can be in the range 40%-55%. In the UK and the EU, discounts can range between 35%-55%. If you think that bookshops won’t actually stock your book but will only buy it in when a customer orders it, you might decide that it’s perfectly fair to give retailers the lower end of the range. In that case, a UK retailer would get £3.50 for ordering your £10 book in response to a firm customer request. And a US retailer would get $4 on a $10 book. If you adopt a 35%/40% discount policy, your book probably won’t be stocked in bookshops, but could still be sold through them.
Are there exceptions to the high discount rule?
You may be able to get your book stocked in local bookshops and retailers at a low level of discount, like 35%, if you visit them (always by appointment) and persuade them to stock it. Such individual deals are usually conditional on sales. In other words, the shop will stock a few copies of your book but will not give you any money unless sales are made.
After a copy sells, you will get the book price less the discount you agreed with the bookshop. If the books don’t sell, the bookshop will expect you to collect the books from them. (If you don’t collect when they ask, they’re likely to bin them, so don’t delay on that!) This option will cost you time, effort and travel. It will cost the bookshop shelf space and, possibly, selling time. But it can be a worthwhile route to selling your books, though it doesn’t really work outside your local area.
Pricing: Working It Out
Draft2Digital and Ingram Spark both provide useful online calculators to enable you to work out how best to price your book, taking account of print cost and wholesale discounts. They’re here: Draft2Digital, Ingram Spark. The Amazon KDP calculator relates only to books that are sold exclusively on Amazon sites. If you want Amazon’s Expanded Distribution to other retailers, like bookshops, you have to do a specific calculation for a particular book from your KDP bookshelf. I’m not able to do that, so I’ve produced estimates.
A few things to note. First, discounts:
- D2D has a standard 55% wholesale discount
- For sales on Amazon’s own sites, it applies a discount of either 50% or 40% depending on the book price and the market.
- For Amazon’s Expanded Distribution, equivalent to what you would get from Ingram or D2D, Amazon applies a very high discount of 60%.
- Ingram Spark allows you to choose your discount rate within the ranges mentioned in the previous section, but it does recommend you choose a discount rate of 50%-55%.
Second, paper quality:
- Ingram Spark gives you a choice of heavyweight (70 lb) white paper, normal good-quality (50 lb) white or creme paper, or lightweight, mass-market-like eggshell (38 lb) paper. Using the lightweight paper at Ingram reduces print costs by only a few pennies but would certainly reduce shipping and postage costs.
- D2D gives no choice. Their paper, with a choice of white or creme, is good quality, like Ingram’s middle choice.
- Amazon KDP also gives no paper choice. The examples I’ve seen suggest to me that their paper equates to Ingram’s cheapest choice. To me, the books looked cheap, but the choice is yours.
Worked Examples
I’m going to use 2 examples:
A a short book of 170 pages;
B a longer book of 340 pages.
Both will use the trim size of 5×8 inches (127 x 203 mm) which is a standard size for genre paperbacks.
Figures are for the UK market, though the calculators allow you to change currencies and markets easily.
My tables show the lowest selling prices at which you’d make any money at all. If you priced above these levels, you’d make more, though the retailer would get more, too. But would the readers be prepared to pay?
The shorter book of 170 pages (click image to enlarge)
The longer book of 340 pages (click image to enlarge)
What do these charts tell us?
- It doesn’t make much difference to the conclusions whether it’s a book of 170pp or 340pp.
- For the same standard wholesale discount of 55%, D2D pays higher royalties than Ingram.
- Amazon’s Expanded Distribution (ED) pays higher royalties than either of the others, in spite of its 60% discount, because its print costs are much lower. But is there a quality issue with the finished product? Every author-publisher has to make up their own mind on that one.
- Because of Amazon ED’s lower print costs, it’s possible to set a lower price there and still make royalties.
- Where you are able to reduce the discount rate to retailers below 55%, Ingram gives scope for much higher royalties at any given price point without compromise on quality.
- Where you have to opt for the standard discount of 55% and want good quality, D2D gives the best royalty returns.
- The very highest royalty rates are available by choosing to sell via Amazon only, but that may restrict your reach as Amazon is not available (or popular) in all markets.
Other Important Considerations
I’d recommend you don’t decide which of the options to choose for your print book based on royalties alone. There are other important things to think about.
Customer Service
You are the customer and you may well have problems during the process of getting your book ready to be printed and released to the world. In my experience (and you may disagree here):
- Amazon’s customer service is slow and the responses are abysmal. They appear to be provided mainly by bots that are not open to common sense arguments. Getting to a real live person is difficult and they may not be helpful anyway. Amazon makes its own rules and expects you to follow them. And no, I am not a fan. With cause.
- Draft2Digital are prompt and generally helpful though, in some cases, authors have to live with the limitations of the D2D software. The replies come from real people which is a bonus since they are more likely to understand your problem than a bot.
- Ingram Spark is slower to respond than D2D, but the responses come from real people who do try hard to be helpful. Their response rate may have improved since I last used them.
Extra Costs that fall on the author
All print books must have an ISBN. D2D will provide one for free. Ingram provides free ISBNs to publishers in the USA only. UK publishers must provide their own, purchased from Nielsen. Amazon will provide free ISBNs but they are registered in the USA with Bowker and can be used only for books exclusive to KDP. Ingram offers an advice sheet on the issue but generally advises against using free ISBNs. I’d say there are advantages to buying your own ISBNs, in bulk, from Nielsen but it’s another case where self-publishers must make up their own minds.
There isn’t space here to go into the issues of formatting your print text for upload and creating your cover. I’ll save those for future blogs.
Ingram quotes Reedsy research that suggests the average cost of getting text formatted is $500-$1,000. Also that cover design costs are at least $500 and up to $1,500. You have to sell a lot of copies to recover those costs. But you can do some, or all, of the work and my future blogs may just help you there. (Can’t wait, can you?)
Interior Formatting and Cover Creation: Ingram and Amazon
Ingram offers a free Book-Building Tool that claims to help you to design your own book cover and interior. I have not tried it so I can’t say how easy it is to use. Ingram also offers a file creation guide that goes into chapter and verse of exactly what is required of your files for upload. It’s a bit scary, to be honest. For example, your pdf for interior upload should be produced either by “Acrobat Distiller, or Export from InDesign PDF/X-1a:2001 or PDF/X-3:2002.”
Amazon also offers such tools, including Kindle Create. Again, I have not tried them.
When I last published in print with Ingram, I had to produce a fully formatted pdf of the text in PDF/X-1a:2001. I had to use the Adobe website to convert from docx to pdf, but it wasn’t difficult. For the cover, Ingram provided a downloadable template for the full wraparound cover that could only be used with InDesign or PhotoShop. I did use that template with InDesign, but the program is expensive as well as complicated to learn. When I looked today, a month’s subscription to InDesign was £32.98. A month’s subscription to PhotoShop cost the same. You may need to include one of those in your cost calculations, unless Ingram’s book-building tool does it all for you. (If anyone has tried it, please do tell us how you got on.)
Interior Formatting and Cover Creation: Draft2Digital
I have used D2D’s tools because they’re part of the basic process. They are very simple and, importantly, free. As I said in the blog about publishing ebooks, D2D will do almost all the work for you, if you let them. In that case, all you need to upload is the text of your book, with clear chapter headings (using Styles) and scene breaks. D2D’s software will format it for you.
You do need a front cover to upload, but D2D’s software will turn it into a wraparound cover for you. It also allows you to change the background and text colours on the cover, and to manipulate the back cover blurb etc. Sounds like a no-brainer?
I’d say it is a no-brainer for the cover. I’m less convinced about the interior, because D2D’s formatting uses quite large font and line spacing sizes. That increases the page count and the print cost. More about this in a future blog.
My first print book with D2D would have been 334 pages and cost £5.03 to print. The proof copy looked gorgeous, but I’d have had to price it at £13.99 to make any return. So I did the interior myself and reduced the page count by more than a fifth, to 258. As a result, I could price it at £11.99 and still make a return. For shorter books, D2D’s more expanded formatting and print cost may be fine. Worth exploring, anyway, I suggest.
Conclusions about self-publishing in print?
You probably knew I’d say “it depends”. Don’t I always?
But it does. It depends on what you want from your print publishing.
If you want the widest possible distribution through retail outlets, including libraries, I’d say that Ingram and D2D are your best bets. I’d say the same if you’re determined to have a printed book where you can be proud of the quality.
If making royalties is your prime objective, you need to consider Amazon as well, and specifically selling via Amazon only. Remember, though, that Amazon-only books are unlikely to get into libraries so there may be little or no PLR for you.
If you’re prepared to brave the formatting hurdles, Ingram gives you flexibility on royalty rates and you can make more per copy sold. If you want an easy life on the formatting front, I think D2D is probably the way to go.
Personally, I’m sticking with D2D for print books because I want wide distribution. I do my own interior formatting to reduce print costs. But I love D2D’s cover creation software which has saved me oodles of time and money. I showed you an image of the stacked books of A Penniless Prospect at the top of this blog. This is the wraparound cover I created in D2D’s software and I love it. Hope you do, too. You can even click to read the blurb 😉
Apologies for the length but I hope you find it useful. Happy publishing in print!
I’ve only created one print version, Joanna, for my Little Book of Writing Romance. My backlist is all available in used paperbacks so I haven’t bothered with those. I did it with Amazon (this was in 2014 so no D2D and I didn’t know about Ingrams) I’ve just taken it down from the shelf to check the paper quality. It’s cream and actually pretty good. Hands up, I left all the hard work of formatting and cover creation to others.
I’ve only looked at a couple of Amazon paperbacks (other people’s) and thought the paper was flimsy but maybe they were one-offs? OTOH, I don’t understand how Amazon’s print costs are so very much cheaper than everyone else’s. I know they’re huge, with huge buying power, but the differences are really big. For a 340 page book, Amazon prints almost a pound cheaper than the others. Or maybe it’s a loss-leader for them, in an attempt to keep self-publishers from going to the opposition? That would make sense to me. I do think their offering on Extended Distribution is intended to encourage people to stick with selling through Amazon only. Cynic, moi?
My book was uploaded in 2014, Joanna, the copies I have are not recent and paper prices have rocketed in the meantime. Maybe I should download a new one and see if the paper quality has changed.
It would be interesting to know, Liz. Thanks. Of course, I may just be prejudiced 😉
Such a lot of useful stuff here! I’ve bookmarked it to come back to when I do the print version of ‘A Real Family Holiday’. Thank you, Joanna.
Welcome, Jane, though I admit it was a lot of work. I’ll be doing a future blog on how to format text for print books so you might like to look out for that before you do your print version. I expect to do that blog in 2 or 3 weeks, so not long to wait.
Excellent piece Joanna, thank you for taking the time and the trouble to put it all down for us. Jenny
Thanks, Jenny. Glad it can be useful.
Another fascinating post. I’ve learned so much from your self-publishing blogs. Thank you!
Thank you Christina. Really glad you find the blogs useful. I’m planning two more: on how to format for print; and on how to do covers on D2D. Then I think I’ll have covered just about everything. I hope…