SELF-PUBLISHING | Amazon, BookBaby, IngramSpark

Sample Comparison of Services, from
Daily Cos. Ingram is more geared to
bookstores (accepts returns).

I am having to compare self-publishing options and this may be of use to other authors going through the same process. It is not easy to sort out what is the best way to go. Each step costs money. Good service has to be paid for. But there are ways to get better value for money. Here's a 2015 post that compares costs for a $14.99 book. 

Amazon/CreateSpace

Amazon is the way to sell ebooks, and it now owns CreateSpace, which is a good way to sell print on demand (POD) books but they have two problems. First, their discounting practices annoy bookstores and going with them makes it hard to get into bookstores. Ingram Spark is better. Second, they have given up a lot of their editorial and design assistance. They have become just a platform for distribution.

BookBaby: Good for eBooks

I had a good experience dealing with BookBaby and getting estimates of costs for putting out a book. The information came quickly and seemed reasonable, and were delivered professionally.

A review of BookBaby from the ebook publishing perspective in 2014 reported that the new management under President Steven Spatz is making positive changes but the reviewer recommends Smashwords and Draft2Digital over BookBaby as primary distributor, mainly because of the charges that BookBaby imposed for changes to the text that is filed.

The Independent Publishing Magazine in 2014 said that BookBaby is competitive on ebooks but not on printing books. I came to that impression myself by comparing quotes. One reason BookBaby can get away with noncompetitive printing charges is that it masks the charges by giving “royalty” estimates.

As of 2017 there were a lot of complaints about BookBaby. However, the overall recommendation by the Independent Authors Association is favorable.

TrustPilot has some more recent reviews and BookBaby is responding to the negative ones. Someone seems to be taking charge. The overall rating is 8.8 out of 10. That’s pretty good.

In sum, BookBaby seems to excel at book design and preparation, and distributing ebooks. On the printing side, the 2014 negative review on noncompetitive pricing seems still to be applicable.

Ingram Spark

Ingram Spark is great for POD books. They are getting more involved in assisting with the details of editing and design, providing guides and a list of certified providers, but they are not as good as BookBaby. They are significantly better than BookBaby and Amazon/CreateSpace as distributors.

All of these assessments are subject to change. I am in this marketplace and am working with these providers.

Hiring Someone to Help

Rather than try to figure out which distributor is best, one approach is to just hire a designer to help you through the process. Then you are stuck with the question where to find a good book designer. Not as easy as it sounds. There are people out there who claim to be book designers who are not qualified. Best to talk to someone who has been through the process and use someone who is recommended. Caveat emptor. Good judgment comes from experience and experience comes from bad judgment.

Summary

For someone knowledgable about publishing but nervous about making a mistake (the more you know, the more nervous you should be), the solution is either to use Ingram Spark for their guides and certified providers or to rely on BookBaby. Once the book is ready, BookBaby is an expensive route to go for POD, but is fine for ebooks. For someone new to the game, the best idea is to hire someone who has been through the drill. Goose Tracks has a strategy for releasing a book in steps, and structures his publishing program that he uses the services of all three of the main outlets for print-on-demand publishing.

BOOK BIZ | Goodman's Plan for Indie Stores

Peter Goodman, Fighting for Us.
Champion of the Indie Book.

Peter Goodman's term as board chair of the Independent Book Publishers Association is coming to an end.

He is the publisher of Stone Bridge Press, which specializes in books on Asia.  He sold his company to a Japanese distributor and then bought it back. Sounds like the Rockefeller Center deal; I hope he made a bundle, net, on the two transactions.

He has written a full-page swan song as he leaves IBPA under the "Soapbox" heading in the Publishers Weekly of May 15, 2017 distributed at BookExpo in the Javits Center, where I will be for the next two days (June 1-2).

Here is my restatement of his article, with a few points of my own added. Goodman says that the problems with the existing system include these four:

• Big publishers have a winner-take-all mentality.
• Lesser-known authors have trouble finding a publisher to bet on them.
• Meanwhile, people with some name recognition (for whatever reason) are recruited to author books, regardless of their ability to generate new ideas or write well, while the real talent is paid off for anonymous ghost-writing. 
• Lesser-known writers are discouraged by the lack of support or opportunity to sell their books under their own name.

Goodman calls for a modern Indie Bookstore with the following characteristics:

1. Community driven. TLC for the consumer.
2. Totally wired and plugged in with kiosks for buying books.
3. Based on Print On Demand (POD), with books printed in less than 10 minutes.
4. Multimedia oriented — you can buy e-books, movies, music. WhatEVER.
5. Participatory, a gathering place. Workshops, etc. The Espresso machine right in front. Starbucks and bookstacks, the Barnes-and-Noble coffee-shop model. Walk in and you will find some of the same welcoming embrace as in a coffee shop or a well-run modern public library. Be a bookstore where local writers can leave their books for sale, either offset-printed and cheaply bound, or available as a POD book.
6. No returns! The return policy is a killer for indie publishers. This will limit the books that the bookstore will buy, but it also means that the authors won't suffer when the books come back.

Goodman doesn't pretend this model will happen without some serious changes in the industry. He is asking for a concerted effort to make it a reality. Indie publishers and unknown writers should not have to rely on Amazon. It's not good, he says, for the growth of our culture.

Afterthoughts

I spoke with a writer for the French equivalent of Publishers Weekly. He said the big problem in the book business is the loss of diversity. Amazon now has 80 percent of the digital book business and 50 percent of the total book-publishing industry, and that is not healthy. It is dangerous.

There is a glimmer of hope in the Indie Book business, as some self-publishers have done very well for themselves.

A chart for March 2017 sales shows that the best-selling self-published books are Romance novels, accounting for 16 of the 25 best-selling books. The best-selling book is Kept from You by Nashoda Rose. Prices of the Romance novels are $3 to $8 a copy. The other nine books on the top 25 are Self-Help (1 title, $10), Memoir (2 titles, $8 each), YA Fiction (2 titles, $4 each), Health (1 title, $10), Mystery/Thriller (1 title, $4), Fiction (1 title, $10) and Poetry (1 title, $10).

Related Posts: Book Design Outsourcing . Goodman Plan for Indie Bookstores .  BOOK BIZ | Critical Mass