A special discount on The Kingdom of Heaven! Valid from now until December 30, purchasing at this link will allow you to get the book cheaper than it is available anywhere else - for $13.65, about $4.25 cheaper than Amazon. Thanks to my distributor for making this deal possible.
If you wanted to purchase the paperback but the list price sounded like a bit much, consider this your chance.
When Alex, a woman working for a futuristic one-world government, investigates a group of Christians labeled a 'cult' living outside the wal
ID: A cropped screenshot from Ingram Spark showing various distribution regions. The highlighted ones are the US and the UK. The price shows 17.99 with a red exclamation mark next to it.
The next drop-down box prompts the author to set the wholesale discount to 55% trade, noting that this is the "retailer preference."
The author compensation, aka the amount the author will get paid for their work after wholesale discount and printing costs have been taken out of the $17.99 price tag, is shown as 0.61 cents in the US and 0.04 pence in the UK.
----
So this is a thing that I saw today when I logged into Ingram to confirm some metadata.
They used to list "retailer preference" at 40%, which is what they have made into their new wholesale distribution standard. You will not be able to distribute your books for global wholesale anymore after October 30th if you don't have your rates sent to 40%.
I don't doubt retailers would prefer if we sold to them at 55%. But considering myself and several others already have doubts over whether or not Ingram is actually showing our discounts to retailers (they've been caught showing mine as 5% even though they've been listed at 35% for three years), I'm just sort of sitting here, well, I can't accuse them of fraud, but let's just say I am not not thinking it.
Also, just a fun little tidbit, I tried to use my old ISBNs with d2d which legally I am allowed to do. They are mine. I own them. Anyway, d2d sent me a warning about how it would require me to work with them and Ingram Spark over several weeks to transfer the ISBN, and ahaha. Hahahahaha.
I'd say, "How do we think this is going to turn out?" But I think we all know.
I’m asking a few other groups about this too, but does anyone here distribute through Ingram Spark and dealt with your paperback not appearing across all the markets it’s supposed to?
My e-book seems to have gone out fine through D2D, but IS seems to have pushed out my paperback inconsistently. It’s supposed to be available across a bunch of sites, but isn’t always there. Do I need to do something special to push it out??
Your author brand establishes what your books and you as an author represent to the public. It's important to set this for yourself through strategic marketing.
From the useful Ingram Spark blog.
On your way to work today, you probably received lots of brand messages without realising. Maybe you picked up a coffee from a café with an Italian name and branding, maybe you grabbed a healthy snack in green packaging to go with it, or maybe you bought a bottle of water with a crisp, clean Alpine mountain on the side. Even if we take billboards and magazine adverts out of the equation, companies have a subtle way of telling you what they want to be known for in their marketing. Big brands spend millions on these clever ways of making you associate their name or product with certain values. Indie authors should be branding themselves in their marketing also.
But I’m an Author, Not a Brand…
We all choose to show different sides of ourselves in different situations. You probably act differently in front of your boss or your bank manager than you do with your best mate. It’s not about being fake, but about making a decision about how you want to present yourself to your audience.
Whether you like it or not, all authors have a brand that will be judged by readers, media, and booksellers. Actively positioning and presenting yourself as you wish to be seen is much better than taking a back seat and waiting to see how people label you. It is particularly important if you plan to self-publish more books or eBooks in the future, as you want to make a good first impression that you can then build on.
1. Write Down Your Brand Values
It all starts with brand values. What are the things you want readers to turn to you for? How do you want them to see you? This is the foundation of your author brand.
Try to write down a few words to describe your brand values. For example, say we knew an older female baker who wrote cookbooks and wanted to be known not only for her recipes and baking skills, but also wanted to incorporate a friendly, grandma-like approach to her author brand. Her values might be:
Reassuring
Feminine
Friendly
Traditional
Everyone’s favourite grandma
Think about what 5 words you want readers to associate with you and your books and consider how you could work those into your marketing. If you have a friend or family member who has read your work, run through your list with them and see if they agree. You might think you are giving off a certain impression, but people may see you quite differently.
2. Make Sure What You Say Matches These Values
Once you have these core values written down, you need to keep them somewhere you see them a lot, e.g. on a Post-It note by your computer. The next time you write a social media or blog post, check whether it is aligned with the values you want to be known for. For example, blogging or tweeting about a bad date might be fine if you’re a romance author, but not if you write business books.
3. Make Sure What Readers See Matches These Values
It’s not just what you say and how you say it, but also how you present yourself. Some self-published authors fail because their brand does not look professional enough – don’t make that mistake. You want people to start recognising you, so you should have the same visual look and feel anywhere a reader might come across you/your books, e.g. your website, social media, business cards, book cover, etc. You want to establish congruity from one representation of your author brand to the others. That will probably mean using similar sorts of colours, fonts, etc. If you’re setting up an imprint, you’ll need a logo that reflects these values as well – you wouldn’t want a child-friendly, cartoony logo for a very serious academic book. These things matter.
An Author Brand in Action
If we take another look at our grandmotherly cookbook author, we can see how she might put all these things together to give readers a really good idea of what she is about and what we can expect from her brand.
Content: her blog and social media of course have a lot of recipes and friendly advice for readers who have baking problems, but also other domestic hobbies, such as gardening, as well as photos of her with her grandchildren etc.
Colours: She tends to use pretty, soft, feminine pastel colours across her website and social media, and she often wears these colours in her author photos too.
Fonts: The fonts used on her book covers, recipe videos, social media graphics, etc. are traditional, pretty, and feminine.
Think seriously about how you want to be seen as an author. Your brand matters and it should be something that you set for yourself.
Leila Dewji is co-founder of I_AM Self-Publishing. She’s used her years of experience within trade publishing to recreate the publishing process for indie authors, ensuring high quality self-publishing to be proud of. As a stickler for quality, she has been encouraging her authors to use the IngramSpark platform since it launched.
Was going to look into Ingram Spark, like a real grown up, but it seems it is yet another platform set up for Mac users and everyone else using it has to make do with instructions that "may vary." Ingram Spark and Vellum just like, "look, peasant, buy our expensive systems or go fuck yourself. guess you will have to do it the cheap, hard way lmao."
I spent so much of last year trying to adapt and anticipate publishing world shit and they really started off the year telling indie authors to go fuck themselves.
