Back last year, I think, Julie and I decided to take our books out of Kindle Unlimited and try to go wide. While we did publish some of our other author’s books wide, we never got around to ours. Wide means that we weren’t exclusive to Amazon. That we could upload our books through IngramSparks, who would then distribute our titles through a bigger network of retailers. Well, we found out some hard truths.
At that time, IngramSparks was the only distributor that offered hard cover editions. Since most of our authors write children’s books, we needed those hard covers for their titles. Hence, our reason for going with them. However, they are not easy to work with. You have to upload a different file of one book for each type of cover: eBook, paperback, hard cover. Yikes. It ended up being so time consuming for Julie.
Another hard truth; no matter how much authors HATE Amazon, they are still the biggest retailer for books. And, they don’t charge you money for uploading your files, Or, making any changes to your book AFTER the fact. IngramSparks charges a $50 upload fee for each book, which is $50 for eBook, $50 for paperback, $50 for hard cover. Yikes. Sure, IngramSparks gives you 30 days to make any necessary changes free of charge, however …
What if you want to lower the price of your book, or change the cover, or even the blurb? $50 for each version of your book. Emm. Nope. Let’s not even go into actually getting paid your royalties. No, they were not fun to work with. So back to Amazon we went.
Now, we can run sales, change blurbs, or covers, with no additional fees. Which is great for indie authors who need to test, test, test what works in their genre to sell their books.
If you’re a kindle unlimited member, like I am, and you haven’t read my series yet, how about giving them a go. 😁😁
