Welcome to the fourth video in my
beginner's guide to self-publishing a book series here on YouTube.
Previously in this series, we covered the nine steps
to self-publishing a book
we covered how to upload a book to KDP, how to upload a
book to Barnes and noble press. And now we're gonna be talking about
how to upload your book to Ingramspark. Make sure you check out the
previous videos in this series, but today is all about
Ingramsparks. In my opinion, Ingramspark is not a
platform for beginners. It's not exactly the most user friendly
platform that I've come across. And there's a lot of things that you can
do to kind of screw up in the process. So that's what I'm talking
about for today's video. I'm hoping to give you
guys some helpful tips. So I'm gonna be covering step by step,
exactly what you need to do to upload, to Ingramspark, and how to avoid some
errors that I've made in the past, including the fact that when I went to
do a pre-order for my children's book on Ingramspark, they actually started sending out
blank copies of the book because I had done one tiny thing wrong
during the uploading process. But I'm here to make sure that you
aren't confused and this is as clear as possible. So I'm not only
gonna be giving you a tutorial. I'm also gonna be giving a ton of tips
and telling you guys a few things that you need to know about Ingramspark
before you publish with them. My name is Mandi Lynn. I'm an author, book cover designer and the
creator of The Book Launch Planner. And if you like weekly videos on
the business of being an author, then be sure to subscribe and
hit that belt notification icon. Let's go ahead and jump into the video. So it's no secret that I am
not a fan of Ingramspark. I have done many, many videos on this YouTube channel about
Ingramspark listing the pros and cons. Listing where you can go
wrong with things. Um, basically what I'm saying is I'm
not gonna go into all of it today. If you wanna know all of the
pros and cons of Ingramspark, please go ahead and watch all the videos
that will be linked in the description. I have an entire playlist about
Ingramspark. Yes, a playlist, because that's how many issues I've
had with them. But to put it lately, I'll make a quick list for you guys.
There are not user are friendly. They no longer have a phone number for
customer service. You have to email them. You have to pay a fee. Every
time you publish a book, you also have to pay a fee. Every time
you need to upload an updated file. You also tend to make less royalties
with Ingramspark than you do any other print on demand company. And I've had a lot of issues and
have heard of a lot of authors having this issue of having their hard
covers printed with no dust jacket. And it seems to happen more
for author copies than customer copies. So I guess that's one thing, but when you're an author and you're
ordering a copy of your own book and it gets delivered to you without a dust
jacket, that's really discouraging, but that's just the quick and dirty like
issues that I've had with Ingramspark, besides the fact that the platform
isn't user friendly, but again, make sure to watch all the videos
that will be, be linked down below. So to put it lightly, I do not recommend
this platform for first time authors. As a cover designer, I work with a lot of authors and a lot
of authors will ask me about Ingramspark and what my thoughts are. If
you're a first time author, maybe stay away from
Ingramspark for a little bit. If you really wanna do Ingramspark, then go first to kind direct
publishing perfect your files there. And I'm talking about the cover files
and the interior files. Perfect. It there then upload everything to
Ingramsparks so that you don't have to pay the fees that you need to when you
need to update your files. Now, with all that said, there's still a lot of good about
Ingramspark Ingramspark gives you a lot of opportunities that other print on
demand companies won't give you. And I'm talking about distribution,
beautiful hardcovers, pre-orders. There's a lot to be said that
is good about Ingramspark. So if you are still interested
in publishing with Ingramspark, let's jump into the tutorial and I'll
give as many tips I can to make this process as smooth as possible. So here
we are on my Ingramspark dashboard. I'm gonna go ahead and show you guys how
to upload a book to Ingramspark in case you wanna go ahead and do that. So
I'm gonna hit the add title button. So you have a couple options here. You
can do print and e-book print only, or e-book only. Now I
recommend doing print. Only if you want expanded
distribution for your ebook, then do it through
draft2digital, not Ingramspark. Draft2digital you can do it all for free. You don't have to pay $25. So once you
select which book it's gonna ask you, do you have files ready to upload?
Yes. All my files are ready. No, I would like to see the available
options, um, for creating files or no, I will enter my title information
and submit files later. So I'm gonna do yes, I have all my files ready
so I can literally show you
guys the entire process. So next it's asking me
what type of files. Um, I have my print jacket or cover ready. And I also have my print interior
file already. So now they're asking, what would you like to do? Am I just printing the book for myself
so I can have the book physically for myself or do I also want to
distribute and sell the book? I'm gonna hit the distribute and sell
option because I feel like that's what most of you guys are here for. And
then I'm gonna hit the continue button. So I'm actually gonna pretend I'm creating
the hard cover edition of meet me at the summit, which I'm not, I'm not gonna be printing the hard
cover addition through Ingramspark, but I just wanna go through
the motions with you guys. So I'm gonna put in the
title and the language, and then we have the print ISBN. Now this is actually a little
different previously Ingramspark only allowed you to use a paid ISBN
that you purchased through Bowker. But as you can see here, you can also
receive a free ISBN owned by Ingramspark. Since I'm just doing an example
today, I'm gonna do the free ISBN. And then when you click that, it does
just explain what exactly that means. Selecting a free ISBN offers
you a non-transferrable
ISBN owned by Ingramspark. Basically that means that this ISBN
can only be used for Ingramspark. It can't be used for other places
like Kindle direct publishing. And it's also letting me know
that if I use a free ISBN, if I had a coupon code to, uh, get some sort of discount off of the
uploading fee that I can't use that coupon code. So that's good to know. So now it has given me this free ISBN. Um, and then to asking me, do I own the
copyright? Yes, I own the copyright. And then it's asking me a
bunch of copyright questions. Just make sure you read through
them. Um, you should be answering no, if you own the copyright and
then you're gonna click, okay. And now we get to add in the
authors. So I'm gonna put in my name, but of course, if you had co-authors,
you would add them in here. Or if you had an illustrator,
you would add them in here. Then you can choose to hit show more
fields to improve book optimization. So you can add in, um, info about where I live
and my biography and, um, other work that I've done,
I'm not gonna do that, but if you wanna improve the optimization
of your book, you can do that. You can also do this
information through, um, Amazon author central later
on. Once the book is published, so here to asking you to
select your imprint and
imprint is just your publishing house. So for me, it's stone Ridge
books, but I can also add other, um, publishing houses or
imprints to my account. The next spot here is subjects. Now, I don't know why Ingramspark
calls it subjects, but this is basically your categories. So like I talked about in previous
videos, when you're uploading your book, you wanna have a document like this
already established where we have our categories picked out. We have our keywords picked out and
we have our book description already written. That way when
we get to this step, it's simply copy and
paste, or in this case, we're gonna hit that fine subject button. And then you can see all the different
categories and you just wanna find the one for your book. Uh, you can select
up to three different categories for me. I'm just gonna select this one for
now. Cause it's just an example. Next you're selecting your audience. You have a few different
options from your dropdown. My book is a young adult fiction,
so I'm gonna select that. And then I can also select
age range and grade range. And then again, there's even
more info that you can put here. Um, I think this would be more beneficial
if you have a non-fiction book, but you can absolutely fill this
out for a fiction book as well. And then we have the
description of the book. So I'm gonna go over to my
document and copy and paste, and I'm just gonna mess around with
the formatting until it looks good. I'm gonna get rid of that extra space. And then we have a spot for keywords. So I'm gonna go over here and
copy these keywords and put them in here. Um, now you do see, it wants them separated by semicolon. I
have them separated by comma right now. So I'm just going to
go ahead and fix that. Okay. And then we have even
more places we can add in. So this is where your
short description would go. So this is like the long description. And then this would be a short
one paragraph description. I actually don't have that prepared.
So I'm gonna skip that step for now, but you can always add in that info later. So I will say Ingramspark only
charges a fee when you update the, um, files. So like the
cover in the interior files, they don't charge a, if you need to
update things like the books description, however, when you do make those updates,
whether it be to the description, the categories, keywords,
or even the pricing, it doesn't update until like the
next calendar month I believe. So now we're to the print info step.
So we're gonna select the trim size. So the trim size of my book is gonna be
five or, and a half by eight and a half. Now it's asking me if the interior
is black and white or color, and I'm just gonna select black and white. And now it's asking me for
the color of the paper, whether I want it to be white cream or
groundwood is more like an off white, whereas ground wood would be like a
little bit darker than cream would be. I've never seen their groundwood
color. I personally am a fan of cream. So I'm gonna select that and binding
whether I want it to be paperback or hardcover. I'm doing a hard cover today. And whether it's gonna be
a jacketed case laminate, case laminate digital cloth,
blue, or digital cloth gray. So let me walk you through. So
to walk you through quickly, what the heck they're talking about?
Here's my book. She's not here. This is the only hard cover through
Ingramspark that I've printed, that I've done some of
their fancier options. So this is a jacketed case
laminate and jacketed case laminate means it's a
hardcover with a jacket. So here we have the jacket right
here. This is what it looks like. And then underneath it has
this case laminate design, and I of course uploaded the
design of she's not here. It's kind of like a simpler
version of the actual cover. Um, but this is the case laminate
design that I designed for underneath the dust jacket. Now you can also get it
just the case laminate, which is just a hard
cover without a jacket. So if you do that option, you of course would want the actual
cover on the case laminate design, rather than this, which is kind of
like a half version of the cover. Now the digital cloth cover, they have it in blue and
they have it in gray. So you're gonna choose
whichever one you prefer. You can choose to have it include a dust
jacket or not include a dust jacket. But it basically means that
when it comes to the case, laminate edition of the book, rather than a custom
design that you can upload, it's just like this design
that looks like cloth. It's not actual cloth
it's it looks like cloth. So today I'm actually gonna do the
digital cloth cover in blue because I'm curious with the cloth cover,
we can choose to have it textured, gloss or matte. And the textured option is
only for these cloth covers. So like if I chose a case
laminate or a jacketed case laminate, I can't choose to have
a texture, but with the blue one, I can choose to a texture. So I'm
gonna, I'm gonna select that. Uh, my page count is 310 pages. My market is the United States and
here it is now telling me that my print cost is $9.90 cents.
So if you wanted to, you can kind of click around
and compare the print cost. So as you can see, when you
get a jacketed case laminate, it does cost more to print. If
you do just a case laminate, it doesn't cost as much. Um, the case laminate and the
digital case laminate, whether it's textured or not is
the same. So that's good to know. So since I chose the digital cloth cover, it's asking me what text
I want put on the spine. So that means Ingramspark will actually
put this text info on the spine right here. So it's asking me
what I want on the left, on the center or on
the right of the spine. I'm gonna do center and I'm
gonna do the title. Now, if you choose the case laminate
or the jacketed laminate, it will ask you to upload files
just to give you guys an example, here's the jacket design for, she's
not here. So this is the actual, um, template that Ingramspark wants you
to use. They have a special template. So you have to put in your ISBN
number in all your printing details, and they'll give you a template. They
email the template directly to you. Then you open that template up in
Photoshop and you basically put your cover design into that template.
You export it as a PDF, and then you upload it to InDesign. So here we have the design
for, she's not here. This is the jacket design. And then this is the case laminate design. As you can see much more simple,
we have nothing on the back. It's basically just a cool design. That's a little simpler
than the actual design. So there is an issue that a lot of people
tend to have when they are uploading their files. And it's not a big deal, but specifically when you're uploading
your cover files to Ingramspark, a lot of people will get an error
message about color profiles, IngramSpark doesn't want any color
profiles assigned to your PDFs. Now you guys don't need
to know what that means. You just need to know the
way to solve that issue. Now there's a really super easy way to
get rid of your assigned color profiles. So you wanna open your PDF in Adobe
Acrobat, which is what I'm in right here. I have the paperback wrap that I
designed for meet me at the summit. Basically, all I have to do is
go to file property. By default, it'll open up to description, but
you guys need to go to custom. And these right here
are the color profiles. So all you have to do is
click delete, click delete, then hit, okay. And then make sure you save
the PDF in Adobe Acrobat. And that's how you get rid of your color
profiles. And it's as simple as that. So jumping back to Ingramspark, we are now on the step of doing
the pricing for our print book. So I'm just gonna put in $24.99, cuz that's just how I tend to price my,
uh, hardcover books. And as you can see, it all fills in right here.
Auto converts, everything. You can double check things if you
want, but it's really up to you. And then this is the thing
that people get confused about. So this right here is
the wholesale discount. So the wholesale discount is how much of
a discount you're giving to retailers. And this is to all retailers.
This isn't just Barnes and noble. This isn't just libraries. This is anyone who buys your book
through Ingramspark. So as you can see, they recommend doing the 55% cuz
that is the retailer preference, which basically means a retailer is more
likely to order copies of your book. If you set it for 55%. But if you ask me doing
that 55% discount just isn't worth it because in my opinion, the only reason why a bookstore or any
of those sort of retailers are gonna go out and specifically buy your
book is if a customer requests it. And guess what if a customer
is requesting your book, it doesn't matter how much
of a discount you put in. They're gonna buy either way. So for that reason I personally
select other and I do the lowest percentage possible, which is 30%.
So that's what I'm gonna put in here. Now it's really up to you what you
wanna do in terms of a percentage. But I will let you know, when I
was first on Ingramspark, I put in, uh, 55% because I thought
that was the best thing to do. And I sold a ton of books and
I had the smallest royalty rate ever. So if I went ahead and selected
55% for my compensation, you'd see that I would only get $1.35 cents per book sale. But then if I go in and select
30% and I type in 30% and that reloads, I get $7.59 cents, which honestly is probably too much.
And because this book is a hardcover, but it does and have a dust jacket. I can actually get away with
putting the price lower. So this is where you get to
just experiment with pricing. So I'm gonna put in $22.99
and see where that puts me. I still make a compensation
of $6 and 19 cents. So let me try it with $19.99, which is the traditional hardcover
price that people are used to. And that puts me at $4.09
cents per book sale. So that's great cuz not only do
my customers get the traditional sort of price for a hardcover book
despite being print on demand, but I still make $4.09
cents when I'm used to making about $3 per book sale. But again, I am doing the lowest wholesale
discount percentage possible. So you really just gotta experiment with
things and see what works best for you and your book. So what I'm gonna do right now is I'm
gonna go through the wholesale discount for all the different locations and I'm
gonna set it for as low as possible. Because again, I already
told you guys my reasoning, if a retailer wants to order my
book, they're still gonna order it. Whether or not I have
the 55%, uh, discount. Now the next column, this is the thing that
Ingramspark doesn't really make super clear. So this
is their return policy. So this is what you need to fill out. So stores know what to do with
unsold copies of their book. So if Barnes and noble orders, 20 copies of your book
and they only sell five, what are they gonna do with the
other 15? Can they return it? And if you want them not to be able to
return it, then you would select no. However, if you select no it's possible, they might not order any
copies of your book at all. Cuz they don't want the
risk that's involved. But what if you do want retailers to
be able to return unsold copies of your book? That's where these two answers come
in hand so they can either deliver the copies back to you or
they still get a refund, but the copy of your books are destroyed. So if you select deliver and Barnes
and noble wants to return 15 books, then those 15 books will be returned
first to Ingramspark and then Ingramspark will mail those 15 books back
to you, which sounds great. But in this fine print down
here, you'll see that there's, there's something that you need
to understand. So we see here, I understand that by selecting yes, deliver option means copies of the
title can be returned to Ingram and Ingram will ship the return
copies to me that makes sense. My account will be charged the current
wholesale costs for each returned copy and that's the wholesale cost. So whatever the retailer
bought the books for, that's what you are going to be
charged back when they return a book, it's not the retail cost. The retail
cost is the price. The customer pays. My account will be charged the current
wholesale cost for each return co copy plus shipping and handling fees, which is $2 per book in the us and $20 per book for us international. And honestly it may not
sound a lot and it's not, but I've definitely been in
circumstances myself where a bookstore ordered way too many
copies of my books. I don't know why. Like they ordered a freakish amount
of books and they ordered them through Ingramspark. And then one day they showed up
at my house and I didn't know why. I honestly wasn't even sure where they
came from until I got the bill from Ingramspark and I put two and two
together. And let me tell you, the bill is hundreds of dollars,
not just a couple dollars. So you just have to know that when
you select that delivery option, that you will be charged on your
Ingramspark account when they return those books to Ingramspark. And then
if you do the yes, destroy, you will also still be charged
the wholesale price of the book, but you aren't paying
that $2 per book fee, but then you don't even
get the books back. Like the bookstore literally
just throws them in the trash. So I select the yes deliver option. So then at least I get the books
back in my possession so I can resell them myself. So that's something you have to figure
out yourself if it's worth it. Um, but that's one of the
finicky parts of Ingramspark. So then at this point you just kind
of go through all your options for the United Kingdom. I don't have the option
to get the books delivered back to me. And I personally don't like
stores to have the option, to be able to destroy my books.
Basically it means for the store, there's no risk. So a store in the United Kingdom
may order 20 copies of my book and not sell them and throw
them in the trash and then I'm left with the losses. So I would rather hit no and
have the store order no books. So they're not at risk and I'm
not at risk for losing money. I rather do that than be at risk for
losing money because a store doesn't mind ordering copies of my book just to
throw them out. For the European union. I'm gonna do the same thing. Select no. For Canada I do have the option
to get them delivered back to me. So I am gonna select that, but do know that the shipping to get them
delivered back is probably higher. Um, Australia I'm gonna select no.
So that's filling all that. And this is all the fine print right here. Just putting that you understand
that selecting 55% for the wholesale discount means that it's less likely
that bookstores will order your book. Um, and to understand that selecting the
no return option means retailers cannot return copies of my book and that
you accept all prices above and understand currency
conversion, blah, blah, blah. So that's what all that
is. Then down here, we just have a few little things. So the enable look inside the
book. This just allows it. So when someone's viewing
your book on Amazon, they can flip through and get a
preview of a portion of the book. If your book has large text,
you're gonna click this box off. And if your book is right to left
content, you're gonna select this. Now just know 99% of
books are left to right. Not right to left. So if your book
is a normal book, don't touch this. So this down here is probably the most
important thing I'm going to talk about today. This is the release
date. And specifically, if you wanna do pre-orders
so without confusing you, all you need to know is to put your
publication date for whatever you want your publication to be. Right now, I have May 31st selected
as the publication date, cuz this doesn't mean anything to me. This isn't a book that's
actually getting published. Um, so if you wanna do a
pre-order for your book, basically you go through the process of
uploading everything onto Ingramspark. You go through the process of
getting your book approved. Eventually hit the publish button
and nothing will happen at first. It takes 10 business days for
your book to show up on Amazon and other retailers, 10 business days.
That's Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, assuming
there are no holidays. Then after at least 10 business days, your book will show up for pre-order
on Amazon and other retailers. You don't have to do anything to
get your book set up for pre-order. This is where I failed in other aspects, because I thought there was
something special I had to do. And Ingramspark actually
changed this. They made it it. So you had to click to see this option, but previously Ingramspark had the
publication date in the on sale date, kind of like right next to each
other. And I think they changed it. So it was less confusing, but basically do not
change your on sale date. Your on sale date is the date that
your book will physically ship out to customers. It's not super clear here. Even when you click on
this little question, mark, it's not super clear cuz this question
mark says the on sale date is the date before which the title may
not be sold by retailers. If the on sale date field is left blank, the publication date and on
sale date will be the same. That really doesn't explain
everything. But in my experience, I can tell you that the on sale
date is the date your book starts shipping out to customers. I thought the on sale date was the
date that your book was available for sale, cuz the word sale is in the
title, but that's not the case. So I had hit the on sale date for
like the current day and then the publication date for the way out future, which is where I got screwed up and
Ingramsparks started out blank copies of my book to customers
who pre-ordered the book. So if you wanna set up your book for
pre-order, don't touch the on sale date. And if you do touch the on sale date, make sure it's the same exact
date as the publication date. I cannot stress that enough if you
wanna do pre-orders you just have to be patient wait the 10 business
days for your book to show up on retailers. It takes a while. So now
that we all have that understood, let's move to the next step. So this is when we're just
uploading our interior files. So your file needs to be a PDF.
Your fonts need to be embedded. It's all pretty basic, but I'm just gonna go ahead and I'm
gonna upload the interior files for meet me at the summit and my files
uploaded pretty quickly. So I'm just gonna hit that continue
button. And this is the validation stage. This is where you'll figure
out if you have any errors. So right now it went through all the
title info that I submitted and it's telling me I had no errors, which is, is
good. Yay. We can celebrate that next. It's going through the content. So the
cover files and the interior files, um, it'll tell me if like
I didn't have fonts embbed. It'll give me that color profile error
at this point. If I had that incorrect. Do know you don't have to
correct that color profile error. I honestly have published all my previous
books without correcting that color profile error. It lets you do
it. It's not a big deal. Uh, but if you wanna make sure that you
have the same result as I do right here where everything is green, that's all you have to do to
correct those color profiles. So at this point we can click the continue
button and move on to the payment. So this is when you actually have to
physically pay to publish your book through Ingramspark. Right
now my fee is just $24, but that's because my cover of
my book is just that digital cloth that uh, Ingramspark is gonna do. But do know if I have a dust
jacket or if I uploaded a design to print on the cover myself,
it would be another $24. So I'm not gonna go through this entire
process today because I obviously don't wanna pay $24 just to show you guys a
tutorial, but you guys get the idea. You would hit this agree,
proceed the payment. And then it would bring you to the
payment page where you have to put in your credit card info, which is right
here. It's not super obvious. Like you wanna wait for a new page to
pop up, but nothing does. It's just, you hit that pay with new card
button and you put all your info. Then once you put in all your payment
info, you pay and you submit your files. You have to wait a little bit
for your files to get approved. You can go through them digitally. So you'll get like a PDF version where
you scroll through and you approve them that way. Uh, but I recommend that you get it physically
printed and physically hold the book and flip through it and
make sure it's okay. Now the one issue with this method
is say, you order your proof copy. And I've got my copy of
meet me at the summit here. And it actually was printed by Ingrampark. So you have your copy
and you leaf through it. And then you realize maybe something's
off with the cover or maybe you spotted typos in your book,
or maybe there's just, there's a lot of things that you could
wanna change about your book before you get to the final stage
of publication. Now, the issue with this is that the only way
you can get a proof copy of your book is to approve the copy of
your book. Unfortunately, the moment you approve
the copy of your book, anytime you need to change the files, whether it be the cover
files or the interior files, you have to pay a fee to Ingramspark
to upload those new files. So you pay about $50 to upload
the cover and the interior. And then you order the copy of the book
and you also have to pay for shipping, but then you get the copy of the book
and you update the interior files and maybe you also update the cover file
and then you're stuck paying another $50 to update that info. So it's probably one of the most
frustrating parts of Ingramspark. If you ask me, because you just can't order a copy
of a book until you hit approve, but are the first copy of your book that
you order is not going to be the final copy of your book, but on the bright
side, their printing quality is fantastic. I'm gonna do a full review of, uh, printing qualities of all print
on demand companies very soon. So if you're interested in seeing that, make sure to subscribe to my YouTube
channel because I'll be comparing Ingramspark, Kindle direct publishing
Barnes and noble press and draft2digital. I'm gonna be comparing all the printing
quality side by side to really see like who has the best quality paperback.
That is it for today's video. If you guys enjoyed it, let me
know in the comments down below, if you want additional content, be
sure to join as a YouTube member. I post monthly exclusive
videos for members over there. Otherwise I will see
you guys all next week.
