IngramSpark Drops Setup Charges But Adds Another Fee

In welcome news, IngramSpark have dropped their excessive new title charges, and also removed revision charges if corrections are made within 60 days. This aligns them better with their competitors at Kindle Direct Publishing. The revision fees were particularly egregious — one of the advantages of Print On Demand is the ability to correct and update when necessary, unlike long print runs, and IngramSpark were effectively penalising people for doing so.

Of course, what one hand giveth, the other hand taketh away — a new ‘Global Distribution Fee’ has been added:

Effective July 1, 2023, a market access fee will be charged for every print book sold through Ingram’s Global Distribution network, reaching 40,000+ bookstores, retailers, libraries, and schools. The fee will be 1% of the list price of the title sold. For example, if your book has a US list price of $20.00, the market access fee will be $0.20 cents. 

POD Providers Head to Head Battle

Book discovery and author resources service Reedsy runs the big print on demand providers (IngramSpark. Bookbaby, KDP print, Blurb and D2D Print) head to head. They have many interesting points to make (read it all) but in the end boil it down to the following formulationL

Upload to Amazon KDP for listing on Amazon, and opt out of extended distribution. Then upload also to IngramSpark for all other platforms and bookstore discoverability and orders.

This essentially mirrors the advice given by several prominent independent authors. An additional point not covered in the article is that non-American authors printing with KDP have to consider the issue of printing offshore and huge postal costs. For Australian authors, using the IngramSpark platform with local printing can make a lot of sense, with volume discounts for print runs and refund of the title setup fee if more than 50 copies are ordered.

Createspace Versus Lightning Source

For self-publishers, choosing between Amazon's Createspace print on demand service, and Ingram's Ingram Spark/Lightning Source service can be difficult. Both services have their pluses and drawbacks. For fence-sitters, here's an article that argues uploading to both services is a good idea. An author client recently indicated this approach was working well for him, and we'd be happy to hear opinions either was other print on demand using authors.

Lightning Source versus Createspace

One of the benefits of digital printing combined with online bookselling is the capacity of printing books as they are ordered, rather than pre-printing and warehousing. This massively reduces costs for small presses and self-publishers. Two major players dominate this field — Createspace, owned by Amazon, and Ingrams Spark (Lightning Source in Australia). The two services offer a very similar level of functionality, but there are differences in pricing, approach, assistance and sales channel availability. Check out these interesting articles discussing  the relative merits of each service, and identify which one better fits your particular use-case.