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All books sold at B&N (Barnes & Noble), or BAM (Books-A-Million), or any stores that happen to order from you, will earn you $1.55. With CS you’ll only earn $4.55 on Amazon. That means with every book sold, no matter where it’s sold, you’ll earn $4.14. If you don’t plan on active distribution into brick-and-mortar stores, you can keep your discount at Spark to 40%. Spark shows only the 40% option for this chart so that we’re comparing apples to apples. The table shows the CS discount to Amazon and expanded distribution. Let me show you what this looks like in terms of earnings for you based on each company’s price of a 300-page b&w book with their respective discounts at the different retailers. Here is the breakdown based on using Ingram’s 40% discount and CS’s 60% discount. They will order it if a customer requests the title, but they won’t stock it. Please note-neither one of these options will result in brick-and-mortar stores stocking your book. Ingram offers 40% or 55% discount options (LS offers 30% and even 20%). CS offers only one discount for “expanded distribution” (which means everything outside of Amazon, such as B&N, libraries, BAM, etc.). If you are selling online (Amazon, B&N, Books–A–Million, etc.) and you have no intentions of trying to be “stocked” in the brick-and-mortar stores, the following examples are for you. Your print book is sold either online or through bookstores. Let’s Take a Little Page Time to Review the Basics But remember, you’re not just an author you are now in business for yourself, and you should pay attention to the details, especially discounts. They simply sign up with CS and go about business. Most of the authors I speak with know very little about discounts and how they work. (LS allows lower discounts, and I have reason to believe Spark will in the future.) With Spark you can choose whether to allow 40% or 55% for distribution.CreateSpace takes 60% for expanded distribution (other online stores, libraries and bookstores).CreateSpace takes 40% when you sell on Amazon.
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I’ll try to break it down to simple terms. This is one of the big factors in making a decision, and it is the one that confuses most indie authors. Spark costs $49…however, if you are a member of ALLi, that fee is only $37.50, and they also waive the $12 yearly fee. Paperback, 6×9, perfect bound, gloss finish, and cream paper. Featuresįor the above chart I used a sample of a 300-page B&W book. We don’t have time for a book, so I picked what seems to be the biggest concerns for most indie authors. If we go into detail on all the choices, it would require a book to do a proper justification. What To Compareĭetermining what to compare is a major consideration for a blog post. But for this post, we’re only going to deal with two options-CreateSpace and Ingram Spark. In Choosing a Self-Publishing Service, Mick Rooney and I covered quite a few possibilities, and Mick’s site The Independent Publishing Magazine has plenty of articles on those options.
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There is no ‘e’ in the name, just like there is no ‘e’ in the lightning that you see during a storm.Īnd to clear up a few other misconceptions-there are lots of options available to indie authors. Most of the confusion stems from misinformation or old information regarding the two biggest players in the indie author printing game-CreateSpace and Ingram (either Spark or Lightning Source).įirst, to clear up a simple thing that always bothers me-it’s Lightning Source, not Lightening Source.
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I have done a few posts on printing for the self-published author, but the more I play around with social media, the more confusion I see among indie authors. For a guide on migrating your CreateSpace books to KDPPrint, read this post by our Watchdog John Doppler.*** ALLi now recommends using KDPPrint and IngramSpark together to publish your paperback books. ***UPDATE: Amazon’s CreateSpace service has now been superseded by its new KDPPrint service. ALLi Watchdog Giacomo Giammatteo provides an invaluable detailed analysis of the two biggest print service providers for indie authors, Ingram (via its two different subsets, Lightning Source – for publishers of many books – and Ingram Spark – for individual self-publishers) and Amazon’s CreateSpace.