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Carla King interviews Paige Allen with An Update on Publishing Your Print Books and Ebooks with IngramSpark.

Nonfiction Authors Association Podcast | February 15, 2023

‘IngramSpark will create monthly lists for bookstores, where they can go in with an iPage and check out the seasonal list that we create that is only IngramSpark titles. So they’re able to access indie content that way, but then there’s also ads within newsletters, ads within the actual iPage catalog itself, that can attract buyers in that way. We are trying to continue to reinvent and expand what we can do–from an advertising component–to get indie titles, especially. Our commitment is to indies first, right? So putting them in front of those buyers in bookstores.’
-Paige Allen

Paige Allen - An Update on Publishing Your Print Books and Ebooks with IngramSpark

About Paige Allen

Paige Allen is a brand and marketing strategist developing innovative channels for content delivery. She partners with companies and executives to sharpen their professional operations, define their brand identity, and engage audiences for maximum conversion. Her work and professional achievements span across various industries, included but not limited to airport technology, sports teams and facilities, as well as legal practices. Paige knows what truly drives conversions and brand engagement; she is passionate about helping people and connecting companies to their right consumer.

After nearly a decade of working within digital marketing agencies, she is excited to bring her expertise and join Ingram Content Group as the Director of IngramSpark. In addition to her extensive PR and marketing experience, Paige is a trained Sweet Adelines International a cappella barbershop singer and member of Metro Nashville Chorus.

Nonfiction Authors Podcast: Paige Allen

Find the video podcast, show notes, links, quotes, and podcast transcript below.

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Show Notes

Links

In this episode…

  • More about IngramSpark and its place in the Ingram Content Group.
  • How IngramSpark serves authors.
  • More about iPage and the two major requirements needed for a bookstore to order and distribute your book in store.
  • Dashboard, account, and website changes and updates for Ingram account holders.
  • How to utilize support features provided by the Ingram Content Group.
  • IngramSpark marketing tools for authors.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the interview series for the Nonfiction Authors Association. Today’s session is with Paige Allen and we will be talking about updates on publishing your print books and ebooks with IngramSpark. I’m Carla King, your host, and I’m happy to have you with us today. This interview will last only 30 minutes and you can find the replay on our Nonfiction Authors Association website and social media platforms including YouTube, and wherever you listen to podcasts.

Paige Allen is a brand and marketing strategist developing innovative channels for content delivery. She partners with companies and executives to sharpen their professional operations, define their brand identity, and engage audiences for maximum conversion. Her work and professional achievements span across various industries, including but not limited to airport technology, sports teams and facilities, as well as legal practices. Paige knows what truly drives conversions and brand engagement; she is passionate about helping people and connecting companies to their right consumer.

After nearly a decade of working within digital marketing agencies, she is excited to bring her expertise and join Ingram Content Group as the Director of IngramSpark. In addition to her extensive PR and marketing experience, Paige is a trained Sweet Adelines International a cappella barbershop singer and member of Metro Nashville Chorus.

Welcome to the podcast, Paige.

Paige Allen  1:27

Thank you, Carla. I’m so happy to be here.

Carla King  1:31

And I’m looking forward to getting your updates now. We’re in the first quarter of 2023, and IngramSpark platform is ever-evolving. And as Ingram is the world’s largest distribution company, it is smart for self-publishers to consider it, and your publishing plans–or if you’re a traditionally published author, if you’re self-publishing supporting materials. But first, I want to ask you–for people who don’t know IngramSpark–and a lot of people really don’t yet–and the whole Ingram ecosystem, right? Including Spark, and LightningSource, and IngramPro, and CoreSource, and all that. Can you just quickly describe IngramSparks place in the company that is Ingram Content Group?

Paige Allen  2:22

Yeah, I’d say probably the best place to start is Ingram Content Group, because Spark was birthed from a lot of what we’ve done there for the past few years. So Ingram Content Group is one of the world’s largest distributors, as well as manufacturers, of books. And really, what we do, from the Ingram Content Group side is–we have what we call Ingram Book Company. We have channel partners–over 40,000 channel partners–which are retailers, right? You all know them as the Target’s, or the Amazon.com’s, or the Barnes & Noble’s. But with those retailers, we provide our catalog. And through our catalog, those retailers are able to use us for printing, as well as a bulk printing, and then we do distribution of that content through those partners.

So, when it comes to IngramSpark–IngramSpark, along with LightningSource, has a virtual inventory or virtual library that is a catalog of all of the traditionally published, as well as independently published books that come in through IngramSpark. And in that catalog–we provide that same catalog to those 40,000 retail partners–they can then place orders through our iPage system. And those orders, again, can be one off orders or they can be significant bulk orders. And IngramSpark is able to leverage, really, that business of manufacturing and distribution to make that happen.

At IngramSpark, we are a platform that–really if you’ve written a book, if you’ve designed a book–you can go onto our website and upload that book and enable it for distribution. And it goes right into that catalog that I was speaking of. And we utilize a POD, also known as Print On Demand, which is a scaled effort of printing, right? It’s a quick-turn way–and sustainable way–in which we’re able to print orders as they come in, so that we don’t have thousands and thousands of books sitting on a shelf, or sitting within our inventory of our warehouses. We’re able to leverage that and use that for the solo author, as well as some of the biggest traditional publishers in the world.

Carla King  5:01

Great, thank you so much. And you know, nonfiction authors–some of us have been writing for a long time. Writing is our business, but a lot of nonfiction authors are professionals and business people who are writing books on their area of expertise. So they may be coming in new, and not know about Print On Demand, which is awesome. And it happened–when did it happen? In the late 2000s, I think. And it just took away the necessity for us to self distribute and have 1000 books in our garage.

So you mentioned iPage. And that’s sort of transparent–that is absolutely transparent to the author. But it is a database–if I’m correct–where bookstores can look and see if your book is available. They might not know and they might not order it. But if somebody comes into the store and says, ‘I want this author’s book, and it’s self published,’ they can order it. But there are some requirements around whether a bookstore will order your book or not. So that turns to distribution discounting. Can you explain the levels of discounting that are available? And the levels in which a bookstore will and will not order your book?

Paige Allen  6:21

So if you go into any bookstore–be it an independent bookstore, be it a library, or a larger chain–if you want them to have the book on your shelves, all you have to say is, ‘My book is with Ingram.’ And they will know to go to that iPage catalog, and they can place an order there.

Now, every store–or channel partner, as I mentioned earlier–has different criteria in terms of selecting certain books. And some of that is based off of content. Some of that is based off of what we call MSRP or list price–so the cost of your book. But most often it is based off of your returnability status. So one–is your book returnable? Which stores do tend to favor, right? Where you check, ‘Yes, it is returnable.’ And the other item is your discount, right? So is it meeting the trade discount minimum? And the trade discount is known to be around 40%.

So in order for that to happen–a discount within IngramSpark, for example, when you set up your title, has to meet a minimum threshold. So when you set your discount, we usually ask you to set that around 53% or higher. Because between the arrangement–so think of Ingram as sort of the ‘middleman’ here, or the wholesaler here–the arrangement that we have with that bookstore, and/or retailer–we want to sell that book back to them, but we will do so at a 40% discount. In order for us to give them that 40% discount, your discount on the author or publisher side for that title has to be set at what we recommend–about 53%. But it can go up to 55%.

And, again, that’s a strategy for in store. You can take a look at changing that–right now our discount goes as low as 30%. So if you only want to focus on online sales, you would have a different approach to your discounting.

Carla King  8:32

And for most authors–I have to say–I say set it at 30%, and sell it online. People buy online these days. And if somebody wants it from the bookstore, they can order it. And you can play with a discount seasonally, as well. Right? So in November, you can set it at 40% or 55% and returns, to attract bookstore sales as well, if you want. Is that right?

Paige Allen  9:01

Correct. I mean, you test out to see what works. And the same discount may not work for every single title So it really just depends on, again, seasonal trends, what the content topic is about. But yeah, I would definitely say experiment with that, and see what works for you. Where do you find success?

Carla King  9:20

Great. And that’s all available in your dashboard and in your account. And I know that you have improved that over the years greatly. It’s easier to use. Are there any other changes to your dashboard, and improvements that you can report to people who are already using Ingram?

Paige Allen  9:41

Well just last year, we did release our new Reporting Suite. It has new graphics, new data points, and it’s something that we will continue to enhance. We do have a lot of things in the pipeline for this year that I can’t necessarily spill the beans on yet. But we have launched with our SparkPro, which is our professional services tier of accounts. Those accounts tend to have a longer tenure with IngramSpark, and have seen some success.

But we are piloting what we’re calling IngramID right now, which is a marketing portal where you can reach verified readers. So we look across all of the books in the Ingram catalog, including traditional and indie. And we’ve been able to collect and really assess the metadata of that account. And we have our own collection of verified readers, and emails, and PII–or personal information points–that we’ve been able to collect from those readers.

So that is all within the back end of the IngramID marketing portal. But through that marketing portal, you can set up a campaign for your book. We will provide suggested tags and copy for your advertisement copy, and you can advertise via Facebook, via Google ads, all in that one platform, as well as a few other social media platforms–all within that one platform. So we are piloting that right now for our pros, but we do hope to, throughout the year, continue to open that up to more and more customers as we get feedback. But a great marketing tool, and one of many that are coming throughout the year.

Carla King  11:36

That’s awesome. Okay, so those are brand new, and I want to talk about that. So I want to go back to the reporting tool. And so authors are more easily able, now, to figure out where they’re selling–if they’re selling more books on Amazon, which they almost always are, or Barnes and Noble, or any of the other online stores, right? And when they sold. Are they very up to date, so you can tell if its success is tied to a marketing campaign?

Paige Allen  12:09

I would say it’s fairly up to date. There may be a lag of somewhere between 24 to 48 hours. But currently, the data is only giving you location, not necessarily channel partner–which partner or retailer it sold with. But that’s something that we’re looking to develop. That requires some terms–shifting of terms–with some of our channel partners, to see how visible we can be with that information. But I’m aware, we’re all aware–that is information that authors need so that they can be more successful, and more targeted with who they approach for distribution.

Carla King  12:48

Wow, so much to cover. So I did want to go back and say–with distribution, you can order and distribute paperback, hardcover, and ebooks–which now only need to be in ePub format, because Amazon takes ePub now. People are still a little bit confused about supplying Mobi’s versus ePub. So paperback, hardcover, and ePub. What about audiobooks? Are there plans to give IngramSpark users access to distribution for audiobooks that you have in CoreSource right now?

Paige Allen  13:23

Yes, there is. CoreSource does distribute audiobooks right now. As it relates to IngramSpark, it’s more of a scalability challenge, right? So right now you’re able to write and upload, and we can push it straight to our catalog. But when we step into audio, we also want to create a space where people can easily create audio files at scale. And so that is a little bit of a technology problem that we have, or a challenge that we have today, but it’s something that is definitely on our roadmap that we want to bring to authors.

Carla King  14:01

Okay, so we’ll look forward to that as well. I wanted to address some customer support issues. You really implemented a great dashboard now, so we can see where sales are coming from and how much we’re selling. We’ve had a chat–we used to have chat, and then it disappeared. Are we going to get chat again?

Paige Allen  14:25

Well, we do have chat, and we do have phone. I think what is not widely known is that certain cell service channels are only available to certain customers. We do hope to get back to the point where we can offer all three service channels.

Carla King  14:44

So how do you decide who is served first? Is there a customer criteria?

Paige Allen  14:54

So in terms of who is served first–it’s first come first serve, in terms of inquiry as it comes in. So if a request came in at 7am in the morning, we’re going to go to that one first. But if you’re speaking about–when is a service channel available to a customer versus not? That is currently based off of a customer’s tenure with IngramSpark, as well as account performance and engagement. So performance may be related to the number of titles that you have, the volume that you have, the volume or units that you’re bringing in a year. But it’s based off of those three components.

Carla King  15:37

Alright. And you did talk about SparkPro–is that a paid service that a self publisher can opt in to get more help?

Paige Allen  15:47

So, Spark Pro is our professional services program. But I think you and I spoke earlier about IngramSpark Connect. So, if you go to ingramspark.com/connect, that is a landing page. You can sign up for paid premium service with one of our service experts and professionals there. So you can schedule a 30 minute session for $25, or you can schedule an hour session for $49. And you can choose if you want to do it via phone, but we also can do virtual meetings and can do screen share, and can help you maneuver anything regarding your account.

Carla King  16:35

I do want to also talk about the printing process with POD. As with anything in volume, mistakes are made–the pages are faded or crooked. It happens. I have printed so many thousands of copies of books, and occasionally I will get something weird happening with it. I have to say though, way back in 2000, I printed 2500 copies of a book. And one batch, my whole last chapter was missing. And I had people emailing me going, ‘Are you kidding me? You stopped right there?’ And it was a printing issue. What happened? That was even with offset, very careful, very professional offset printing. What happens with the POD machines?

Paige Allen  17:31

Well, sometimes it depends on the file itself. And sometimes we’re not able to explain it. Because the machine is printing at scale, it may read that print file correct for times 1-1000. But on time 1001, it may be incorrect. And we understand that those issues do exist. I will say we have one of the highest levels of POD quality that exists today. But sometimes that really detailed luxury level quality that you may get from an offset printer may not necessarily exist with POD, because it is happening at scale.

Sometimes, if it’s seasonal, it can be what’s happening on the manufacturing floor–where we may bring in extra workers outside the floor onto the floor, in order to help us, right? And there are manual components–the machine prints the pages, but there are manual touches in terms of the binding that happens, and the lamination that happens. And so human error will happen. But also, just because you have a bigger order doesn’t necessarily mean that that big order will be printed all at once.

Sometimes it will be broken up into different batches, right? And so sometimes there can be either cross contamination or confusion between the printer reading the files of the batch that just came before, or the book that just came before in that batch, and the book that comes after. And sometimes it gets confused, and then we end up with those quality issues. But unfortunately we don’t have people that check every single page of the book, so we do have those.

Carla King  19:29

It’s tough, I know. I mean I’ve worked in manufacturing and high tech all my life, and  I’m kind of amazed it works as well as it does. I have seen, when there are complaints, you replace the books, which is always great. So thank you for that. And I know that equipment is being updated and changed all the time. And with the pandemic, of course, there were supply chain issues. Are those remaining? Is that remaining an issue today in 2023?

Paige Allen  20:00

I would say in some parts of the world, but not at scale, or near to the amount that we saw a year or two years ago. Thankfully, during that time, we rarely had any paper issues–we always had the volume that we needed in regards to that. But you have seen consolidations happen between offset printers, between paper manufacturers, as well as other components of material vendors of the book making process. But I would say–to the scale that it was no, it’s no longer a large concern. Moreso supply and/or economic concerns, as it relates to what we’ve seen out of the UK. And really some of the difficulty that they’ve had around inflation, economic changes, towards the back end of the year. But we’re still going strong.

Carla King  20:58

Thank you. Well, that’s great to hear. And, you know what I didn’t ask, that I wanted to was–many, many authors upload to IngramSpark and Amazon.com. And they use Amazon KDP Print and KDP for their ebook. So I always talk about–the paperback needs one ISBN, the hardcover needs one ISBN, and the ebook needs one ISBN, no matter where you’re uploading it, right? And that’s how Amazon and you both know that it’s the same book. I’ve heard, ‘Uploaded to IngramSpark first,’ and, ‘Upload it to Amazon first.’ What is the best practice there?

Paige Allen  21:48

I mean, I of course have bias, right? I say upload it to both. We tend to see a little bit more issues from the ASIN.

Carla King  22:04

Amazon product number, right.

Paige Allen  22:08

On that side, when they’re trying to transfer it over to a new ISBN, or when you’re trying to cancel the title of KDP and move it over. But there’s really not a method to the madness. I, of course, am biased, and say choose IngramSpark first. But you can really do either. But I do tend to see that there are a little bit more issues when people go KDP first, and then to IngramSpark.

Carla King  22:35

All right. Well, it can get sorted out. And both of you have customer service. So great. And I did want to end with some marketing tools. You’ve got high page ads for a really good price–which is advertising to bookstores that your title is available. And if you’re going to advertise to bookstores, you should have that 53% and returns program, right? So can you describe how much that costs, and how that gets out to the bookstores?

Paige Allen  23:04

I want to say that our iPages are $150, if I’m correct. So IngramSpark will create monthly lists for bookstores, where they can go in with an iPage and check out the seasonal list that we create that is only IngramSpark titles. So they’re able to access indie content that way, but then there’s also ads within newsletters, ads within the actual iPay catalog itself, that can attract buyers in that way. We are trying to continue to reinvent and expand what we can do–from an advertising component–to get indie titles, especially. Our commitment is to indies first, right? So putting them in front of those buyers in bookstores.

Carla King  24:00

And then you have a Publishers Weekly Book Life Professional book review, which is a trade review. I think it is $325 off the regular price. So for $75, you get a guaranteed professional review by a Publishers Weekly reviewer. Is that still going on? That’s an amazing opportunity.

Paige Allen  24:25

Yeah, that is still going on. And reviews are just so important. They’re great for Metadata, definitely in terms of legitimizing your title. So yes, that’s still going on. We do have a section on our dashboard under marketing where you can access a lot of that information. We also have the Edelweiss catalog that you can access for $15 to that catalog. And we have our own Edelweiss lists that, if you opt into, buyers, of course, can see that information as well.

Carla King  25:05

And I really would love to talk to you about so many other things, like book IO, and Ft for books, and all this, but we have run out of time. So I really just want you to let us know where we can keep up to date with what the heck is happening with IngramSpark all the time? And where we can maybe reach customer support when we need it? And all the URLs, which we will put, also, in the show notes.

Paige Allen  25:33

So, you can always go to ingramspark.com to see what is going on. You can visit our blog there, as well as our resources and expert channels. You can also do ingramspark.com/business-updates, where you can receive some updates. In terms of reaching our support team, you can email ingramsparksupport@ingramcontent.com, or go to ingramspark.com/connect. Hope you got all this.

Carla King  26:05

We’ll get all that in the show notes. And I’m always pointing people to your resources section on ingramspark.com–with all the book specs, and creating your book cover template, and your free barcode that comes with that, when you put that in your book cover template. It’s just a wealth of information there. So Paige, I know you’re so busy, and I want to thank you for your time today. And I’m going to invite you back in another six or eight months to get some more updates, if that’s okay.

Paige Allen  26:43

Do a part two, I would love it.

Carla King  26:46

All right. Well, thank you for being on the podcast. And thank you to our listeners for joining us today and every week. For a list of guests and topics just check our schedule on the site, use your favorite search engine, or better yet, sign up for our mailing list at NonfictionAuthorsAssociation.com.

Quotes from our guest

‘So IngramSpark will create monthly lists for bookstores, where they can go in with an iPage and check out the seasonal list that we create that is only IngramSpark titles. So they’re able to access indie content that way, but then there’s also ads within newsletters, ads within the actual iPage catalog itself, that can attract buyers in that way. We are trying to continue to reinvent and expand what we can do–from an advertising component–to get indie titles, especially. Our commitment is to indies first, right? So putting them in front of those buyers in bookstores.’

‘Now, every store–or channel partner, as I mentioned earlier–has different criteria in terms of selecting certain books. And some of that is based off of content. Some of that is based off of what we call MSRP or list price–so the cost of your book. But most often it is based off of your returnability status. So one–is your book returnable? Which stores do tend to favor, right? Where you check, ‘Yes, it is returnable.’ And the other item is your discount, right? So is it meeting the trade discount minimum?’

‘At IngramSpark, we are a platform that–really if you’ve written a book, if you’ve designed a book–you can go onto our website and upload that book and enable it for distribution. And it goes right into that [iPage] catalog..’

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