Weekly Writers: Print-On-Demand Distributors For Independent Authors

A selection of the main options

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Print-On-Demand (POD) Distributors For Independent Authors

There are a number of options here. I won’t even pretend to cover them all, especially the smaller print-on-demand distributors based in other countries, but which may still offer an excellent service. All of these would enable customers to buy print copies of your work, and allow bookshops and libraries to order your books if they wanted.

Note that, just because they are available for order, does not mean they will get stocked in bookshops and libraries. That’s where marketing comes in, which I’ll cover in future posts.

Generally shops won’t stock titles by unknown authors, but that is likely to change as you build up your reputation, reviews and presence. There is also the issue of a wholesale discount, and bookshops expecting to be able to do returns. I advise against the latter – not only can that potentially bankrupt an independent author if a bookshop orders hundreds of copies in error and returns them at the author’s expense, but there are huge environmental implications.

And, finally, what I refer to as POD distributors are technically wholesale distributors: they make books available, printing and shipping them when they are ordered, but they don’t promote the work. Whereas full-service distribution is what trade publishers use, which involves sales reps going to bookshops and trying to tempt the manager into ordering their new titles. That’s sometimes tied to payments to the bookshop to promote the titles in front-of-house displays. What, you thought the books face-up on those tables inside stores of a major book chain were placed there because they are the best books? Nope, it’s often paid promotion, but not flagged as such.

I’ll list the companies in alphabetical order.

Blurb Blurb have a reputation for good quality output, but also for being expensive. Personally, their website put me off as I couldn’t find any homepage link to contact them (if customer support was a priority I would have expected that to be easily findable) and some of their pages won’t load. Since I care about attention to detail, those kinds of things would give me a cause for concern.

Bookvault Whenever I have contacted Bookvault they’ve been friendly and helpful. Bookvault offer a good range of printing options, and possibly the lowest printing costs (without sacrificing quality) out of all the services listed here. The only downside is that they are a small company based in the UK, so their international distribution options aren’t as all-encompassing as some of the other service providers. Bookvault charges you for book uploads, though lets you make revisions for free; if you are a member of ALLi (the Alliance of Independent Authors) you can get the upload charges waived.

Draft2Digital We saw them as a key distributor in the ebook posts, but they also distribute print copies of books, and have tools to help you format them. This has big advantages in terms of managing print and ebook copies (and royalty payments) from the same dashboard. The downside is that – perhaps because their printing is done through a partner company – their royalty rate per print copy sold is low, meaning you have to increase the sale price for a book in order to make any profit. Still, Draft2Digital is one of the better companies to work with, and doing everything through them can make the whole process much more pleasant. Draft2Digital can also generate a paperback cover for you based on the ebook cover, adding your blurb, author bio, and author photo to the back. It won’t have unity of fonts, or a wraparound image, but if you have no design skills then it is an easy and free solution for paperback covers.

IngramSpark Possibly the largest and most well-established option, they can certainly distribute your books to all the major stores around the world. IngramSpark let you upload books for free, but charge if you want to make a revision after the first sixty days. The charge is $25 per file (cover or interior) changed. Unfortunately, IngramSpark’s revision fees actively discourage authors from fixing errors. They also quickly add up if you want to keep your books up to date. For example, if you want to update your author bio or list of titles across five paperbacks and five hardbacks they’ll charge you $250. Personally, I’ve always found IngramSpark’s customer support, website, and reporting systems to be frustrating and unfriendly to use.

KDP Print This is Amazon’s service to let you distribute print books to its own sites, whilst also offering optional global distribution. Many authors with no objections to Amazon see this as the best way to sell print copies via Amazon’s site, since they’ll show as “in stock,” whereas POD books from anyone else will likely show a worrying out-of-stock message. This is why some authors use both IngramSpark and KDP Print: they upload the print book to KDP Print but disable global distribution, so it only goes to Amazon; they also upload the book to IngramSpark (or another distributor) for global distribution. Yes, that is more work, so it depends on how important Amazon print sales are to you. If you use KDP Print on its own for all your distribution then note that many bookshops will refuse to order Amazon-printed copies due to controversies surrounding Amazon’s business practices.

Lulu I used Lulu many years ago, and was generally happy with their service and customer support. They’re still going strong, so are worth investigating. Lulu don’t charge for uploading books or making revisions, which is a huge positive.

PublishDrive As we saw in the ebooks posts, Publishdrive can distribute POD titles too, via their subscription service. In return you get 100% of royalties received. The same downsides apply as with ebooks.