How I Learned to Love IngramSpark
A few years back, I wrote a post about what I saw were IngramSpark’s shortcomings and why I wasn’t going to use it.
This month, I hit the button and “The Best Sherlock Holmes Parodies and Pastiches: 1888-1930” was published.
So, as the Talking Heads sang, how did I get there?
Let me explain. I’ll also go into detail how I was able to publish a book there without using InDesign, the latest version of Photoshop, or any other expensive piece of software.
There were two reasons why I objected to IS:
1. Cost: Uploading a book was too expensive. First, $49 for a “set-up” fee (which was a way for IS to generate revenue), and a yearly fee to keep the book available. You also had to pay $25 for each subsequent upload, so you better get it right the first time, bucko.
Worse, you couldn’t even test-drive the website by putting up a book and not printing it. You needed an ISBN, which in the U.S. cost at least $125.
So, just to familiarize myself with IS, I would have to play nearly $175 for one book. Not worth it.
2. Insufficient documentation: If you work for a book publisher and have access to InDesign and Adobe, you were set. You were also trained and experienced enough to understand the documentation. For those of us used to CreateSpace, we had a harder time making sense of IS’s demands.
That’s it in a nutshell. It was too much trouble to make the effort for potentially little return, and all of my loading mistakes would deepen the hole in my bottom line.
Whereas, CreateSpace didn’t charge a set-up fee, let you upload files without charge, and offered interior and exterior templates to make it easy to format and upload your work.
IngramSpark Gets A Clue
But that was then. Over the last few years, IS made some changes. It’ll still charge you $49 for a set-up, but there were plenty of discount codes that made it go away (for example, PUBLISH2019 works up until the end of the year).
They offered interior and exterior templates, which increased the chance of a successful upload.
The third change was on our part. As a result of a contretemps with Amazon over our Complete, Annotated books that is too dull to go into, Peschel Press bought a block of 100 ISBNs. At $575, the price went down to $5.75 each, and since we’re now at 20 books, it seemed like a good long-term investment in the business.
Suddenly, experimenting with IS made sense.
How to Publish a Book with IngramSpark
Let me walk you through the procedure for how I published “The Best Sherlock Holmes Parodies and Pastiches.”
As with CreateSpace (overrun and destroyed by KDP, which I’ll use from hereon), there are two parts needed to create a book: the interior PDF file, and the cover PDF file (which includes the front cover, back cover, and the spine).
Interior Template PDF
1. This book was first published through KDP, using its 6-inch by 9-inch interior template, so no changes were made to the file.
EXCEPT: IS wants the file to have an even number of pages. The book had 389 pages, so I added a Page Break to create the blank page.
2. Whether you’re working with KDP or IS, you want to make sure that all inside art is set at 300 dots per inch (dpi). When Word saves a file, it automatically compresses images to 200dpi.
(Make sure you sized your interior art so it’ll fit on the page at 100% — no shrinking and especially no enlarging — and at 300dpi.)
To stop Word from compressing the art, immediately before you create the PDF, find the Compress Picture panel. In Word 2007, you right-click on a piece of art and click the the Format Picture button. Or, when you click on a picture, the Format tab will appear, and you can click on the Compress Pictures option that way. Select Option, then uncheck the compression command box.
3. Using the free PDF995 plug-in, I “printed” the PDF. Don’t use Word’s Save As function to make the PDF. Other PDF plug-ins might work, but PDF995 works for me.
Exterior PDF
This is the tricky part. I’m assuming that you learned how to make a cover PDF for KDP. The procedure is the same, but IS requires your software to use the PDF/X-1a:2001 or PDF/X-3:2002 plug-in when you export the PDF version.
These plugins make sure that your file is configured for the printing process. It may be that your software already has them. I use an old, old version of Photoshop (CS2), and it also already had one of the two plug-ins installed. You just need to make sure your software has it as well.
What about color density?
What do you mean?
It’s mentioned in Ingram’s documentation.
Don’t worry about it.
You sure?
I published four books successfully without worrying about it. Let me explain.
Without going into too much detail, IS wants your dark colors to look dark, but not too dark.
IS sets an upper limit on the density art, expressed in a percentage. The maximum density you can have is 400%. Printing a color page requires four plates: cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. The maximum color density of each plate is 100%. Four plates times 100% equals 400%.
According to its documentation, IS wants the maximum color density to be no higher than 240%.
Now that you know that, try and forget it, because IS doesn’t enforce this rule.
For my “Best of” book, I know that sections of the cover are well above 240%. It passed their process without a problem.
So, back to the process: Once I knew the page count of my book, I went to IngramSpark and downloaded the proper exterior template (make sure you know if the pages are white or cream; cream pages are thicker and the spine will be wider).
When I was done designing the cover, I used the Save As function to create the JPG file, then —
Wait a second. What’s the JPG file for?
Oh, I forgot to mention, you use the JPG file to create the PDF file.
Why?
I don’t know how it works for you, but when I tried to make the PDF directly from the original Photoshop file, my computer crashed. The original file was so big that converting it to a PDF was too much for my 10-year-old-plus RAM to handle. Saving the original file as a JPG, then loading that file and converting it to a PDF worked.
Anyway, during the PDF-making process, a panel appeared with a number of selections. The Adobe PDF Preset was already set to the PDF/X-1 plug-in. All I needed to do was make sure was that the Standard option was set to that as well.
That’s it.
Now I have four books up — “The Best Sherlock Holmes Parodies and Pastiches,” “The Dictionary of Flowers and Gems,” “The Complete, Annotated Mysterious Affair at Styles,” and “The Complete, Annotated Whose Body?.” Without advertising, they’ve sold a couple dozen copies in six weeks. And all it cost me was $575 for the ISBNs, which I’m also using on the trade paperbacks on KDP.
Is it worth it? It raw dollars, no. But somebody is buying Peschel Press books through Ingram, and if they like them, maybe they’ll seek out our other books. And I’m making more money per book than they did through Amazon’s Extended Distribution.
Not only that, but IngramSpark also allows me to print books in hardcover, with either a case jacket or a full dust jacket. If I want to make a limited edition collectible out of, say, The Complete, Annotated Mysterious Affair at Styles, and sell it at Subterranean Press prices, I can.
And that’s good business.