Parisian Phoenix Publishing

The podcasters I listen to like to talk about how they make the most money self-publishing and rapid-releasing on Amazon. Many of these people not only release approximately every six weeks, but they also focus on Kindle Unlimited and ebook readers. Many do not do print books.

But many others do do print books, and I feel those who are most successful blend the rapid release strategy and the ease of Kindle Unlimited with throwing the file on Ingram and promoting direct sales. It’s a hard business and authors who need to eat from their words have to use every tool at their disposal.

Now I’ve read plenty of books printed by Amazon, and lord knows I’ve read plenty of books from Ingram Sparks. But whose books are better?

As many of you may already know, Ingram rejected our latest title, Shuffling & Scribbling: A Journal for Learning Divination Through Tarot by Eva Parry. They called the book “too low content” even when I appealed the designation and listed all the people it took to design the “low content” pages. (Those who have received the book have no complaints.)

Ingram will, of course, print the book and allow me to order it, but they will not distribute the book. So, I used KDP. I ordered five books from each service.

How did they compare?

• Price: The two entities have different pricing structures, but once you break it down to total print cost per book, they are the same. And despite what everyone says about Amazon giving more royalties, my dashboard seems to indicate that the profit from each service would be remarkably similar.
• Look: Amazon appears to make no effort to line up the spine and cover art on the books. The back cover ran over onto the spine on the Amazon copies— and they weren’t even the same in their imperfections among each of the KDP copies.
• Cut: Amazon also does not cut their books as nicely as IngramSpark. I bet my teammates Gayle and Dawn (who have more experience in physical printing than I do) could use better terminology for this, but Amazon’s books feel dusty and when you first open them, the pages stick together. Ingram books seem fluffier. And cleaner. Crisper. (But not crispier, I did not eat either company’s product.)

The differences are very minimal, but if you spend a lot of time around books, especially Print-on-Demand books, the winner is clearly Ingram.