Tag: IngramSpark

Previously on Game of Tomes

In A Dance with Designers, three talented teams of freelance designers produced covers and interior book designs for Raether’s Enzyme. Each team’s cover captured a different aspect of the story and were viable keys to unlocking readers’ interest. The teams mastered the layout challenges posed by the manuscript’s stylistic flourishes. The dance ended with a cliffhanger: I had three great designs and could only bring one to market. There was one last test.

Kindle Direct Proof

The final test was to upload the designers’ files to Amazon KDP and request proof copies of the paperbacks. This would get me as close as possible to what a real reader would experience. I had prior experience with the system that gave me cause for concern. This time I had professional design products, not dev. I was optimistic. Too optimistic…

I’ll break here and to say that the trials I recount here are 21^st Century First World Problems™. KDP and IngramSpark afford indie authors an amazing opportunity to create real live books without the overhead of a full-blown print run. Raether’s Enzyme would not be available in paperback if it wasn’t for Print On Demand.

Okay, back to our story. I chose the design I favored ever-so-slightly for the first proof. With the files uploaded and the automated tests passed, the online preview of the book looked promising. The cover was a bit dim, but the interior tracked the designer’s PDF file perfectly. I ordered four proof copies and sat on the porch steps waiting for the delivery.

The covers were rather dim. Areas that glowed on the screen with red were like dried blood. The magical cyan was the green of chalkboards. Whole areas of subtle detail were lost in the darkness.  I’ve worked in and with computers long enough to know that unless the screen to printer pipeline is calibrated, what you see on the former isn’t what you’ll get on the latter. The additive colors on your screen work differently than the subtractive colors used by printers. Gamut mapping is a science. But it struck me that in the years that KDP had been serving indie authors, it should be able to print the users’ cover files with greater fidelity.

Diving into the KDP community forums revealed that dark covers were a persistent issue. The best advice anyone had to offer was to print on glossy paper (I had chosen a matte finish) for a 10%-20% boost in brightness. That was useful. I would try that. But that would mean another week or so before the next (single) proof copy arrived. The process was broken. For the time being, I had to deal with it.

I imagined ways it could be better, wrote them up, and posted them to the section of the KDP community forums dedicated to feedback and feature requests.

First things: I’m still new to this but have been in the system since CreateSpace. I know that printing cannot deliver the luminosity and range of colors that you can see on the screen. I recognize that an ideal pipeline would include calibration of the monitor to the printer. I understand the difference between RGB and CMYK but am not versed in the art and science of gamut mapping.

KDP has done an excellent job with my books’ interiors. The covers of my proof copies are invariably MUCH darker than source PDFs and images. The new previewer hints and the darkness to come, but IMHO understates it. The availability of proof copies on demand is a miracle of 21st Century publishing, but the one-week time between requesting a proof copy and having one to evaluate makes an iterative approach to getting the desired cover very, very slow.

Any or all of the following would improve productivity and reduce resource use. Please consider implementing these features for KDP.

COVER PROOF COPIES. Allow the author-publisher to request a printing of just the cover.

FILTERED COVER PROOF GALLERY. Like a cover proof copy, but with multiple miniatures of the cover on a single sheet. One displays the cover as uploaded. The others show the printed results with variations on the cover. RGB vs. CMYK. Selected embedded color profiles (community wisdom is that these are discarded by KDP, so maybe not). Gradations of enhanced saturation and/or brightness. Label each so that the customer can adjust their cover to match the one that looks best to them.

SMARTER COLOR MAPPING. Amazon’s a smart, capable company. Do a better job at translating the customer’s colors to what the printer can deliver. Train a machine learning system to provide customer-satisfying results. Something to keep my spirits from falling when I open the box of proof copies.

GREATER TRANSPARENCY AND BETTER GUIDANCE. Community members have done heroic work in offering workarounds to weaknesses in KDP. They aren’t in a position to solve our problems with this aspect of self-publishing. KDP should tell us up-front how to get the best color fidelity for our book covers. At the very least, it should document which printers to target so that we have a better chance to get things right the first time.

KDP is an important partner in getting Tensile Press books to market. Addressing the issues around cover color fidelity will make it a cherished partner.

Thank you for your attention.
Sean Flynn
Tensile Press

This is a “compliment sandwich” with some “plussing” in the middle. These was no response from the KDP team. Various jaded community members took time out of their days to tell me that it was foolish to expect any improvements to the system. One helpful soul recommended that I send the same message to KDP tech support. I did. The response was a polite email thanking me for my input and assuring me that they would forward the message to the business unit. Time will tell.

With help from the designer and a glossy cover, the second-round proof copy looked great.

I still had two more designs to proof. Swapping in their cover and interior files one after the other would take weeks—possibly months if changes were required—before I would have all three in front of me to compare. I cheated by creating two new books with slightly different titles and KDP-supplied ISBNs. With the files uploaded for each, I ordered both as proof copies. In these cases, the covers and interiors were fine.

Proof of spines

Now there were three real-world copies of Raether’s Enzyme, each a unique embodiment of the story. The fruit of the dance with designers lay on my dining room table. I studied the covers under sunlight, LEDs, and the sky. Magical. Sophisticated. Electric. I paged through them all, weighing how each rendered the general text and played my various formatting games. A favorite emerged. A personal favorite. For a final final test, I met separately with two of my stalwart beta readers and asked for their impressions. Both preferred two of the designs. To my great relief, one of the two was my favorite. My marketing-savvy reader told me that an image should contain one, or at most two messages. He pointed to one of the proof copies and said that it had the most direct message. It was the design I had chosen based on the emotion in its cover and the way the design infused the interior. Sometimes marketing and personal taste converge.

The Bill-ion-aire, and the rest…

Amazon (via KDP) is a big market for independent authors. It is not the only market. I want Raether to available to as wide an audience as possible. Or at least as practical. Alexa will tell you that I’m quite fond of Amazon, but she doesn’t know that I like my local bookstores too and favor them when it comes to new books from my favorite authors. Readers enjoy their books on tablets, phones, laptops, desktops, and eReaders. They check out print books and e-books from their local libraries. Raether’s Enzyme should meet them where they want to read.

The self-publishing ecosystem makes this possible in numerous ways. After research and deliberation, I decided to split my non-Amazon betting by putting the print edition and the e-book into separate channels. Part of this was for eggs-and-baskets reasons. The other was to learn more about these channels for future projects.

Sparking Raether’s Enzyme

IngramSpark, that is. In many ways, IngramSpark is like KDP. Authors upload cover and content files. IngramSpark’s printing arm, Lightning Source, prints copies of the book on demand. KDP is a vertically integrated tentacle of the vast quasi-monopoly that is Amazon, who prints and sells the book. IngramSpark is part of Ingram Content Group, the largest book distributor and wholesaler in the United States. In that role, it is the ally, rather than adversary, of bookstores large and small. Adding your book to Ingram’s catalog makes it visible to your friendly neighborhood bookstore, Barnes & Noble, and your public library.

As in KDP, after your files are uploaded, IngramSpark guides you through setting the price of your book. This was my first real contact with life outside of the Amazon basin. I learned why paperback books cost what they do. To make money, bookstores need a wholesale discount. IngramSpark recommends 55% off the cover price. When I combined the price I had set for the paperback on KDP with the discount and the cost of production, Ingram calculated that my profit would be negative. I would owe for each copy sold. I needed to raise the list price by…a bit. To maintain the goodwill of the non-Amazon universe, my Amazon price would have to rise to match what I needed to charge to make things work with Ingram.

Bookstores very much want to be able to return unsold books for a refund. Margins are small. They need to manage the risk of stocking new authors. I understand and respect that. Tensile Press (which is me) can’t afford to be on the hook for a big return. Or a multitude of little ones. So, at the very real risk of Raether never appearing on a bookstore shelf, I opted out of offering a return policy.

Smashing all the words

The prospect of plugging into all myriad e-book stores daunted me. There are several outlets that will handle the multiplexing for you. I went with Smashwords. It has a good reputation and I have some pleasant memories of working with (what I think is) its founder, Mark Coker, back at Apple in the 1980s. When you upload to Smashwords, there’s little room for shillyshallying.  You’re either in the pipeline for immediate publication, or you’re available for pre-order. I freaked out. I hadn’t set a date in my mind, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t that day. I picked a release date a few weeks in the future. And I found a button on the dashboard to ‘unpublish’ the e-book. I clicked it.

Finger on the trigger

I sat there and asked myself, “If not then, when?” It was 2020. The murder hornets appeared here in Washington in the second act. Chekhov’s Gun required they be used before the curtain fell. Did I want to risk dying in whatever ether, cocaine, and peyote infused madness the 2020 writer’s room had in store without having published one book?

…………………Bang.

The answer was no. I republished on Smashwords with the original release date. I set the release date on IngramSpark. I set the (e-book) release date on KDP. The hammer struck the firing pin. The firing pin hit the primer. The powder began to burn. Raether’s Enzyme was on its way down the barrel and into the world.

Two days later an excited email arrived from one of my beta readers. Raether’s paperback edition was available for preorder on Amazon. After a moment of confusion, I realized that the IngramSpark had pushed the preorder to Amazon. As I write this, I’m working through Amazon’s support network to override that edition with the KDP version. Over the next few days, the e-book preorder surfaced on Apple’s bookstore. Print and e-book on Barnes & Noble. Kobo.

I am committing the quietest, softest, weakest book launch imaginable. I have flouted all the online guru’s advice for building interest. I haven’t sent advanced reader copies to influential book bloggers. I haven’t sought out the online communities where my (potential) audience dwells. I haven’t commissioned reviews to decorate the ad campaign I haven’t even planned. I haven’t raised an army of flying monkeys to trumpet the news to the far corners of Oz. My marketing-fu is rubbish.

Nonetheless, here it goes. There is much left to do before I can at least make an announcement via my limited social media.

Tick-tock. Tick-tock.