Self Publishing Approaches

There are a couple approaches to self publishing, the cheap-ass approach, and the investment approach.

The cheap-ass approach is to just publish on amazon for free with an amazon-specific free ISBN and cheap DIY cover art. This approach cost you nothing, and is well-suited for small run books such as poetry books, personal memoirs and the like. It has a small learning curve and there are tons of resources on the web to help walk you through the process.

One Stream

The fundamental limitation with Amazon-only publishing is that bookstores WILL NOT stock your book. Theoretically it is POSSIBLE for them to order it, but they will only do so as a special order, and even then, maybe only if that particular customer is well-known to the bookstore’s staff. This is because Amazon does not accept returns from bookstores. Bookstores rely heavily on returns. The whole point of a bookstore is that they have stock on hand. Since they don’t know how many of which new books will sell, they’ll order a box of each, and return the ones that don’t sell. If the book printer doesn’t take returns, the bookstore can’t really afford to take the risk of ordering a box.

Now let’s consider the e-book side of things. Amazon sells e-books. But so do other companies; Kobo, & iBooks, to name a couple. Do you want to exclude these other retailers? You just did, if you published on Amazon as they sell for Kindle only.

Multiple Streams

It is possible to diversify your publication outlets. You CAN use both Amazon, and other outlets. Let’s say you decide to publish your e-book on both Amazon, and through some other services. This can work. You can find multiple e-book publishing sites that will allow you to get into the other format and marketplaces. Some of these are free, while some charge a setup fee. Most will provide you a free ISBN or allow you to “bring your own ISBN” (BYOI). We’ll see why that’s important later.

OK so we have a way to work around the Kindle-Only problem, and although it means a lot more work than simply the nice one-stop-shop that Amazon provides, it gives us more distribution options.

Now what about the bookstore issue. Is there a way around that problem? Yes. You can set up your book on Ingram-Spark, which is the primary supplier/printer for all the books that end up on the bookstore shelves. This will allow the bookstores to order your book and give them the all-important Return option. So, essentially, this does solve the problem. BUT it also creates a bit of a mess that at the best-case will cause headaches for the bookstore orderer, and at worse-case may actually give them errors on their ordering system that prevent them from placing the order. This is caused by DUPLICATE ISBNs. When you got that free ISBN from Amazon, that went into the universal bookstore databases, tied to your name and book title. Then, when you got another ISBN from Ingram-Spark (oh by the way, that wasn’t free) this new ISBN was also added into the database, again tied to your name and book title. Oh yeah, also, remember all those other e-book sites you registered on? Some of them also gave you another ISBN and another database entry, so you ended up with somewhere between 3 and 10 ISBN entries for one book. When the bookstore clerk searches for your book, they are going to see a big mess of entries on their screen, which is going to be confusing and just a general pain in the ass for them. If your bookstore clerk is both highly ethical, and adequately caffeinated, they can probably sort this out and get your book ordered for their customer, but they might just say that “it’s not showing up” because, seriously, is the hassle worth the $5 the store will see from the sale?

the Universal ISBN

There is a better way!

All the various companies and services mentioned above will let you Bring Your Own ISBN. You can purchase your own ISBN. This ISBN is owned by you personally, and you essentially allow all the other services to use your ISBN. This solves the giant mess of the duplicate ISBN records. But keep in mind, that it really only solves the problem if it is THE ONLY one for that book. Bringing your own ISBN must be applied at the very beginning of that book’s publishing life cycle. You can’t go back in time to clean up the mess.

Cost Comparison

Let’s look at the costs involved. Amazon is free. Ingram-Spark is not. They charge a setup fee, and fees each time you need to edit the submission. If you are like me, you will want to edit the submission, so you better budget for that.

If you are going to do Ingram-Spark, you might as well do Amazon as well, because it is free and it IS the world’s biggest online retailer, so, from a purely fiscal perspective it would be crazy not to. (I know some people who are boycotting Amazon due to some ethical stance, which is fine) If you are doing both – please for the love of all that’s holy – use a Universal ISBN. Don’t buy it from Ingram-Spark, and don’t use the free one from Amazon, or any of the e-book retailers. Ask us about our Half-Price ISBNs!