Pricing Changes With IngramSpark and KDP, and Their Effect on Indie Authors

The typesetter arranges movable type letters, made of metal or wood and smaller than her pinkie fingernail, on a handheld tray, then locks them into words and lines, rolls them in oil-based ink, and presses them onto paper. So goes the careful choreography that revolutionized book production in the 15th century. Obviously, publishing today looks very different. Since the late 1990s, online platforms and marketplaces have created new avenues for writing, marketing, and building author fan bases. Barriers of entry to indie authors, like limited channels of distribution or high costs of printing, are bygones of a pre-digital era. Now, more than 2 million ISBNs are issued for self-published books every year. Equally many, it often seems, are the number of different online self-publishing platforms from which an author can choose. Still, self-publishing is not without its pains. Publishing platforms across the industry frequently change their pricing options and user policies. Whether you’re a new writer or an established author, keeping track of industry trends and printing cost changes pays.

Keeping Up with Kindle Direct Publishing

True to its corporate origin story as an online bookseller in competition with brick-and-mortar stores, Amazon is, to this day, the highest-volume bookseller in the world. The company has diversified the literary landscape in large part by supporting indie authors. Amazon pays $250 million in royalties to self-published authors each year, and 85 percent of Kindle Unlimited books are self-published. It should come as no surprise, then, that many new writers turn to Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) to publish and market their books. But it is not only new users who need to read up on printing cost fluctuations and other publishing industry developments. Even KDP veterans need to track changes in the book market and Amazon’s response to them.

Starting June 20, 2023, KDP will implement changes to printing costs so that they “better align with today’s cost of materials and labor,” per the KDP website. Costs are changing in three keyways. First is an increase in the fixed cost for all paperbacks. Second is a new cost for paperback and hardcover books with large trim sizes. Third is a decrease in the per-page cost for certain color-ink print books in select marketplaces. While these changes in cost make printing with KDP more expensive across the board, some authors will pay more than others. Size matters. An “oversize” book, which Amazon describes as one with dimensions larger than 9 by 6.12 inches, will cost half a cent more per page plus an additional 15 cents. For a book of that size with 200 pages the printing cost will increase by $1.15–or, in other words, the author’s royalty will decrease by $1.15 per book. For a 200-page book with dimensions smaller than 9 by 6.12 inches, printing costs will only increase by 15 cents per book. This difference can also be explained in terms of royalty decreases. The royalty for an oversize book is estimated to decrease by 10 to 35 percent. The royalty for a regular trim size book is estimated to decrease by only 3 percent. Authors of children’s books, cookbooks, and other large trim books with illustrations or high page counts, stand to see the steepest cost increases and royalty decreases. Meanwhile, the average KDP user, whose book dimensions tend to be either 9 by 6 inches or 5 by 8 inches, and who prints in black and white rather than color, will see minimal cost increases and minimal royalty decreases. To learn how KDP’s pricing changes will impact the printing costs of books with other dimensions and page counts, check the pricing tables on the Amazon KDP website.

Average users who don’t expect to see drastic price changes still need to stay abreast of the new KDP pricing changes. Higher printing costs mean higher list prices. KDP, which offers a fixed royalty rate of 60 percent of a book’s list price, does not require authors to update their existing list prices to reflect printing cost changes. However, veteran indie authors–and even Amazon itself–recommend that authors keep their list prices current with printing costs. The stakes of list price changes can be high, especially when it comes to royalties. For example, if an author doesn’t update her list prices to reflect increased printing costs, and her existing list price turns out to be below the new minimum list price, she won’t receive any royalties. This is because KDP mandates a minimum list price to ensure that the royalties an author earns are always high enough to cover the costs of printing. KDP offers its authors several resources, including a Printing Costs and Royalty Calculator, which has been updated to reflect the June 20 printing cost changes.

Industry Trends and IngramSpark

On the IngramSpark website landing page, a banner celebrating the platform’s tenth anniversary makes a bold announcement: “NO MORE book set up fees!!” IngramSpark, which was founded in 2013, is the online self-publishing platform of Ingram Content Group, an American publishing service provider with offices in the United Kingdom, France, Australia, and the United Arab Emirates. In addition to a strong network of distribution that includes over 39,000 book retailers worldwide, IngramSpark users enjoy a wide range of paper, trim sizes, bindings, hardcover, paperback, and color options. These benefits used to come at a cost of $49 dollars in set-up fees. For many self-publishing writers on the fence between IngramSpark and KDP, this “title-setup” fee once proved expensive enough to push them over to KDP. With the recent elimination of book set-up fees, however, IngramSpark might well see a spike in new users. If you’re trying IngramSpark for the first time, it is important to have a basic understanding of IngramSpark’s user and price change policies, as well as knowledge about how the platform itself responds to supply and demand fluctuations in the publishing industry. In the past few years, IngramSpark veterans have observed several user policy and price changes of note.

Like other publishing companies, IngramSpark is not immune to market fluctuations. Higher shipping and printing costs coupled with an increase in consumer preference for online shopping and digital content, contributed to a 10-12 percent increase in paper prices in 2021. In the same year, the Independent Book Publishers Association received notice from IngramSpark forewarning increases in print pricing due to uncertainty in the global supply chain. Print prices in the U.S. market went on to increase by 6 percent, and in the U.K. and Australian markets by 3 percent. More recently, pricing with IngramSpark has increased through flat rate shipping fees for US addresses as well as through what the company calls a new “market access fee.” The shipping fee is $2.99 per order plus 50 cents per unit. The market access fee, which is charged for every print book sale, amounts to 1 percent of the book’s list price. At first blush, it seems to be a small change. The royalty for a book sold at $20 dollars decreases by 20 cents, as noted by the IngramSpark website. The average print run of a book in the United States is small–only 2,000 to 3,000 copies. But for IngramSpark users who sell more, the new market access fee could prove costly.

Choosing the Best Platform for You

Several publishing industry trends are poised to affect print costs and self-publishing platform pricing. One crucial market development is emerging monetary incentives for publishers across the industry to adopt carbon-neutral printing models, where printing causes a net-zero release of carbon dioxide into the air. A popular way for publishers to achieve carbon neutrality is the use of post-consumer waste (PCW) or recycled paper. PCW is currently costly, especially for small print runs. But an increased demand for recycled paper is poised to drive costs down. Shawn Morin, the CEO of Ingram Content Group since 2016, currently sits on the board of directors at element6 Dynamics, an AgTech company that has developed sustainable alternatives to tree-based pulp for paper production. Tracking industry-wide changes like the move toward sustainable printing will put you in a good position to choose the best publishing platform for your book.

In the end, however, we can only predict how industry changes will impact the costs of self-publishing platforms like KDP and IngramSpark over time. It might well be the case that KDP maximizes your book marketing and profits one year and IngramSpark the next. As a result, many indie authors use a combination of different self-publishing platforms and marketplaces to avoid a situation where price hikes on one platform force them to scale back their print run. For example, authors who use IngramSpark to distribute to Amazon can earn 50 cents more per sale than authors who both publish and distribute with KDP. A book listed at $14.99 and sold at a discount (in this example, 30 percent for IngramSpark, which lets authors set their own discount rates, and a fixed 40 percent for Amazon) yields a royalty of $5.29 on IngramSpark $4.79 on Amazon.

Be an Authorpreneur

Exactly when “authorpreneur” entered the publishing industry parlance, no one can be certain. But the term, a sure spoil of digital publishing, is here to stay. The basic idea is this: today’s writers must think and act like businessmen, and today’s authors like entrepreneurs. Famously, the business instinct comes more easily to some writers than others. Emily Dickinson never sold a single poem during her lifetime. Charles Dickens, meanwhile, was paid by the word (and to many critics, his prose shows it). Even if you’re more of a Dickinson than a Dickens–at least when it comes to business and marketing–it is crucial to stay on top of pricing changes and industry trends.

Keep in touch with other writers, your local literary community, and blogs like this one to successfully navigate your self-publishing journey.