Learn How to Self-Publish Your Book with IngramSpark

1. Learn How to Self Publish With IngramSpark: Hello and welcome. My name is Romney Nelson, and thank you very much for joining this course about how to self-publish with Ingram Spark. Now, my journey, I used to be a school teacher. Then I'll became an executive with several businesses before beginning my self-publishing journey. From that point of now created several bestselling books and also several bestselling courses about self-publishing. Now, the Ingram Spark platform is a fantastic way to have global distribution for your book. If you're looking at becoming an author, then this course will show you everything you need to know about how to use the platform of Ingram Spark and to get your book into global distribution partners across the world. Now, I'm going to go over a few of the contents of this course because I know it'll cover everything you need. And then we'll finish with a few minor details before we get into our first lesson. So let's get into the content of the course right now. This course has four key areas that we're going to be covering. Let me go over those right now. Number one is the introduction. So we'll go through an introduction to Ingram spark, my journey with Ingram and how that has changed my self publishing. Creating an account to make sure you set up ready to go. Then the next step is the important considerations. So the title and the setup process and the associated fees by using Ingram spark. The key differences between in-group and for example, Amazon, kVp, the types of books that are permitted to be uploaded to Ingram, the book printing options, you have all the compensation and the payments and when to expect those. Section number three, which has ten lessons, will include using the templates and the calculators that are provided by Ingram spark, the types of prints, interior options available, creating paperback and hardback covers. The upload process, I'll step exactly through what you need to do, sitting a pricing and what they call the wholesale discount pricing. So that's something that you'll need to look at and discover the section number for support and resources where to get help from Ingram, additional access to resources for your support, and then book promotion within Ingram. I really do hope you enjoy this course about publishing with Ingram Spark. So without any further delay, let's get into lesson number one. 2. An Introduction to IngramSpark: Welcome to lesson number one. In this lesson, I want to cover off a few key features about Ingram Spark and how that's going to impact your publishing by using this platform. So let's get into that now. So this is the main site for Ingram spark. It is simply Ingram spark.com. But instead of going over the whole website, we'll be covering off many different elements to this website and why that can help you throughout the course and throughout the lessons. But let me go to a few key summary points for you that will highlight what Ingram Spark can do to help you be a self publisher. So Ingram Spark can connect your book to over 40 thousand libraries and retails in-person and online world wide. With the online platform, there is approximately 70 to 80 different online platforms that they distribute to, but we'll cover that off more in the course. They print and sell locally and globally. All the compensation is paid for every style depending on what your synergies they allocate. And what we'll do is cover that off in that particular list that about pricing a book and about condensation in green can track all yourselves for your Ingram dashboard. They offer a print on-demand service, which is amazing. So print on-demand means that your books are no longer sitting there inboxes. As soon as an order goes in, that book is printed, you don't need to wait for ten books to be ordered. If one book is ordered on one day, that will be then printed on that day or the next day, and then it will be organized to be distributed out. Ingram offers paperbacks, hard backs, and e-books, and in a wide variety of choices and trim sizes. So it really is a wonderful way to be able to get everything you need to give it in the one place for a self-publish are many different features that I'll be talking further through throughout the course. But these are just a few highlighted elements of Ingram spark that I wanted to bring to your attention before we progress any further. 3. My IngramSpark Journey: This lesson, I wanted to give you a bit of background about my Ingram spark journey today. I convinced with Ingram spark in December 2019. Thing is maybe one book that I got published or put onto Ingram spark at that point in time. And since then, I have really accelerated my self-publishing. And I have got well over 50 books now on Ingram spark that are generating thousands of dollars per month for me in reoccurring revenue. Now, it's a wonderful platform to be able to generate passive income. And you'll see throughout the course again different ways that I've been structuring my publishing to allow that to happen. Now, creating income may not be your sole purpose. It might be a component of your self-publishing, but it may not be the thing that is driving you. What might be driving you is becoming an author, becoming a self publisher, being able to create the resources that allows you to spread the information and knowledge and even your inspirations out into the world. So what I'm gonna do now is show you a little bit of a snapshot of my journey with Ingram Spark because I think it'll actually be helpful and also hopefully but inspiring to see what can actually be done even after a short period of time of approximately two to 2.5 years. So let me go to the first slide, show that information and then I might even go into my dashboard, show you a little bit of information there so you can actually see how things have progressed for me since I've been publishing with Ingram Spock. And this is just a quick snapshot and summary of the publication data that I've got four Ingram Spark, as you can see, in 2019, I only had four books that were sold in 2020, nearly closing on five thousand two thousand, twenty one, over 7,600 books. And so far in 2022, which is currently May the data with 1796, I've also had digital books which have increased so over, all over the whole year of two thousand, twenty one hundred and twenty eight books that were sold this year. So far already have had 52. So in total, 14,470 book sales with Ingram. And you can see how Book Numbers can fluctuate a little bit. You do have some down months. You do have some increasing months. The time of filming right now, it's only the early part of June, so it's still plenty of time to generate lots of books sales for this month. And if you have a look at this data just down here as well, January 470, book sales, February 345, even April 361. That gives you quick snapshot. Let me jump onto my dashboard and show you some other key things that we can also discuss further in the course. As you can see here, my net sales so far have been over $100 thousand in book sales. So I do know how to use his platform effectively, generating good passive income. And that amount is only growing, which is great. And you can see the net publishing compensation to the far right. And that's what I receive as an author. When you publish with Ingram Spark and he's selling the number of books that I am. Certainly want to increase that. But it's a really good start for the last couple of years that I've been publishing with Ingram is just a good snapshot to show you a summary of where I'm currently positioned with Ingram Spark and why you should really trust the information that I'm sharing with you. Because I've got the proven results to demonstrate that or know how to successfully published with Ingram Spark and to get my books for global distribution. 4. IngramSpark Revenue Update DEC 2023: Hello and welcome to this updated lesson. I just wanted to let you know what is actually possible during my journey with Ingram Spark. From this point from December 2023. Since I crowded the course, the revenues continue to increase and so this is the year to date revenue and Australian dollars from Ingram Spark. So it's closing on 20,000 Australian dollars. And the overall period of time, if you look at the lifetime, it's nearly 75,000 Australian dollars. That's in author royalties. The actual net sales that I've completed has been nearly $180,000 It's been quite an incredible journey. I just wanted to provide this update for you to give you inspiration about what is possible with Ingram Spark. Hopefully, this helps gives you motivation to create those books and to load them onto Ingram Spark. 5. How to Create an IngramSpark Account: There are plenty of features you can access with Ingram spark.com before having to create an account. But once you decide that you're ready to create and publish books with Ingram Spark and upload them. You will need to create an account. Now your account will allow you to gain access to the Ingram spark dashboard along with receiving payments. Now you will need to access that by going to the link, which is linked up just above. But I'm also going to jump on the website in a moment and show you where you need to do that. But you'll need to be well-prepared and advise you or I advise you to make sure that you have everything ready, including your tax information. For example, if you're in the United States, your tin, if you're in Australia, your texts, phone number, or details that will allow you to publish. Now in Australia, for example, you might need to get an ABN or a business number. And that's something you'll need to apply for, which is free of charge through the Australian Taxation department. In America, they might be a couple of subtle differences, but when you go and create your account, it is quite straightforward. So let me show you where you need to go on the website to create your account. When you go to the Ingram Spark website, which is Ingram spark.com, what you need to do is go across to the top here where it says create an account. Click there. And then you can start filling in the details. And that will then progress you through. What you need to do is push Create Account. And then that's the point we need to fill in. Address details your texts inflammation, and that will allow you to establish your account. You'll also receive a special ID number or customer reference somebody, and that can be used when you are having communication through to Ingram Spark as well, because I usually require this number if you make a certain inquiry about your account and you need them to investigate something, that's where you need to go to set up an account. It's quite easy to establish. Just make sure you're well prepared before you get onto the platform where your tax information so you can enter that when you go through it. 6. Book Distribution Reach of Ingram Content Group: Welcome to this new lesson. It's important we talk about the huge ability to be able to distribute your book across the globe using Ingram Spark. It's an amazing way to be able to get your book into the hands of more customers. So let's have a bit of a deeper dive into the distribution opportunities available with Ingram. Now you must remember that Ingram Spark isn't like a traditional publisher. They won't be representing you as a publisher. But what they do allow you to do is create your books and upload them to their platform, which gives you access over 40 thousand different ways to connect your books to the customer. And that's through libraries and retailers, in-person and online across the world. So they act as a middleman. I guess you'd say. You create the books, you upload them to the platform. Ingram will then give you the opportunity of being able to print off your books, but also had them as print on-demand, available to schools, to universities, to library's, book and mortar stores and online platforms. Who can then purchase your book through print on-demand and have it delivered directly to their door. So that's the massive advantage Ingram has across the whole publishing network can pay too many, many others. So it's a wonderful platform to be part of. Here. I'm going to highlight some key features. So indie authors will have access to one of the publishing industry's largest global print, an e-book distribution networks in the world. The next biggest would be Amazon API. But there are quantify things where Ingram spark or what they offer is quite different to Amazon KP, and I'll cover that in a future lesson with Ingram is print on-demand service retaliate order of physical title through Ingram. The order prints ships and arise to the customer, store or a library within a few days. Ingram Spark makes distribution for so publishers even more expansive by granting access to incomes global, online and printed distribution partners. They're located in the United States and Canada, United Kingdom, and Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. And is further distribution channels that have been created, such as in India as well. So that's important to know and gives you a clear understanding of the power that Ingram Spark has for the distribution of your books. 7. Title Set-Up Fees and Considerations: Welcome to the lesson. This lesson, I want to cover the different fees and associated costs with using Ingram spark. Unlike Amazon K P, the E is an actual charge for you to upload your books to Ingram Spark. Now, we'll go onto the website in a moment and show you. But basically it's $49 for print in a book, or print book only is also $49 and an e-book is twenty-five dollars. Now, the way you need to consider this payment is that it will give you global distribution and you need to think about it as an investment. Now there's charges for your upload, but there's also a charge that you need to consider for your ISBN and that will be a future lesson that I'll talk about soon. But let's jump onto the website because I want to show you what these costs are and how they are going to impact your book when you upload it to Ingram. Before we go to the website, when you get through to the end stage of your title setup, you'll come to a page that says Order Summary. And there'll be the cover set up, which is just over here, and the digital book block set up which is here. So in total $49 US. So make sure that you know, that is in US dollars. But there is a code that you can apply to get a discount. That will be my next lesson because there is a work around to get a free upload code. Back in two thousand twenty two thousand twenty one. There were times that they were promoting free upload codes and on occasions I still do that, which saves you 49 volts. It may be limited though, the number of books you can upload. So let me show you the website and the new title setup and what the associated costs for creating your books and titles for Ingram spark at the time of filming in 2022, these were the costs. So it's got the best value, $49 for both your printed in a book. Remember, you've got global distribution of over 40 thousand retailers and libraries. You've got availability to Amazon, Apple, cowbell, and Barnes and Noble. You can also view your reporting via the online dashboard. And you can see it all from that single dashboard. If also got just print. If you don't have the e-book, we can just do the print by itself. But it will cost you the same amount. If you're wanting to do a paperback or hardback, then will be $49 each time. It was a book alone, $25. Now the other charge you need to be aware of once you publish your book, if you want to make a change to their book, but a new cover, then there is an additional charge that you will be Ingram will charge you to make those changes. And for a book cover, for example, it will be a charge of twenty-five dollars US to change your cover or if you want to change your manuscript, again, there's an upload fee, twenty-five dollars. So you just need to be very careful when you do upload your books to Ingram spark that you're very confident that what you're uploading is what you're going to keep. Again, that's the difference with Ingram Spark and another platform such as Amazon, kVp. Amazon permits you to make as many adjustments as often as you like, free of charge. That is important to understand the pricing structures for any changes or uploading for that platform. 8. Title Upload Fees - IngramSpark - Update May 2023: Welcome to this new lesson about fees and pricing associated with publishing with Ingram Spark. As of the 1st of May 2023, the $49 upload fee has now been wavered. Previously, it did cost you $49 to upload a printed in a book, print book only, and $25 for an e-book. So this is fantastic news for those that might already have a book on Amazon paid API, but have been reluctant to upload the book to Ingram due to the $49. Now remember, you also need to purchase your ISBN, which we'll be covering off in a later lesson. However, you do now have the opportunity of uploading for free and use is fantastic news. One thing for consideration though, what do you do need to keep in mind that if you wanted to make a change to your manuscript, then you still need to pay a fee of $25. If after the first 60 days you make a change up until the first 60 days, you can then do a change for free, but once that time elapses, you'll then be charged the $25. So great news for Ingram, spark publishers or those that have previously been ingrown on Ingram and had to pay the 49 $9 fee that is now wired. So great news from the 1st of May 2023, or uploads will be free. 9. ISBN's - What You Should Know: Welcome to this lesson about what you should know about ISBN. So let me cover some information because it is important to have a good understanding of what an ISBN is, how it impacts you had a get an ISBN and the cost associated with them as well. So what is an ISBN? The unique ISBN is a nine digit number assigned to every published book. So you can see on the top right-hand side here, this is the ISBN which would sit at the back of the book. It's an international identifier for books. So that's why you need an ISBN. The barcode holds the vital information about the book, and this includes the title, the language, the edition, publisher, and technical aspects of the book. In the United States, you can get ISBN through BellKor.com. In Australia. You can get in through Thorpe, a BellKor in the United Kingdom, being getting through Nielsen in Canada, you can actually get ISP DNS for free. But let's have a look at a few other things to consider about an ISBN. Now I apologize for the writing. There's quite a bit here, but I needed to include these so you get a comprehensive view of why you need an ISBN for your title. So an ISBN improves the likelihood your book will be found and purchased. An ISBN links to essentially information in your book as well. And most retailers require your ISP and so they can link it on their catalog. Or the ISBN conveys no legal or copyright protection. So just know that you do need an ISBN in some countries, by law. In some countries, a book will be charged a higher tax if it does not have an ISBN. Isbn is the global standard for book identification. So how many ISBN is do you actually need? Well, you'll need one for each edition of your book. So paperback, hardback. We don't always need them for e-books, but I would encourage you to do that. The ISBN identify as a publisher as well as the specific book title, edition, and format. What do they cost? So they can be as high as 125 US dollars per ISBN, but they are much cheaper when purchasing bulk. You can actually purchase your ISP DNS through your Ingram account, through your dashboard. But I've personally gone through Thorpe BellKor in Australia to purchase mine. But ensure that you only purchase your ISP in through an official ISBN agency in your respective country. So I did purchase a bulk amount and it saved me around about 60 to 70% based on my purchase of a 100 ISBN. Now I'm still working through those ISBN. I've got a lot of them there. But I just now over the long term, even if it takes me two to three years, then I'll be able to use them up and they don't expire. So it can be a huge saving from a 125 US dollars per ISBN to around about $5.75 if you buy them in bulk. So Ingram do offer free ISBN United States residents when uploading. So you can find out more by visiting www dot Ingram spark.com, forward slash free dash ISBN. So just regarding the free ISBN is for US residents, there'll be an imprinted listed as in the pub. I won't have your own publishing name there. Any title with a free ISBN must be placed in the wholesale distribution program and it can't be transferred to another account. It can't be used on other platforms like ADP or blurb or book baby, et cetera. And you can have a look for other information if you visit the Ingram Spark website about free ISBN. And remember some primary codes can be used in conjunction with a free ISBN. So that's another consideration as well. If you're using the free ISBN rather than purchasing your own. As I said, I purchase my own. I bought them in bulk or bought them maybe two years ago. And I'm still working through that batch of a 100 ISBN. Still got a long way to go. But it saved me a significant amount of money by buying them all in bulk at one time. 10. Key Differences between IngramSpark and Amazon KDP: Welcome to this important lesson because I want to outline the differences between Ingram Spark and Amazon, TDAP or Kindle Direct Publishing. Now I know both of these platforms extremely well. I've also created a course about Amazon API, which is a best seller. So I want to highlight the differences, the key differences, so you can make an informed decision about what platform might be best for you. Now, yes, you can publish your books on both platforms. You don't have to have your book exclusively to one or the other. Now, I can cover off how to publish your books on both platforms in another lesson. But for now, let me just provide an outline or those key differences. So you've got the full knowledge of what the differences are between both Ingram Spark and Amazon kVp. Both Ingram Spark and Amazon kVp both print and distributed globally. They both pay author compensation for books sold, and both offer what we call print on-demand or P, O D. Let me cover off some of the key elements to Ingram Spark. Then I'll talk about Amazon API. So Ingram spark, unfortunately at this point in time, don't offer a direct marketing platform to advertise your books. They do have a marketing booklet, a booklet that goes out to libraries and institutions across the world. But I'm still torn to decide whether that's something that I want to pursue. I haven't actually seen great evidence to suggest that that really boosts my book sales, but I'll talk about that more in a future lesson. Ingram spark permits her backs with this load is 30 pages, so it's a great platform to be able to put your head back onto. Ingram Spark allows you to set a wholesale price, discount or discounts for libraries or brick-and-mortar bookstores. So that gives you some control over those discounts. Again, that's as part of a future lesson for our pricing of their books. Ingram spark, from my experience, provides a better printing with a quality of books, particularly those with images. So that's an advantage. Ingram Spark requires you to purchase an ISBN and they are Upload and title revision fee. So $49 per upload in twenty-five dollars per revision. So that is a key difference between Ingram spark and Amazon API. However, that could also be seen as an advantage. And I think the advantage is that it's going to have less competition. And there's a bit more of a barrier to entry. And as a long-term proposition for my business, I liked the fact that I'm investing on putting everything into my books. Therefore on competent, they'll sell and I'm happy to pay the $49 per upload. But remember, you can bypass that upload with a membership with LI, which I've mentioned in a previous lesson regarding our spins and uploads. The next thing is Ingram spark offers such a diverse global distribution network and all feel far greater than Amazon kVp, and it connects your books, as we've mentioned, to over 40 thousand libraries and retailers in-person and online worldwide. These offers fantastic diversity vacation for your book sales. Finally, Ingram do have their catalog Integrity Unit and they are strict with the tops of books that are permitted. Again, I see this as a great positive for the platform. I've seen in more recent times the number of books that are uploaded to ADP because of the lack of buried entry, because they are free to upload. There are a lot of very low quality books that are uploaded and lots of bulk uploading going on that can infect cause a bad customer experience as well and are found. So there's some key points from Ingram Spock, let's look at Amazon API. So they do have a free title setup and free revisions. If you have a changing cover or changing manuscript for Amazon, you can do that for free, whereas Ingram equal to pay a $25 fee. So that's an important element to make sure we get you cava and your manuscript to rot the first time round. Really triple check it before you upload it. Amazon carry pay off as a marketing platform called Amazon ads. It's based on a bead per keyword platform. But in saying that they offer the marketing platform, we can get very, very expensive. I've found that actually you have to do very little marketing and advertising over the long term with Ingram and our continued to get a really good passive income from it. So a lot that fact about Ingram spark, Amazon Kennedy offers a free ISBN for most books. They don't offer it now for no content books, but Ingram spark don't permit no content books anyway. Some of the low content books, Amazon can sell your books across more than 12 countries. Amazon offers a 6040 royalty or the compensation split after it's printing costs. Amazon pay off our backs, but it's limited to only five trim sizes currently, and it must be either 75 pages, whereas Ingram offer a great variety of hardback cover sizes or trim sizes that you can choose from. Amazon has a very small barrier to entry. Therefore, the competition is significantly higher. Again, that's what I like about Ingram Spark. And Ingram had a PE, have quite a loose policy and the tops of books that b can be uploaded, pretty much anything goes with Amazon API. I do like the fact that there, there's a much stricter review of the book's going onto the or through Ingram spark. And that provides a better experience for everyone. I think. I think over time, Amazon kVp will start to get a lot stricter with that. So there's some pros and cons across both platforms. I do love Ingram Spark because of the greater barrier to entry, because of the 40 thousand strong distribution network that it connects your books too. I do like the fact that you can publish your heart x with 3030 pages or less, or more than 30 pages. If you have a book of that size. There are a few really good positives. And even Ingram spark happened to increase the opportunity for marketing and advertising. That could be another great benefit. So there are a few other points that I wanted to highlight for you. I hope you found those of interest and we'll help you with your decision to publish through Ingram spark. 11. The Types of Books Permitted - Ingram Catalog Integrity Unit: This is a lesson that you'll need to pay particular attention to because it may impact your choice of whether Ingram spark will be wrought through your publishing. Now there are types of books that are only permitted by Ingram spark, Amazon, kVp do permeate many, many different sorts of books and they have very low barrier to entry. But England Spark is a catalog integrity unit that checks to ensure your books meet the minimum requirements for their titles. So you need to ensure your book meets requirements before purchasing an ISBN and spending money on the Upload fee. For example, no content books and not permitted. Some, but not all forms of light quantum books are permitted. So let's have a look at the ones down here. So a primary composition notebook for kids would not be permitted. A long form book, such as a 30 thousand word book, work, the habits, which would be per minute oriented, the beach adventure, which is a children's picture storybooks, would be permitted, and the camping Explorer, which is a journal full of maps and information and has a lot of information in value in it would be considered as being suitable. But if this was a blank journal, then know the answer that Ingram spark would give you is it doesn't meet their catalog integrity specifications. But let's have a look a bit further at the communication that they're released in 2020 to try and clean up Amazon, to clean up Ingram Spark. So didn't become like Amazon kVp with so many load caudal quality books that are just clogging up the system. So there's a couple of blog posts that Ingram spark have provided. These are the two on the left-hand side that I would definitely recommend that you look into. Now if you just wrote catalog integrity guidelines into Google, you will find it. Now let's have a look here. In regards to the catalog integrity guidelines. Summaries, workbooks, abbreviations are simultaneous contact without permission from the original author and not permitted. Content containing material, amounts of blank pages like notepads, scratch books, journals, or simul top, and not permitted. Content that mirrors particular titles, including without limiting similarly covers, cover design title, the names are not permitted. Content that is misleading or likely cause confusion by the buyer. Including without limiting, inaccurate descriptions and cover art is not permitted. Content listed as price is not reflective of the books market value. So if you're trying to overcharge for a book that is not permitted part of it, contents scan from the original version is not permitted. Content creator using automatic, automated means or mass-produced processes. So looking at repeating the same manuscript over and over and using upload, bulk upload processes. Content that is duplicated across titles in the same format in multiple sizes. So if you had the one book, use the same interior and the same covered, but just try to amend the different colors sizes is not permitted. Other information here is public domain content may be free to use by anyone or maybe lost since for use by more than one party. Now, I'll let you read through the rest, 0.9.10. But it gives you a very good idea about what you can and what you cannot upload to Ingram spark. As I've mentioned, it is so important to check this before you publish the Ingram Spark and before you pay an upload fee or an ISBN fee. Because if you, your book gets rejected, you won't get a refund for that. So it could be worth making some further inquiries to Ingram spark to the customer team if he just not quite sure whether the book you're thinking about creating will meet the catalog integrity unit. That wasn't important lesson. Please consider those elements that are contained here. And therefore, you have a much clearer idea about what's acceptable and what's not. 12. Book Trim Size and Printing Type Options: So in this lesson, I want to talk about the different trim size options that you have. Now, trim size, you could think about it as your book cover size. So the trim size will determine the size of your manuscript as well. Now there are lots of different options for your hardback paperback and a book using Ingram spark. In fact, there's a roundabout 25 different paperback options. You've got approximately 20 hardback options that you can choose from. So there's really a size for every body that you can use. Now what we need to do is to go through some further details about what trim sizes are available. And I'll be referring to the Ingram Spark website, which also goes through the different trim sizes and the different printing options that you have when you do publish with Ingram spark. Some just on the Ingram Spark website at the moment. And this provides a great deal of information about your binding and pipe options. So we're looking at different paper thicknesses, scored a GSM. And you can either have it in cream or white. You can have thicker paper as well, depending on if it's illustrated book or whether it's a plane region book. If also got color printing or black and white, you've got your hardcover or your paper back. Many, many books, trim sizes. So we'll cover that soon. And remember, it is what they call print on-demand, so they never out of stock. They can also help with your shipping worldwide. And there's no need to store unsold copies as well. So let's have a little bit more of a look at the different trim sizes that we have a viable plus some other information. So what I've decided to do is provide you with three examples of different books sizes that I have. The five by eight typically is what I use for my longer-form books. Say 30 thousand were books. So magnetic goals as a fire by eight, Sam and Ted visit the doctor isn't a 0.5 by 8.5, so fairly big, but it suits the audience. And I've also had premium color for this book. And then we've got my mom's mom's life journal, which is 8.5 by 11. And that's because there are sections where the mother would be filling in details, so I needed to make it a bit bigger so it was easier to include photos and things like that as well. Now what we'll do is have a look at the different trim sizes that are available, both in hardback paperback. So let's jump into that now. And with the help of the Ingram Spark website, I'll be able to show you all of those different trims, ours that are available. So firstly, let's look at the ink qualities that are provided with Ingram Spark. So you have the black and white printing. It's the most economical and that's printed on the five ounce 74 GSM paper in cream or white. You got the standard color printing. So they also do premium. You can choose what he's going to be best for you. Depending on if you have illustrations, photographs, paintings, anything about that? We're inside your book, paper, color, and whites. So you've got different weights of buyable depending on the different kinds of paper that you might wish to choose. I tend to choose a crane paper for my longer-form books, but a white paper for my shorter form books. Let's go down further to the book trim sizes that are available. So these are the paperback. So you can see how it actually goes to be quiet small, four by six inch. But collectively, how many would there be? 123456789. There's a roundabout 30 roughly 30 different trims sizes they have available for paperback books. Then you can also look at hardcover books is a few lists in the hardcovers, but they do cover many of the popular size last 6.6 by 97 by ten. I do my kid's book in an 8.5 by 8.5. And you've also got the size that you might have for larger journals. So that's 8.5 by 11. So you can see there's plenty of different options there. Stem color books there, the options you have, and also the premium color books. They are the options you have available there. So I'll leave the link for this in the assignment document that you'll receive for this course. And that'll cover off all of these different sizes that you can actually use and referred to before you start creating your book so you know what sizes they permit. So you can see there's some different information here that will go through later about how much does it cost to print a book? And we'll use a calculator and I'll show you how to use that so you know what it's going to cost the four Ingram. And then we can also work out our royalties as part of that calculation. So that wraps up the different kinds of book trim sizes. And remember the trim size is your book cover size, front and back. But it also dictates the page sizes within your book. If you got if you've got a six by nine inch book, then your cover, your front, and your back will be a six by nine. Your internal manuscript pages will also be six by nine. So hopefully that helps regarding the different options are available for Ingram spark in your pipe back, your hard back, and we'll discuss eBooks later. Of course, there's only, there's not going to be really much choice in regards to ebooks. But you can have lots of choices for your paper back and your hardcover depending on what color you will. So one of the, if you want to do standard or premium. 13. Getting Paid and Author Compensation : Welcome to the lesson about compensation and being paid by Ingram Spark. Well, this is an important one for most of us because we want to know when we're going to get paid and how we get paid. Now there's a few things that people need to be aware of are getting paid by Ingram Spark. So let me just go into an example right now to help you get an understanding of how that occurs. When you first created your account with Ingram spark, you would have included details such as your residents, your tax information, your bank account information, and other details that would allow Ingram spark to pay you. Now payment terms of Ingram spark form part of a 90 day cycle from when you had your book sales to when you actually get paid. Now let me try and clarify for you how that process works. So it's a bit clearer because some people think that if they sell a book in January, that at the end of January they should get paid, but is actually a 90-day process for that to occur. Let me give you an example right now. So let me talk through a book called job launch that I've got. So the publisher competency, she's paid within 90 days from the report date following the end of the month. What does that mean? Okay. So thread January, as an example, ten books of job launch was sold. My author compensation totaled $30.45. Now, that was based on what my book prices and then there's printing costs. But overall, the compensation that I would receive after all those costs are taken out, He's a royalty of $30.45. Therefore, the payment of $30.45 would be received at the end of April, the approximately the 20th of the month. So it's a roundabout, the 28th for 30th of the month. Sometimes it's a little bit earlier. So therefore, from January the 31st, I sold ten books in the month. But because Ingram Park spark of pay 90 days after that period, that would start from the first of February, therefore is the conclusion of April. The $30.45 is paid. So that's where a bit of confusion. Sometimes laws, people have sold books, then they're not sure where their payment is. Well, it's because you have to wait 90 days from the end of the month when you sold your books for that payment cycle to start and you get paid at the conclusion of that 90 days. So hopefully that clarifies that a little bit more for those of you that have been using Ingram spark, or for those that are looking at using Ingram Spark because the problem is, you first start your books. You sell a few books, but then you have to wait. Lucky few started your books in January. You'd have to wait till the conclusion of April before you actually receive that initial payment. Now because I've been we think room for wall because I'm getting paid now. I'll get a payment every month just because it's cycles caught up with itself. So I get a payment every month, but I'm still having to wait that 90 days from the end of that cycle to get paid, if that makes sense. This is just a snapshot of my compensation on my dashboard for a month. So it's an Australian dollars. If I received compensation that would show on the dashboard. I'm going to go through the dashboard a little bit more in detail in a future lesson. But once the amount, once you find out how much you've been paid or the compensation for the month, you'll receive an e-mail that will say that you've received $30.45 for the month of January, but the payment won't be received until April of that year. You'll receive the email just like this, that will tell you how much you're getting paid for each of the respective countries, all the printing location. So I get payments from the United States, from the UK and great British pound. And also I get paid in Australian dollars from the Australian part of Ingram Spark. So I should receive three different payments at the end of the month or the end of that 90 day period if as long as my books sell in those locations. But I will go into more detail about the dashboard and how that works. But just know that you get paid 90 days at the conclusion of your selling period of those books, you receive an email at the end of the month to tell you how many books you've sold across each of the respective areas. And you also receive an e-mail that will tell you how much you've been paid, um, for that particular month, near the end of the month, it's usually we say that email around a bit the 23rd, 24th of the month, saying that you can expect to receive your payment of fiddles 45, for example, in the next few days. And that will arrive directly into your bank account. 14. The IngramSpark Dashboard: Welcome to this lesson. I want to cover the Ingram spark dashboard. Now, Ingram is recently made some changes to the dashboard and there will be some slight changes going forward regarding the reporting. There's a traditional form of reporting which I'll show you that that will be phased out at the end of 2022. There's still some changes that are likely to happen. But for now, this is the dashboard. And I'll get onto my dashboard and show you a few key features. So let me sign in right now. So to begin with, I go to the login page. Credentials and details are in and are simply login. Then the dashboard will show just some key highlights of the last 30 days and different units that modest soldier in that last 30 days. Now what we're gonna do now is click on titles. So if we click here, this will then take us to the page where it contains all of our information from all the books that we might have uploaded. Now if you're new to Ingram Spark, then you might not have any information here at all. But if you have published a few books through Ingram Spark before, then your titles will be sitting here. And you can actually do a sort. If you click just on these big just here, you can actually do a sort based on the title, author, the status, the ISBN format, so you can do different searches. So if I went just here and I did have it switch, then it will bring up the two forms of the habits which I've got my case, lemonade, MR. perfect bound book. Now I can also go in here and I can change details around. This book has already been published. Then I can place an order. I can do an author order. And so that would be clicking here. And then that would take me a page to a page where I can then enter different details. So I'll just click off this and it's got my address details are returned to or ship to. Then I've also got the location where it's going to be located too. So I can do the US, UK, or Australia. Then it's got the different economy types, how many I wanted to do. And it's also got the number of orders as well and how much it's going to be. So you can order different books via this tab. You can also do it via orders right here on the left-hand side. So let's go back again. And if I just wanted to go to the perfect bound is what we call a paper bag. If I want to go and click here, I can actually edit the title as well. We vars file so I can upload new file types if I wanted to upload and change the color, or I wanted to change the manuscript, you click here and you would upload a new file. Now I won't do this because there is a charge of $25 each time I change the manuscripts or I changed the cover. But you can do it there. You can do, you can place the AutoCAD before but Edit title. So if we go to Edit title, this will bring up the information about the habits which I've got the print information here, but initially I've got my print detail. So I've got my details here. I've got my biography, and I've got the subject title, the subject tops. And then I've also got the description of it. And then I've got all the different bits and pieces that I need to include, including reviews that might have happened as well. So if I scroll all the way back up here and I go to print information, I can then see the different sizes. So this is a 5.25 by eight trim size. It's got the black and white cream, a 194 pages. It's got my ISBN and the card number. It's got the spine width and the white. Then if I go down here, it's got the pricing. So at the moment, these are the details that I've got set. Now, I'll go through pricing in another lesson. And I'll outline why there's a 55% discount and why I've got it set to return yes, Destroy. And the compensation is here for each book there are cell. You've also got any promo codes that might have been used at that point in time. And the release date as well. You can change the printer pricing. So for all wanted to change this out, go Edit. And if your price, a piece on your cover fall a chart, sorry, change in price may also be required to revise the kebab. I understand that. I don't have a price on my cover. So I'll scroll down and you can click on the effective dates. So I'm gonna do the seventh, eighth so far Changes to $6.16 dollars. Ninety nine. Let's do these two four-day 99 changes to 9999. And let's make our logics. We keep this aside. As the US, the United States, then it will highlight it in yellow. All the changes. I will go through this in more detail later about our pricing options. But you can see the compensation that is here. Now, Canada doesn't appear. But the because the printing is done in the United States, however, I always match it pretty similar to Australia. There is a little bit of a difference in the currency price conversion, but it's not too different for me to give a bit of an idea. So I tend to list the same process with Canada is I'll do with Australia. So that's how you do that. And then what I'll do is go back up here and click Save. Now, these new prices will be effective on the seventh of August 2022. That's when that change would occur for this book. So that's how you going to tell you use your dashboard to just edit details about it so you can upload new files. You can generate what they call an E proof. So I can actually get a copy of my, my book and in lock in a PDF version. So I can actually have a look through that to make sure everything that I need in that is ready to go. So I think it's you'd better either e-mail that to me or it will appear as a download. Generally, it does it email it to me so they're not going to get that. And I can check over what my book is log. Let's get back to the dashboard though in some more details to have look it over so we can change the details here with the titles. Let's go back home for the moment. And now this is where we've got the new Reports tab. So your classic, which is the current reporting or the old fashioned reporting. And we've got new, we might go to classic first because this is going to be phased out at the end of 2022. So you can see here all we pull functionality found below the retired as the tool. So 31st of December 2022. If we look at our e-book sales report for this example, what I'm gonna do is show you the print sales report. So if I click here print sales report, this will give me an idea of any books are sold during a particular time. So let's go to, let's say it's a last period, just waiting for it to sit. If it doesn't sit last two periods. And we might change that to go back to June right there. And then I go down and I've got the US Print Area, currency, US dollar. Click, unclick that button there. We just want print on-demand and we're doing a screen display. And you can also give it delivered by email in Adobe or in Excel as well. And you can plug in your details here. But for the moment, we're just going to submit this and then this will now generate the report for us. This will bring up all the book sales for that month. So if I scroll down, I can see the books that have been sold during this period of time. And then it's also got your compensation. And it's also got any returns that might have happened as well. And that's the traditional kind of reporting that will provide you. Now you can generate a new report and then you can go straight back into it and you can enter a certain date range as well. You might want to change it to the UK, but when you do the UK, unclick that box, go pound sterling and then print on-demand, click that, unclick that one, and then you can do screen display and then submit again, and the same report will come up. But just for the UK this time, you can do the same for Australia. But let's go to the new reporting because that's what's more likely going to be relevant for you moving forward. Let's go to reports. The reports new tab will bring up a lot of different information. It will provide for a certain period of time where your books are selling. So last seven days, I'm gonna change this to last 90 days. And my majority of muscles, they coming from us and some from Australia, the UK, many different parts of the world. It's actually quite fascinating to see. It's also got different units that were sold or the different print bestsellers. It was sold at different times of the year. And it also provides you with a sales at a glance e to date. You've also got the percentage of sales per subject. And let's just say for the last seven days, so let's change it to 90 days. Majority of my books that are in family relationships are selling the most at 44 per cent, Juno nonfiction, I then educates 16% and others 21 per cent. And I can actually print off a full report here. And I've got my sales again year at glance. And then what you can also do is go to. The styles of the different books. So if we click on sales, then this will go into more detail about the sales, about the print, digital prints, and also the sales by region. If we go to titles, then you can actually export the gen, generate a report based on the metadata for your books. So you can do one here, or market pricing, export compensation. This is one that you'd probably be interested in. What you would do if we want to change up different recent sales history, you can do that as well. So at the moment, total pay compensation was 839, but then you've also got estimated unpaid compensation that is coming through. And you can also scroll along to different parts of the world. Australia, United Kingdom, and the US. You've got now my payments or in Australian dollars, yours of course, maybe in US dollars, Canadian dollars, wherever you are around the world. So that's the compensation. And then you've also got transactions are transactions will be for any books that you might have purchased. And therefore, there'll be the transactions that you've got, the books that you might have ordered through your author page. So if you go to titles and did your orders, then that's what this will show as well. So if we go to orders down here, we can also do a search for different books. And we could do it by title, the ISBN, the dates. And you've got all your different books as well. You've got any painting or submitted that you've done. You can also go to your marketing tab. Now the Marketing tab, they do have an offer through Ingram Spark and I'll talk about this slider in a future lesson. They do call it. And I page listing. I will give you what my thoughts are about this during that lesson. But just know there is some marketing, there's a viable through Ingram spark. Under tools and resources. You can find a lot of helpful information here about fall crashing guides, cover template generators, PDF checklists, ePub guard lines, processing services calculate as compensation calculators and print n ship calculators. If we want to go to the print and ship calculator, then this would then bring up the inflammation. So we'd include the ISBN, the trim sizes, what size it is. And all we need to do is include those details which are in the box just here where it's shipping to. And then we do calculate. And we've got some very handy calculators in a future lesson. We'll also use one of these calculators to organize or to look at our compensation. So that is a good summary of the dashboard because it is new and is a lot of different things that you need to be aware of. You can go to the help and you can find out all the different areas about distribution and subtle set up a marketing, ordering and eBooks. There's different questions there about catalogue integrity. And you can crosscheck as well with, with anything that you need help with, your dashboard should be able to cover everything that you need to know. So if we just go home again, we can also go to the tab. I'll just wait for it to show up. So I go up here and make it narrower, or we can make it water just by doing that. And you can also see quick links down here too. And there is some more information on your dashboard down below. Now. It would take probably two hours to provide a full overview of this dashboard because there's a lot of different things. But for me, I think that I've provided some basic information which you need to know as a starting publisher on Ingram spark. But just by playing around with a few things, you'll get some more knowledge about this dashboard. But remember that the classics will be phased out at the end of 2022. So you'll need to get familiar with the new reporting that I showed you before. So that's a look at the dashboard for Ingram spark. 15. The Order of Book Creation: One of the initial areas of confusion for me when I was first self-publishing was, in what order should I create my book? Should I create kava first? Should I create the manuscript first? I just want to highlight what I do and easier any particular order that you do need to follow when you're creating your book for Ingram Spark. So this is the order that I typically follow. Number one, I'll get my manuscript ready. I need to know the number of pages of my manuscript because that will then dictate the size of my cover, my trim size, and also the spine width. So my first tip would be to start with your manuscript. Yes, you can have an idea for your cover because I can sometimes inspire your book. But I'll always start with my manuscript, get that ready, know the number of pages, because then I can move on to the design of my cover. So I'll do the front cover first. Then I'll also do the back cover after that. Now the front and back cover will obviously need to meet the trim size of your interior. Therefore, you need to make sure that it meets the audience's requirements as well. When I say audience, or mean the customer who is going to be buying it. And what is the size of the cover that you require that will make it the most attractive for customers to purchase. Finally, I'll then bring the front and back cover together and I'll be showing you through the process of the development and formatting of your front and back covers. But you need to make sure that when you're putting together, when you do the calculations, you're accommodating the spine width. And the spine width will be dictated by the number of pages of your book. So in summary, the audio create your book doesn't really matter in particular, as long as you know the number of pages. So what is important is the calculation and the spine width. You can only finalize the front and back covers into the final PDF file and to know the number of pages of your manuscripts. So that will be critical. As I mentioned. I start with the manuscript and then worked at the front cover, back cover, bring it all together and either can then format my final front and back cover in a PDF version. You might have a different choice in the order you do it. However, that is the way that I do it and the way I've found it to be most successful and the most streamlined in the process. 16. Using the Book Size Calculators and Custom Templates: In this lesson, I want to cover off a few of the calculators that are available via Ingram Spark. One of the important ones is getting your template generated as well. So that is the cover template generator here. You've also got the pricing and the pricing and calculators, which is available on the right-hand side there of your dashboard. But what I'm going to first focus on is the cover template generator. Now you can use this when you want to get the template for putting your front and back cover on. Now there's a few different techniques you can use. I've always used Canva to create my front and back covers. But you can also use other tools like InDesign as well or any many different design platforms, whatever you choose. However, I'm probably just going to show you what I'm familiar with. And to create these templates though, there's a few little things that I might give you hints on that might be able to help you out during that process. So firstly, let's do the cover template generator. And I'm going to use an example of an 8.5 by 8.5 Children's illustrated picture book at Thirty-two pages. So you need to assume that you've done your manuscript and you know how many pages you've done. And you've also got the size of the book that you want. Therefore, we can use the cover template generator to create a PDF template for you. And then I actually use Canva with that template. Also need to use another tool, another calculate the outside vendor and Spark. And maybe, maybe I haven't found the right calculator and ingress back, maybe it's there and I haven't quite located, but there is another calculator that I use that I've found to be very, very handy. So let me go through that process right now. So I've now reverted onto my actual dashboard cover template generator. Now, what I'm gonna do here is actually login to start with, go into my account. A lot of times it's a pain in the account. Now need to add the 13 digit ISBN that I want to use for that particular book. And I've also got to include the trim size. So let me add the 13 digit ISBN, are just going to go and find it and are now located an ISBN. The trim size you can select. The trim size is appropriate to you in mind since I'm using 8.5 by 8.5, it is color. We can choose the black and white. So it's just a matter of selecting each of these as you go through color, premium color, got the paperback and the perfect bound. Then we've got a gloss cover, which is the book that I'm using. The page counties 32 entities detail already your pet your book might be a 190 pages, but my book is Thirty-two pages. I'm going to use PDF. You can choose InDesign if you want. Odysseys PDF email address, I'm going to enter my e-mail address and don't worry about the price or currency. And then I'll push Submit. Now went over into my email address. It will actually be delivered to my email address it in a PDF format. So I'm going to send it through now and I'll show you what it looks like in your inbox and how you can use it from that point. So the PDF is ready to go. So that's the template right here. So if we open this up, I've got the template. Now what I want to do is use this template now it will provide a barcode on the back. It's interesting and they put it in the middle because every single book that I've ever created through Ingram is actually placed it on the bottom right-hand corner. But it's worthwhile just ensuring that you don't have your kava when you place your cover over the top of that bar code because it will be rejected and you need to do it again. But what I normally do from here is use another calculator. So I can use this template in Canva. So I'll show you what that calculator ease and how to locate it. This is the first website called Book L. What you do, ignore the kVp cover template generator because Ingram have provided our template already. We're going to scroll all the way down here to the Cover Size Calculator. Now even though it says kVp, same dimensions that can be provided for our paperback. So trim size, we are using a 0.5 by 8.5 and the page count is 32. It's already there. We're using color and we do calculate cover size. This will provide the dimensions we need, the width and the height for Canvas. Now show you what I mean. So what I'm gonna do is I'm just going to highlight that number. They're going to Canva and where it says custom size, I'm going to make sure it's in inches, the width, and go to the heart. We go back here, we go create a new design. This will provide, this is where the front cover is going to be on the right hand side and on the left hand side will be the back cover. We need to get a template here. I'm just going to do a screenshot and then go back to Canva. So let me do the screenshot now. And I just did control paste on the template. Now what I'm gonna do is reduce the scene. So I'm going to zoom it up. And I'm going to bring this scene rot onto that blue line. Just there. Rot there. Then what we need to do is zoom back out. We need to go to position middle and center. Now what I'm gonna do is stretch it out to the corners. There. There we go. So I can now use this template knowing where I can include writing because the pink area is the safe area at the blue area, which is he's here. All backgrounds should extend throughout the blue and pink areas. So for us to add the Sam and Ted book, front cover and back cover, I'll show you how I need to fit that too. This actual template saw us now go over quickly because it's another lesson that I actually covered in more detail. So I've now got Sam and Ted. So what do I need to do is quickly just position the front cover there. I go all the way up to the lines, bring it to the middle. Now, I need to make sure there's no writing that goes into the pink area. So just do that. And then you can see the middle section here which is at the spine. Again, I'll bring it to the middle, which is approximately there. Bring it up to the corners. To the corners, bring it to the middle, up there. And then on position. So I've always just scroll back here. You can see where the center of the spine is. I can actually make that spine once I get rid of the template, which is important of lift with the middle, which is the spine. I can always do the background just by going to hear the calotype up. And I'm going to do that middleware up there. Now, I need to make sure that I'm extending this all the way to the end. So you can see that what I'll do is simply go to share, but go to download a PDF. And then I download. Now that will come up as a document that I can use my PDF document, which is this one just here. Click on this in a moment. That will then bring up the cover for me. And I can then use that for uploading to Ingram Spark. So that's that area there. So what I wanna do is actually show you some other calculators as well. But I will go into more detail about the front cover formatting for Ingram Spark. In a listen that's coming up in a moment. The other calculator I wanted to bring to your attention was actually the Amazon KD P calculator. Now, now it's not associated with Ingram SPARQL. However, it will still provide you with the right dimensions for your book. And what you need to do is go to Katie p.amazon.com, forward slash AN under scroll us forward slash cover dash calculator, just up the top here. So you use it the same way if we're doing paperback interior, top premium, do Pivot4J, what PayPal page turn direction. We go left to right measurement units. We're using inches, interior trim size. We're gonna be using 8.5.5 and we do the Thirty-two pages, calculate our dimensions. And then we have put the cover there, so the width and the height. And they're the same dimensions as well using book out. So that's another way you can actually use it. So they're the two different calculators you can use for your cover templates. You can use the book l, and then you can use Canva, but you can also use the kVp calculator as well. Now, the next thing we need to do is go back onto the other calculators that we're using under tools and resources. So I'm back onto the website under my own personal account. So what I'm gonna do is go to the compensation calculator. This is where we can work out what our author compensation is going to be. You don't have to fill in the ISBN here. Trim size, you can do whatever you want. So if we had a six by nine inch book, was a black and white. We're gonna go through a crane paper. We're going to go paperback. We're going to go perfect bound. The lemonade top. We're gonna do a mat page count. Oh, duplex color. Don't worry about we can know page count. Let's do 180 pages. The least price if we say 1799, wholesale discount, I'm going to do 50 per cent and I'll cover the pricing later in one of the next lessons. And the market in the United States calculate. And this will tell us that our compensation was all charged to taking consideration will be $5.20. So that's how the calculator works. You can plug-in the details of your book that you've gone to create or you have created. So you'd know what the different publishing compensations are going to be. That's a great way of using this tool. Let's just go back for one last calculator, which we can look at. And this is the print and ship calculator. If we go here, again, you don't need to enter the ISBN. You can do all these things again. So let's just go for the same one will go. Let's go a seven by ten. This time. We're going to do black and white. What the paperback, perfect bound. We're gonna do a mat page count or we'll just do know for that one. So a duplex cover means that you can print on the inside cover of your paperback book. So it's just on the inside. We're just we're not gonna do that today. Page count. We're going to just get rid of that. We're going to go a 180 pages quantity. We're just going to do one ship to Australia. For me. Province. We're going to go New South Wales. South Wales, ship the postcode. Actually will go it will go 2001. Pretty glycation. We're going straight dollars calculate. Then we can do the different costs here. So if we did economy express, so you just have use of those and then it gives you the cost. But if you did one and we lifted on these, it will be $20. Now if we did, we put it five and we had a calculation. It will be $60. So it'll tell you the unit selling price, but where the costs come into it is the shipping and the taxes, and there's a handling fee. So that's what adds up to that. But that's the, that's the way you use that calculator for the print and the ship. And there's other resources you can use on here as well. But the main calculators are these two plus the cover template generator, which you might like to use as well for your creation. 17. Types of Interior (Trim Size) Print Options Available: Welcome to this short lesson. I'm just going to be covering off the different types of interior print options that you do have available with Ingram Spark. Now it's good that there are a few different options for you to choose from, because it does depend on your audience, the type of book you've got, and what kind of illustrations or pictures or writing that you might actually have for your interior of the book. So the inequality, so we've got a black and white printing, so it's the most economical and it's going to be the cheapest when we do our processing, you'll see the difference in price if we move it from a black and white through to a premium color, you've got the paper thicknesses, so you've got the 74 GSM in paper, paper in cream or in white. That was not the magnetic goals I showed you that had in a previous lesson, the head, the cream kind of paper. And you tend to find that longer-form books for some reason do have a lot of green paper as the printing option. Then you've got standard color printing. So there are two different kinds of color printing that you can decide on what's going to be best for your book. For me if I'm doing a children's picture storybooks or will go premium or want that premium experience for customers that are reading that book. Though, it's again some 74 GSM paper. Or you can have a 104 GSM paper as well. And you've also got the premium color printing, and it really is a great color when you do receive your books from Ingram spark, that is the highest color quality that you can get. These more vivid. And again, it's on a 104 GSM paper, so it's a bit thicker. That helps as well with any color that might bleed through to the other side with a thinner paper. The paper color. You've got the cream, What? I've never used the ground wood before. But it's available in black and white printing. And again, it's only in the US and the UK. So if you're in other countries, you may, you won't have that opportunity to use that. But there are different kinds of printing interior that you get to choose from. You cost will increase if it is a standard color or premium color. Also the paper thicknesses, there are different costs associated with that. But you just have to wire up the kind of book you're creating. What is the end product you want to create for your customer? So hopefully that information helps you out. There's plenty more information on the Ingram Spark website if you need to go there. But I'll also cover this when we do our upload to Ingram Spark, and I'll show you the front. Why is it choosing color, premium color, black and white can impact your pricing and it is quiet significance. If you just go from a black and white or premium color, it adds a lot on to the end price, which will then impact the price. You can list it for the discount they can offer for wholesale marketing or for wholesale groups. And also your author compensation, which you need to factor in as well. 18. Bleed or No Bleed?: Welcome to the lesson about bleed and no bleed. This is something that actually is quite confusing and I'll do my best to explain what blade or no bleed is. When you create your interior or your manuscript. You need to consider whether you need to add bleed or not. For a longer form book with no images and things like that, It's probably unlikely that you need to add bleed to your manuscript. Now, when you would need to use bleed is if you have images that might need to be stretched right to the end of the page. I'll give you an example. If I show you my children's picture storybook and I'll show you an illustration from this book here. So if I show you that you can see the illustration how it spreads all the way to the end than the top, bottom, left and right. That's when I would need bullied to be added to my manuscript. If you're just creating a book, such as Here, job launch, then if I have looked at the pages, I wouldn't need to add bleed to that book. That would just be a simple formatting issue or sorry, formatting structure that I'd put in place. I'll give you an example. I'll create something very simple in Canva where I add bleed and I'll show you the reason why I do. But if you look at this table, just tee up. So if you are creating a five by eight inch book, which is pretty similar with I think that might be a five-point eight inch book there. If I needed to add bleed, I would add 0.2125 inches to the width, 0.25 inches to the height of that manuscript. And they the dimensions you need to add if you're adding blade to any one of your different trim sizes. So if it was a seven by ten inch book, then if you are adding blade, it would end up being 7.125 inches, 10.25 inches. Let me go into Canva. I'll show you a simple example of a book that you might need to add Blade two. Therefore, it might just make a bit more sense. Now when you're uploading your book to Ingram spark, you don't actually have to tick a box that says whether you're at a bleed or no bleed. Whereas if you were to publish through other platforms, for example, Ingram Spark is a choice where you do indicate whether your book escaped being submitted with bleed or no bleed. Let me go to Canvas right now. Again, it's not a platform that maybe you all use depending on the kind of books that you publish. It just gives me a better opportunity to explain how blade or no bleed works within the manuscript and you'll trim size. Let me do that right now for you. Now on Canva, if I was creating a design and are needed to add bleed, are needed or need to add the 0.125 to the width and 0.25 to the heart. So if I had a traditional seven by ten inch book, that would suddenly become if I go to inches, 7.12510.25. That's how sit my dimensions and make sure it's in inches. I would create my design. I've got my page, so this is, this is the internal pages of my book and I'll just continue to add pages to it, depending on how many pages you had. If you are doing your traditional book with writing, then you wouldn't need to add the extra blade. However, if you had images that were part of your book, then you would need to add the blade. If you wanted those images to stretch right to the end of the page. Let me grab a couple of images and I'll show you exactly how this concept works. So if I had these two images in my book that are appearing on page 25, for example. If I just wanted the image to be in the middle, then that's fine. You wouldn't necessarily need to add blade. But if you wanted the image to drift rod across and to extend beyond, then you would need to add blade. The same if he'd wanted this flower in the corner as it sits right now. If you want it to be like that, then that's fun that you'd need to add the bleed in there. If you didn't add blade. This is what would happen. I'll grab a square. If I just go shapes. And I'll do this. And I'll just make that what, just like this. Then you would find that the image wouldn't stretch all the way to the end. You'd have this white line that runs around your page with the image would be cut off. If you add blade effectively, what that does is remove that what block or that white line. Therefore, the image would extend all the way through. So if you want your image to extend beyond the edge of the page, you need to add your blade to your manuscript when you do the dimensions. And remember that was 0.125 to the width and 0.25 to the heart. If you don't require bleed and you're happy to have that line that runs around the side here or there runs around your each of your pages on your manuscript, then that would be fine. If you're happy with that. That's what it's going to turn out to be looking like. And you need to accommodate that when you're doing your design. So that's how I like to explain the bleed or the no bleed. It's a little bit complicated at times. You would probably need to use the bleed when you're creating those books, required illustrations or photos, or any design that needs to extend beyond the page. If you're just doing long-form books or books without the requirement to have any illustrations that extend beyond, then you don't need to add blade to your manuscript document. So hopefully that explains a bit more. It can be challenging to get your head around initially. But just remember those dimensions you need to add. And you just need to add it to your trim size when you're creating your book, whether it's on Canva, whether it's in Word documents, whether it's in a PDF, you just need to make sure that you add that blade if required. So therefore, the pitcher extends all the way beyond the actual edge of the page. Hopefully that helps. 19. Formatting Your Paperback Cover for Upload: Welcome to the lesson about formatting your book cover. Now for this example, I'm going to use a book or credit which is on the bottom here, and it's called job launch. Now, I created this book in a five by eight inch format. The book size is 90 pages. So once you've created your manuscript and you know the page length, and you know the size of the book that you want to create. For example, for job launch, it was a five by eight. I'm going to go through the process of how I would format the front cover for this book. Now you're gonna, you're gonna have a book that might be a different size or different page count. Hopefully this example will show you the process that I go through. Ultimately, what we want to do is get a PDF format of this book cover. We're going to do it in paperback format for this example. But there's another tool that I'll also show you that will hopefully completely revolutionized the way that you do your book covers and the formatting. You can do the manual way, which I'll show you through Canva. And remember, you can use Canva for free. You can get a free account to be able to do the things that I've been showing you in this course. But if you want a streamline process, there's another software platform. However, there is a subscription, a monthly subscription fee that you pay. But if you want to do it for one month and then not doing any longer, what we can do that as well. Or if you're creating many books, it might be a subscription that you want to do, but the cost is a random bit tenuous dollars a month. So it's not really that expensive to be able to make sure that your formatting of your book covers is meeting the requirements of Ingram Spark. So let me show you the process I would go through for this book as an example. Therefore, you can go through step-by-step and just apply it to your own book for the formatting of your front cover. So let's get him to listen now, when we eventually get to the stage of uploading our book cover to Ingram spark. It'll ask us for a PDF file. This is where we upload that file. We need to make sure that when we're going through this process, I'll show you how to create that PDF file so that you won't have any issues when you're uploading it to Ingram Spark. So let me show you the manual way of doing it. And then I'll show you the more efficient way or the easiest way that I find to create my paperbacks, in particular, for Ingram Spock light, I showed you in Lesson 14 using the calculators or showed you a very quick example of using the cover template generator. Then what we need to do is go to kava template generator. And we use this information so that Ingram can send us the template to allow us to fit our cover correctly. Now what we can do is include the ISBN that we're gonna be using. So let me retrieve that now for job launch. So I've entered that ISP and now, now this information will automatically come up because I've already entered all the details of the book. But if you're creating a book from scratch, then we need to do is enter these details, MVC as you go through. So there are the tick boxes or drop-down boxes to choose from. So I've chosen the five by eight. Remember, there are many, many different trim sizes you can choose from. I'm just going to leave mine at five by eight. The interior color and paper, I'm using black and white and I'm using the cream paper for job launch. You can choose white or ground wood. You can also use color. Now if you chose color, you then choose either standard or premium. But in this example it's just black and white bonding top. I'm using the paperback and then we take perfect bound. You could also take hard back. If that was the option you're choosing. We go down and I'm choosing the matte finished for my cover. You could choose gloss. But in this example, I like to use mat for my longer-form books. Duplex cover with no page count. The book is 90 pages. You need to enter your page count. Now if you've got, don't worry about double-sided or anything like that. It is just the number of pages of your manuscript. If you have a 100 pages that have information on them throughout your book, it is 100 pages. You don't need to worry about thinking. It's gonna be printing on both sides is now going to be 200 pages. It is 100 pages and it needs to be multiples of two. I can have 91. It must be 90 or 92, or 94, or 96. And it goes on for all type. Now, this is where Ingram is going to be sending me the template. I want to choose, for me personally PDF. You can choose the other two options if you wanted to. I'm now going to enter my e-mail address, confirmed my e-mail address. Now, the template will be sent directly to my email. And then I'll use that template in Canva so I can format my front book cover. So let's quickly do that now. I'll enter my details and I'll have the cover, the cover template ready to go. So while I wait for my templates be e-mail me, e-mail to me from Ingram Spock on now going to go down and using the website book out.com under resources, I can now find out the exact dimensions that I want. The trim size is going to be a five by eight inch and the page count is 9000 AM using cream colored paper. So it's book out.com. Now what I'll do is calculate the cover size. I can see the two-dimensions here, 10.475 inches by 8.25 inches. Now you can either use the pixels in Canva or you can use inches. Now go to Canvas, and I'm going to put those dimensions into the Custom Size link just here. Remember canva.com, you can use for free to do what I'm showing you right now. I've got a custom size and I need to enter those details. So if I go back to Canva, you'll see it's currently in px pixels that I can change it to inches. I might change it to inches for this example. On now copy this. And what I need to do is go back to, go back to this one. Hot and put that in there, copy the bacteria gain. And then a creatinine design. And here is more, it's going to be my front end mod back. That's, that's gonna be the size of the front and the back cover. So when they close together, there'll be a format that will be the format for my book. This is the size that I need to put my covers on. Now, what I also need to do is wait for this template to arrive from Ingram Spark. Then I'm going to put that on there so I know exactly the dimensions where I need to place my cupboards. The other thing I can do is upload my front and back cover that I've created and I'm going to put them onto this page here and use that to be able to format this cover. So let me get the template for us from Ingram Spock from the e-mail. Then I'll go through the process. The email has now rod from Ingram Spock and they've provided me with these PDF as a template. So I thought quick there, and I've got the template right here. What I'm now going to do is print screen that. And I'm going to go to this page and Control V. Now that will bring up Rob there. I'm going to now tree nice. So it goes there, down to there and rot there. I can also zoom up making sure that I'm getting all the way to the blue line. The blue line there, blue line there, and that is BlueLine. Now I can zoom back out again. And what I want to do is make sure that I've centered this and it's ready to go. So I can go position. And I'm gonna center and middle. I'm going to zoom back out. And I'm going to stretch this template. So it goes all the way to the corner. Then I can go all the way to corner again. Now that should be very, very close. If there's a tiny little bit of white and you can actually stretch that a little bit just like that. And it's very, very close to the top. There we go. Now what I need to do is get my front and back cover on here. Now you've got the ISBN barcode here. Now that he's just showing you for the template when you do print with Ingram spark that will appear on the back of the book. And I'll show you that at the end of this lesson, how it will actually appear when you create your book using Ingram Spock. So it'll be a good example of what it will clock. So let me grab my front and back cover now. The front and back covers. And now here, what I need to now do is bring them into the middle and start to stretch them to the edge of the blue line route that we can bring these down a bit and make sure it's centered there, bring it down there, up. Rot, and that's rod on the board. Then we do the same. Now remember we've got out ISBN barcode. So we need to position ourselves again right here. Stretch it. Bring it to the middle, which is right there. Stretch all the way to the corners. All the whites, the corners. And we're very, very close. What we can do, if you had a book over approximately a 120 pages, you can add a The book name on the spine. Now to do that you just add text. And if it was called job launch now this spine is only 90 pages, so it's not going to work for this book. But I just want to give you an example of what that would look like. If we turn that around to 90 degrees. And then we placed it in the middle. And we reduced it so that actually was to fit there. We can get position right there. And you can have your book name on your spine as long as it was in capitals. And again, we need to make sure it fits in that span, but don't do a spine. Nivea book on the spine. And unless you're approximately a 120 page says not going to be thick enough. Now I'm going to remove this. And the other thing I want to do is turn my span into the same color as my front and back cover. I can now remove the actual template. So hover around the whole thing so I can click in the middle and I'll delete it. We do not want the template to remain. Now crudely that what, because of that matches with the label here. If I wanted the back to be the same color, I click in the middle section, I'll go to Background. Click on this little button here, click on the plus, and you do the color pointer. And if I hover over this area, it will tell the, It'll send the right code to have the right color appear for more spawn. And that would be the book right there. What we now need to do is save it in the correct format. So we've got our step number one was getting the right template from Ingram. Then we got the template and we removed all the walk beats to leave it there within ahead our front and back covers, and we've now put those on. The last part of this process is to save it as a PDF. Because when we do go to upload our book, we need to make sure that it is in PDF format. So we go share we downloaded and we downloaded as a PDF print. Best for printing. We click there. You can see has his RGB for digital use. You can do this one, CMYK for printing, and then we can download it. Now this will now provide the right format and the template for our book. When we click on here, we can see the book is perfect. That's exactly what we want, and that is the format that you'll be submitting through if you wanted to do this another way, there's another quick way that I will show you entities using a program called Book bolt. Their book bolt is a subscription. It's about $10 per month. I'm going to jump onto my account and show you how I can create the same thing, but very, very quickly. So this is the website, it's called Book bolt. And I can use this platform. Again, it is a subscription model, but it is very, very efficient and quick to use this for book cover formatting. They do offer options for hardback as well. But let me jump into the area where I can create my paper back very quickly and efficiently using this program. And I've logged in, and I've clicked just over here on the icon. I go down to book bolt designer. And I'm just going to log in. It initializes now what we're doing. We can choose paperback or hardcover. Now, hardcover, it is set for the kVp, different sizes. If you see here, they've only got five different sizes, but we're going to use paperback. I'm going to do the cover. We're doing our five by eight. We can do the crane paper. And I'm doing 90 pages. I submit. This will automatically generate the template and everything that we need. And it does it very, very quickly. So this will save you having to do that design on Canva if you would like to avoid doing that way. Let me wipe the template, just generate. It can sometimes take about 60 seconds. The template has now been provided or length do is go to images and upload my two images for job watch. Just clicked an edit images here, click here. And what I'm gonna do is don't move the image anywhere from the middle to begin with, you stretch it down to the pink line and you drag it across. You can see those little grey dots. They just need to be on the border. And just make sure it's in the right area because you can see the spine as well. So we just want to have it right there. We do the back cover now. Gained, don't move it, stretch it so the little gray dots are on the line. We then drag it across. This makes sure you get all those gray dots top, top, left, top, right, bottom and left all aligned. And if we wanted to add the back color, we can as well. And all you'd need to do is go up to product and select that one. And then you can enter the color code that we had before for the front and back now, and I'll show you where I get that color. So if I go back to Canva and I'll click on the outside, I can see the color here. That's the Kelly. If I do the plus or they just copied that, go back to Book bolt. And I've put that code in there, and now it's the same color, That's the whole background. Is that now that color, all we need to now do is to download these cover. So I just go download, which is white. It can again take about 60 seconds and you would receive the download button. Now, I have noticed an error when I did this. So you can see how the writing goes into a little gray box area there. I would like to avoid that so I can reduce this just to make sure because I don't want any rejections. Again, I'll maintain to make sure I look around here. We want to make sure all writing within that shaded lot. Reddy pink color. We do not want any writing going into that zone at all. So let's read download it. So I go download again and wait for it to download. It is now ready to download. We click Download and the cabinet will appear right here once it loads up. And here it is. And that's as quick as it needs to be or should be when doing your cover. If you're using book Bolt, what I would then do is download it and then save it as a file as my PDF. So I've got my fall there and I will now save that. And that file is now in PDF format, ready to upload to Ingram. When I'm ready to do my final upload process with my manuscript, MY cover. So that is the process to create your front cover. There are few steps involved there. Remember to keep the template if you're going to use Canva, use the template calculator or the cupboard template calculate out from Ingram spark, get that, place it on Canva and trim it spread across the size. And you need to get the dimensions from book out or even the kVp cover calculator, which I also showed him listen 14 to get the right dimensions. The alternative is to use a software like book bolt, and you can create that cover on book ball nice and quickly and save it as well. And it will need to be in the PDF format and the book ball will naturally save it as a PDF format for you. Now, remember, this is the book that I had on the back cover and you can see how the ISBN was put on the bottom corner there rather than the center with a template originally showed. He's probably just to leave a gap down below to allow for that. That ISBN with barcode or peer in that space. Now the cover is important to get right. You wanna make sure that you take your time. You don't want little gaps or little white streaks along the side. Get the template right and ensure that you save it as PDF. It is a critical component. The cover and the manuscripts collectively, when you put it onto Ingram, when you upload it during the process. These that final stage that you need to do. Hopefully that helps you with the formatting and it'll just depend on your manuscripts, page counts, and also you'll cover size when you're doing those initial calculations to use either Canva for your cover or to use book bulk for the formatting. But just make sure you have it in PDF format and ready to go. 20. Formatting a Hardback Cover for Uploading: Welcome to this lesson about formatting your hand back or your hardcover book. Formatting your hard back is a little trickier than trying to create your paperback book. The process of creating a paperback is a lot more simplified. There are certain tools are available that make things much easier. But for Ingram Spark, you can be a little bit more challenging if you haven't done any design or anything like that before. So I'm going to show you the process that I used for my hardback version of the habit switch. So that's going to be this one just here. You can see in the bottom corner just there. So I'm going to show you the process. And hopefully it will allow you to create your own hardback books. You can always outsource this to a group like Fiverr or someone on a platform that will do this formatting for you. But if you can do it yourself, you might save yourself a little bit of money. Perhaps time-wise, it might be a bit more challenging for the first couple of books you do. But after that, it becomes a lot more easier. So let me run through the process for the book and how I can create the hardback cover and the right format type so you can submit it through to Ingram when you're ready. And this is the hardback cover that I want to try and replicate for you so you know how to create it. And therefore, you'll be able to get your own hardback version of your book if that's what you're willing or wanting to do. Let me go to the first step. And that is to go to the tools and resources again. And we're going to use the cover template generator. This will give us the option of choosing hardback. And again, you will need to have the ISBN number for your cover template generator to work. So no matter if you publish your book or not, Mod book is already published. So therefore, when I put these ISBN, it will generate all the details already, but I'll go through step-by-step anyway. So I'm just going to put the numbering now and it will bring up all the details because this is a book that I've already published. So you can choose the different size that you've got, depending on what hardcover you want. Now, without hard, hard back, hard cover, you can see all the different options that you do have. The hardback there. You choose, whether it's going to be black and one with its walk cream. You can go to the color. If your book is going to be color, you can choose that as well. We're going from black and white. We go down to here where you have the choice of paperback or hardback. Of course we're doing the hard back in this lesson. They can do a case Lemonade, which is the same as this one. You can do a jacket case, lemonade that has the dust jacket on it. Digital cloth and blue or digital clock, right. I've never done those before. So I can't comment on what they look like. But that is an option, different prices associated with different kinds of power back that you do. So we're going to, I'm going to choose the case lemonade here. I'm going to go down and I'm gonna, you can either choose glossy or matte. And this book that I've got is I just find the gloss better in hardback just because it's more hard wearing and you can walk fingerprints off it as well. So I'll go gloss there. Then you include the page count needs to be multiples of two. This book is a 184 pages. So I'll leave it there. Actually I think it's a 100 and I actually think it's 188. We can do 198 fall type. I'm going to do my PDF again, and I'm going to enter my email address. There's no price options that I've done and it's not compulsory. So I'm just going to leave that and I'm going to submit that through and get the email again for the template. So let me do that right now. So in my inbox, I've received the template. So I'm going to click on the template and I'm going to do a screen shot of that. But firstly, we need to check some different dimensions that are provided here as well. You can see the board width, which we need to include with our template that we're creating on Canada. Now this is a six by nine. What you need to do is we're going to add, instead doing a six by nine, we're actually even do 14.4444 multiplied by what the width is, plus 1.5 inches. Let me give you an exact give you an exact example of what that's gonna look like for this book, which is a six by nine, but we're doing it in the hardback version. So I'm going to go into Canvas now and put those calculations in. But this number over here is an important one for us to remember. So I'm not going to hit across to Canada and get everything organized. So the first step, like we did with the paperback, is to create our design. We're going to do a customer's design. And we can use that first summer, 14.44. And we need to make sure it inches 14.44. And if you remember, that was the number which is just here, we might even do the complete thing. So let's go back. And we'll just add one more four and just in case that makes a difference. Now the cover is a six by nine. So with the nine, the nine inches, with the height, we need to add 1.5 inches. So now it's going to be 10.5 rather than nine. You just need to add 1.5 inches. So whatever the heart is of your book. So let's go create new design. Now we've got our main template here. Now we're going to paste the screenshot that we did earlier. So we're going to do that and I'm just going to trim it up to that lawn again. So we go to here, rod there. Move this across to that Mark Rob. There. We go all the way down. If you need to be clearly, Can we want to make sure that we're getting rid of everything apart from that blue line. We go down to there. That looks pretty good. Up to there. And now we need to zoom back out. And we're going to go position saint out, middle. Now what we need to do is stretched. So it goes to the point there and it goes down to 0 there. So we've got that completely covered. You can see a tiny little bit of a white line on here. Now, it's going to be fun. We can just do the smallest, narrowest margin either. There we go. Now what we need to do is put out front and back cover onto this template. So what you'd need to do is go to uploads. And then what you need to do is add your media though your picture. So I'm gonna do that right now. So now I've uploaded those two images. So grabbed the front. And I'm just going to reduce the size a little bit here. And I'm going to drag that down just to the pink line. Pink line are out there in bringing it across. And I just want to check with the pink line here. So what I'm aiming to do is to get the book within that pink line and be nice and even not even have to shrink it a bit to their shrink it a bit to there. What I want to do is make sure to in the middle. Then bring it up there. And just there. I'm going to do the same for the back cover. Now. I've got the ice being barcode there. So I just need to keep that in mind as well when I'm doing this. So I didn't go in just down to just need a pink up there. There. Bring it across. Just have liquid and middle is going to bring that across to there. Back up again. Just check with Eddie's drop there. Now I'm also going to bring this across because that is where the rotting it's going to be cut off. So I just need to make sure that it's in the boundary there. I'm wanting to bring this across a fraction. Should actually, that should be grouped with perfectly right, they're just there. And I can extend that now knowing that the rotting is inside the pink area. Now what I'm gonna do is the color that I've used for this, I want to use for the background. So what I can do is on now, actually, before I do that, if all I wanted to add the middle, I'm writing here. So I'm actually just copy this one. And I'm going to paste it right in the middle. We're on A2. So you can go position middle, center. What I am now do is I'm gonna get rid of the template, but I want to use the background. I'm going to go to this color plus to the eyedropper. And then I've got the full color of the whole book. Now you can see how this cutoff, but this section here will be, will be trimmed or folded up underneath the book. I'm gonna see if I can show you what I mean by that. Let me just bring my camera back on. And if I show you inside here, you can see there's a fold just they're taking run my finger along it, along here. That is the what is going to be folded underneath. So if I hold the book up before it, around to the front, you can see there's a fold on the top here. And around that I'll need to make sure there's time allowing for when this book gets created as a hardback book. And so the key things that I need to keep in mind for this cover, I've allowed that extra 1.5 inches of use, the template with the calculations right here. I've also added a spine if I want the spawn. Don't worry about these cutoffs section here because that will be folded underneath this whole section around the book. And the last thing I'm gonna be doing, he's made sure that I remove the template and if I want a background color or I can use the eyedropper to match it to what is already there. The next important thing, if you want to, you can label it. A habit. Switch back, have a fluorine group, 6.99. Now what I'll do is go share. I'm going to download it. I'm going to go to PDF, print this one. And I'm going to for digital use. We could use also used that one. We might just use it for that one for this example and we go download. The PDF will be made available and we have everything we want. So if we go back a bit, we can see that the covenant is perfect Here and there were no white lines or any marks that will cause an issue for this book. It goes through to ingroup to be reviewed. I can download that PDF format and it is ready for upload. So that is how to create your hardcover book and format it correctly for Ingram Spock. 21. Formatting Your Interior For Uploading: Welcome to the lesson about formatting your interior or your manuscript. Now there's not one size fits all when it comes to formatting your manuscript. The one key thing though, is to make sure that whatever you choose and the way you format your book is that you save it as a PDF file. Ingram will only accept a PDF file when you're uploading your manuscript. So you need to ensure that his sight at y. In this lesson, I'm going to go through a few different consideration points. I'm also going to show you a long form book and the formatting are used for that book, but also a children's picture storybook. And the other option you have available there. As I said though, it is very difficult to create a lesson around the formatting because your book is going to be probably unique. You might have a picture story book that has some illustrations in it, that might have some writing and need to format it in a particular way. But I think it will be helpful to show you a couple of examples and those things for consideration. Let's get into Listen now. This is my manuscript for the habit switch. So the habits which initially when our credit for a paperback cover was a five by eight inch design. If I scroll down, you can see the way that this book has been formatted. I've got the main title here. There is a blank page as occurs. So when you open up that first page, there's nothing on the inside. Then you go through to the copyright page. There might be a dedication. Then I have my table of contents. So that is on the left-hand side and the second page of the contents is on the right-hand side. A formatted it in this structure. So it was easy to float, float easily, and it was easy to follow. And the writing wasn't too small so that people couldn't see it. So you can see as you scroll down what that book is locked. Now, I can show you, for example, this job launch. Again. This is in a very similar size and you can see how it's been set out. And you've got the front front page, then you've got the blank page, and then you've got the copyright information. And then I'll move on to the content side of the book as well. Now when you're creating your books, you need to save them as a PDF. So I've saved this document as a PDF, and I'll show you, wait, what you need to check to ensure that fonts are imbedded on that document so it will be accepted by Ingram and you don't get any warnings about that. This is the habits which I've actually gone to the six by nine inch version. If we've cited as a PDF, all we need to do to check that fonts are imbedded. You go to File, go to Properties. And initially you can check the size. So it's really important to make sure that that size reflects the size of book that you intending on submitting through to Ingram. If it's not, you need to make sure you do save it in that page size. If I go to fonts, you can see how the fonts have been embedded. Across here, embedded, they're all embedded fonts. And that needs to be checked off as well to make sure that they are in place. So that would be the six by nine inch in a PDF format for the longer-form book. Now if I go to a children's picture storybook that are created on Canva. When I save the manuscript on Canva, it will automatically embed the fonts and all the colored tops for me. So what I'll do is go to that and remember, you need to check lists and 16 about blade and no bleed. If you need to add bleed to your manuscript or if you will, if you need to leave it with the habits which I didn't need to add bleed. But for the next book on showing you the children's picture storybook, I did add blade to the manuscript because I'd illustrations that go, it went all the way to the edges. I'll show you that manuscript now. We, Sam and Ted, I had to add bleed for this one. And it was a I point to five by 8.25 inch books. So if we go to fall under properties, you can see the inches here. So I've added the extra inches to allow full bleed for this book. We can go out of the soil if we wanted to go to fonts, we can see that they're all embedded. So when I did say that in Canada, all the fonts were embedded already. And if we scroll down, you can see the different formatting that I use. I had the front page. Then if I scroll down, I've got the next page about the book and copyright, then I go straight down into the writing as well. And when I make sure that when I was using the formatting for this, I wanted to make sure that when customers we're opening the book. It was appearing in the right order. So I'll grab that book and quickly show you what I mean. So here is the book here. When I open up the book, we've got that nine front page. Then if we open it up, I've got the next page as it was shown. And then I made sure I had the rotting and the illustration wasn't out of order. So that's what you need to check. Any fuel confused, just grab a book and any book and you can count the pages so you know which is page number one and which pages? Page number two. So when you're doing that, we've got a page one which is going to be on the right-hand side. So all pages on the left hand side will be even numbers, and all pages on the right-hand side will be odd pages. And that's a good way of remembering that as well. So that's the second way you can do the formatting. Again, just make sure if you can check the properties through your PDF to make sure that the fonts are embedded and that you have the correct size of the file when you're uploading it. So if it's a six by nine inch book, then it says six by nine inch on your Adobe properties. If you need to add the bleed when you're initially doing your manuscript, made sure you add that as well. That either it could be done through word or it might be done through Canvas. Just the measurements need to be accurate. So you can get that element rod. What I wanna do now is go through some options are available for book formatting for you. So the freight options would be to use word order. We use the free version of Canva if you wanted to. Paid, of course you can use the paid version of Canva, but there's also other software platforms available. These are the ones that aren't familiar with vellum, which is more for Mac users. I only is Atticus that can be used for, as we have just a normal PC. You've also got Adobe InDesign, a fin of the publisher. Those options are generally subscription-based options. You can do one-off payments, I believe for Finley publisher, I believe the other option is to outsource to a professional. So you could use groups like phi that there might be other groups that you might. For example, Freelancer.com. There are a couple of different groups you can use to outsource your formatting. Important that you'll be judged by the professionalism of your formatting. Yesterday's borrowing, however, you need to stand out and major publishing houses used professionals to format the books. Therefore, you need to get this element right for your book. What else do we need to consider? The major one is that your final manuscript needs to be saved as a PDF. I can't stress that enough. Make sure you save it as a PDF so you'll cover annual manuscripts need to be saved as a PDF format. There are a few things within this lesson that you need to consider. Again, it's hard to be able to create lesson that goes through each of the different formatting options because there's just so many. If you were to do one form, a book, for example, a high cons and book, your formatting would be very different to someone doing a children's picture storybook. You may be required just to do a little bit more research in the setup and the structure of those books that are read show you the initial structure that I do for my high content books and the structure that I can import that are nearly normally implemented for my children's picture storybooks. Just worked through what is best for you and also the different format types that you can use. Whether it'd be a Word document, whether you're using platforms, pay platforms like Atticus. They are velum, there are a couple of options for you. They can get expensive. I've been using Word and Canva as mod2 that I use. But I do know of publishers that do pay more of a premium to either outsource that role or to use a software that helps them formatted correctly and get that professional. Look. There you have it. That's the lesson about formatting your book. Just make sure whatever option you choose that you have it in PDF format before you have it ready to upload to Ingram spark. 22. A Quick Look at Publishing eBooks with IngramSpark: In this lesson, we're going to look at the different options you have for e-books with Ingram Spark. Now this lesson we'll cover a few things. Firstly, I wanted to show you my results with e-books. We have a distribution with Ingram Spark. Then we're going to have a look at different options you have regarding a book conversions. And then finally, my thoughts around e-books and the opportunities that you do have if you do decide that providing a books to your customers is something that you want to pursue. So let's get into my journey with e-books so far this year. And only show you some results, therefore, might give you an idea of how your e-books might sell. Should you decide to convert your paperbacks are hard backs to enable format. So far for the year, I've got to e-books that our cell haven't done a lot of e-books on Ingram spark or tend to use Amazon KD pay for this distribution. However, I am starting to reconsider my options in that space. But so far this year, I've got two books. One is sold 55 units, the other one just the one unit. Now does the pain on the kind of book that you have and whether it's going to be suitable for conversion to a book. So let's look at a few reasons why you should consider converting your book an e-book format. So firstly, the key reason would be that you have an additional source of income when you create a book, depending on the current book, you could have a paperback or hardback, an e-book, and an audio book. All those sources of income, a fantastic if you have a book that can be converted across those four different platforms or different types of form formats of your book. The other thing to consider is, could it be an extra option for your customers to purchase? Now, the way we purchased books, the way we read books has certainly changed over the last five or six years. And some customers prefer to have their book in a book format. Or this may even like an audio book format. But it does depend on the different kinds of books that you're publishing. For example, a blender filler into rot book for a young adolescent isn't gonna be, be suitable for a book or even an audio book. But it wouldn't be suitable for paperback, potentially a hardback, but it would be quite expensive to do it in that format. So it is an option if your book is suitable and you can convert it to a book. The next one is it. It's an excellent network distribution offer for from Ingram. Go to many, many different platforms and I'm going to show you that distribution network in a moment. By having an e-book, it does allow your brand, your book to be out in different, different streams. Because there's some platforms that only deal and manage with a box. If you can get your book out into that platform, you just never know who might pick up, who might read it and who might purchase more of your books. But let's have a look at the different platforms. Amazon, sorry, the different platforms and Ingram offer, including Amazon kVp for your book distribution, an e-book within groups. So this list is come directly from Ingram Spark. I haven't even added all of these up yet, but I would suggest here we go, 1234567891011121314, around about 42 different platforms that you will have the opportunity for your book to be on. Now if you have all your, you've got books on Amazon, then if you have exclusivity with Amazon to have your book there or you're a book, They, then you can't be putting that book onto Ingram spark. So your option is to put it onto Amazon but not have exclusivity with them, or to potentially put it on Ingram and your book will be available on Amazon anyway. But look at all the other options that you have to have your e-book on. The other option is to use a platform called drafted digital. And night also host a books and they distribute to many, many different platforms as well. But how do we do the e-book conversion? How do we make it work for us? And what do we need to consider if we want to create a book? Move it from a paperback or hardback to an e-book format. Let me go into a few of those details now. So the first thing is the processing options are available with Ingram Spark. As you can see, you've got a print and a book option, and that's $49, or you can just choose a book alone at twenty-five dollars. The preference is if you know that it's gonna be converted, then you'd go for the $49 package. The reason why I haven't uploaded a lot of eBooks to Ingram is because personally I've found it a little bit more challenging to do than say with Amazon KP. The conversion side of things is more challenging because Amazon do provide a free software called Kindle that you can put your e-book on and it will actually convert it to their format for you. And it's really easy to upload. But with Ingram, you've got a few different options. You could try and do it yourself and you use a conversion software that makes it an ePub format. So ePub is the file type that you need to use for your e-books. That could be the DIY, do it yourself where you try and do that. I wouldn't recommend that though because I've tried that and I had several knock backs where it just wasn't going through properly. They weren't allowing me to publish a book. So therefore, I decided to AppSource and engage someone else to do that for me. And it really didn't cost that much to do, was around about ten or $11. So it wasn't patch. And I'm going to show you how you can access that. The next thing you can do is use increments, platform yourself. And they've got a eBook creation service that they offer. Now it is 67 per page. Let me show you on the website for Ingram how you can access that to get your book converted to a book. But remember, it could be fairly pricey. But on the flip side, you know that it's going to be done well and done professionally and today's standards. So you need to consider that as well and the long-term prospects of your e-book moving forward. So I'm only Ingram spark ePub conversion. And this is a page where they talk about, they are off the opportunity they offered to publishers, authors to get your book converted to a pub. So what you need to do, you can get your, you convert your slit, your file. You can get it converted. You allow it to 15 days for it, and it's 60, $0.60 per page. You get guaranteed a reader compatibility for all retailers, which is important. And you'll also have it available to major online retailers. You can, you can use that platform if you like. Again, if it's a long book, just say it's a hundred and one hundred ninety pages. It's going to cost you a 108 US dollars to get a book converted. And if we looked at my conversion rate so far with 55 books sold, I think it was about 80, $80 that I've received so far in book sales. So you need to be confident you're going to be able to get that money back over the long term. So, so far the $80 is come back over around about 78 months. Hopefully by the end of the year. That would, if you use that service, then that would cover easily cover that price. So you can pack yourself in if you're using this. The next option at your disposal is to outsource it to someone on Fiverr or Upwork. Now I've got a QR code there that will take you directly to the person that I use. I'm going to quickly show you their services now. And this person did a great job for me converting my book into an ePub. So there could be someone that you might want to consider for your conversion. I'm going to go to their site right now just to show you what you need to look for if you do happen to use, utilize this. And this is the salt here. All I did was go to o convert PDF to ePub eBook formatting. This is what needs to be filled out. So you can either choose the basic standard of the premiums. So it just goes up. If you do basic convert up to three pages, standard is 75 pages and premium 190 pages for this is strained old, so it's about 2122 US dollars for the premium, basic autonomy, that five US dollars. If you're only doing 30 pages or you might have a book that's much more than 30 pages. So what you need to do is you go to continue, fill in the details, attach your book and your PDF book. And then this freelancer will convert it to ePub and send you through the document ready to upload through to Ingram. So I've used this freelancer before and has been fantastic. So if you do happen to outsource the process for creating a book, just make sure that it is converted to a pub. And also the person that you are using is experienced with formatting the book for Ingram spark. You don't want to get someone that creates Amazon Kindle file for your e-book because it won't be accepted by Ingram Spark. Now unfortunately, I can't go into too much detail about the formatting sides of a books. There is a y, you can do it like in DRY within Ingram spark. But I don't want to be teaching anything that I haven't personally practicing complainer myself. And that's why I'm recommending that if you aren't good at doing this sort of thing, then I'd definitely recommend that you asked. And for the charge of about even if it's $20, you outsource it. It will absolutely be worth your time. It'll save you significant amount of heartache and time doing it, trying to do it yourself, or even using a free platform to do that conversion. You'd rather someone who has experienced do that for your book. It can be a long-term play with the e-book. If you can convert many of your books and you take up the forty-nine dollar package, it might really work in your favor. The kinds of books that are going to work, or obviously high content books. You could even do books, cookbooks. But the conversion of books will really depend on the audience that you're creating them for. And the different dynamics of that book is it's something that needs, someone needs a rotting because if it is certainly not going to be suitable for a book. But if it's something that people can flip through like a children's picture storybook. If it's a longer form book, even different kinds of books that might be suitable for learning, but readapt the requirement of rotting in them that could be good as well. So hope that information has been helpful for you. Get ready for the next lesson because we're about to stop that soon. 23. Pricing Strategy | Book Price, Wholesale Discount and Returnable or Non-Returnable Options: Welcome to the lesson about your pricing strategy. I'm gonna be going through in greater detail the pricing when we do our upload. Now that will be in a future lesson. But I think it's important to cover off a few key elements before we get to that lesson. So when we do get there, you know what I'm referring to? There are three key things that I wanted to discuss in this lesson before we do move to the upload lists. And firstly, when you're creating your book price, you have an opportunity to do so during the upload. Now you need to think about the competition for your niche and your market. You need to price your book appropriately. You don't want to be too high. You don't want to be too low. But finding that book price can be tricky. I'd recommend going to sites, for example, like Amazon, and having a look at the different prices, go to other online stores, bookstores, and have a look at the pricing. What will potentially adjust your pricing will be the page count. The kind of paper you're using. Are you printing in standard black and white, standard color, or premium color prints? Because all of those will influence the pricing that you can print your book or distributed with Ingram Spark. What about if it's paperback or hardback? Again, those dictate the different pricing structures that you'll have and you need to consider. The other thing is when you do upload your book to ingredient, you have what we call a wholesale discount. This discount to retails, and it can form a part of a sales strategy. So I wholesale discount is what the for example, it's called a brick-and-mortar store. When they get your book, they want a percentage discount so that they can actually make something on the book. So you set your price at $15 for your book. You might need to set your wholesale discount at 50 per cent, meaning that your bookstore can buy it for $7.50, but they can then price at $15 and make money themselves. The highest you can go for the wholesale discount is 55%. Now, in recommend that if your strategy for selling your books through brick-and-mortar stores is one of your strategies for your book sales, then I recommend 55 per cent. If your strategy is more online book sales, you can go as low as 35 or even 30%. Getting that structure right can be challenging. I've tried a number of different pricing strategies and it's actually very hard to work out. I've found some books though there are no, will be more likely to sell online. So therefore, I've structured that pricing at 35 per cent for those books that I think could make their way into bookstores, I discount them at 55 per cent. This will make more sense when we get to the upload process, but that's just something you need to keep in mind that you will need to discount your book. You can adjust that pricing depending on your strategy. And finally, you will get an option whether you want your book returnable or non returnable. If you have returnable at means that if someone purchase your purchases your book, being a customer or even a brick and mortar store. And they, brick-and-mortar store have too many and they need to return them. You need to actually cover that cost. If it's a customer and they buy the book, they don't like it, or there's a small tear and something has gone wrong. They can also return the book and you have to pay for it. Now you can either have a returnable and destroy, which means that if a book is returned in group will destroy your book. You can also have an option where it is returnable and delivered back to you, but you need to pay for the shipping price. They're all factors you need to take in consideration. And I've found that I have a number of books. I've had a number of books that have been returned and I've had to where that price across my profitability of my books. Now I think over selling books now for 2.5 years, three years on Ingram spark, my return has been around about 2%, 3 percent. So you're going to get that occasionally. But if I'm going to make it attractive for bookstores, I need to sit the higher discount price. So let me show you. If I had an existing book and I wanted to adjust the pricing, I will show you that. But when we do the upload process or set the fees and show you what you need to look for. But let me just show you how adjusting the processing can affect what you get as a author for your compensation. Now there's also a publisher compensation calculator. We'll have a look at that in a moment as well. Let's get into the dashboard and I'll show you how adjusting the price can impact the author compensation for you. So here I'm on the dashboard within existing book and you can actually go in to adjust the pricing. What you need to do, you need to determine what that pricing is gonna be to give you the publishing compensation that you need, but also make it a book that he's attractive for customers and even bookstores to hold. You can also have your strategy for online retailers. Near, they'll give you United States, United Kingdom, European Union, Canada, Australia, and Global Connect. Now with the retail pricing, I can set it just say I set it for $14 and I have a wholesale discount of 55 per cent. Now you can adjust these. You can make it down to 30 if you wanted to leave, it allows me go down. Let's have a look and see what it goes down to. Must be between 30, 55%. So if we, if we have 30 per cent, then the compensation is going to be $4.51. So it's quite a good compensation, but it's not going to be attractive for wholesale bookstores to actually hold at 30%. They're not going to be making that much. So if I leave that to 50%, then this will change and I get a $1.71. So there's a significant difference with that. If you look at the compensation, so it will look at the wholesale discount. It says to ensure bookstores received their expected trade discount when they buy from Ingram, consider offering 55% wholesale discount. The wholesale discount you offer is what distribution channels receive for selling your title and he's not the discount in customers receive. So you had the option of seeing and discount with the range of 30% being the minimum, up to 55 per cent. You need to consider that the return options. So you've got non returnable yes, deliver. I'll go through this a bit more when we do the upload process, but just know that you can have an option for the book to be returned, or you can have it. You can have it so that you can actually be destroyed by Ingram so you don't wear the cost of them sending it back to you. You can go and adjust these prices. We need to make sure that we're getting a fair compensation, but also making it attractive for bookstores. This is a personal choice. You need to think carefully about because it can impact the long-term profitability of your book. But also, you need to give you a book every opportunity of being found. If that is a bookstore, then that's the pricing strategy you need to go for. If you pretty much think that book sales are going to be more online for you, then choose the lower option for roundabout 35 per cent. You've got the different marketplaces. Most of my books cells or the United States. And I'll get a few that come through from Australia and Canada are on m starting to see a different change in book sales through India. So you can set your price with Global Connect. That will be too many different parts of the world that Ingram actually distribute two. Now these are the, these are the different things that you should consider for your pricing. There's no one formula that will suit everyone's book. It is a personal choice. Some books work better online. Some books are better in brick-and-mortar stores. One thing you can use is the Ingram spark calculator. I'll go to the calculator so you can actually find out the difference in compensation you will receive based on the discount and your book price. What I'll do is add some details in here. I'm not going to use the ISBN. I'm going to do a typical book, let's say typical children's picture storybooks that I'll be using for the upload lesson. We're going to do color and I'm gonna do standard color binding top, I'm gonna do Paperback. Perfect bound. Page count is going to be 42. List price. I'm going to go 1499. Wholesale discount. I'm going to set that at 50 per cent. Market is United States. Okay, It's not letting me do this. I, here we go. We need to go glass. Let's just go 40. And let's try it again. So the publishing compensation is going to be $3.9014 dollars, ninety nine competitive for the book that I'm offering behind it, perhaps I need to go to $12.99 to make it competitive at 50 per cent. Calculate that, I'm going to receive $2.90 in Publisher compensation. That is quite reasonable. And if you think you're gonna be selling quite a few books. Then that will add up, particularly if your book's going to be around for the next ten years. You need to come up with a strategy that he's going to work. You need to choose what is the right strategy depending if it's paperback in hardback, some hardback books that I have, I just don't think there can be competitive enough to create a hardback because of the pricing on a to create, to even make anything. Because if we had this at $14.99 for hard back in gloss over making a navy if 90, $0.92. So if I need to make that 1799 and I make $0.58, That's where it's starting to get quite high. And that's where creating a hardback can sometimes cause challenges. So an $18.99, you're wondering if customers would buy a 40 page children's book for $18.99 us. Because I would be making a $1.08. Use the calculator to determine your book. If we if we go for a smaller book, If I went for a seven by ten, Let's have a look at the difference. We're going to go color, we're going to go standard. We're going to go hardback. Paperback, perfect bound, gloss, 40 pages. Let's see what it is now. It's $5.90. So it's quite a significant change from the processing we did have. For an eight by eight block by seven by ten, you get $4.90 at that iodine, those 99. If we went back to 1499, it's $3.90. The book size does make a big difference. The book top and the paper does make a difference. And whether you choose paperback or hardback, or at least price, just need to be competitive but attractive enough for customers. And you need to set your wholesale discount. That will also be attractive if you wanted to get into brick and mortar stores. So go over some more details when we're doing at upload, I just wanted to give you this information to base inflammation. So when we get to that stage, you have an understanding of what I'm talking to and referring to when I'm seeing my pricing. So remember, sit the book price, so it's competitive. Same thing about the wholesale discount. And whether you want the book to be attractive for a book, sorry, if it's attractive for brick and mortar stores and if your strategy is more for online stores. Finally, is it gonna be returnable or non returnable? You don't want books being sent back to you because you're going to have to cover that cost if you don't want them to. Think about. If you want your book returnable and non returnable. And if it's non returnable, is it gonna be attractive for bookstores to want to hold your book? If they've got excess amount, then they're gonna be stuck with them. And that's not gonna be attractive for the bookstore. That's where returnable and non returnable comes into place as well. Let's get ready for the next lesson. But I hope you got some good information from the pricing strategy that I talked about throughout this lesson. 24. More Detail into Returnable and Non Returnable Options: I wanted to go into a little bit more detail about the returnable and non returnable element of Ingram Spark. Because I don't want you to get caught out with having to pay for refunds that occurring because people are bookstores have decided to return your book. What can happen if you have returnable as an option when you upload your book? Is it a bookstore, as an example, could purchase 50 of your books. If they only happen to sell ten of those books, they are actually permitted to return the remaining 40 at your expense. Now why would you choose returnable? Well, it allows brick-and-mortar stores to take a calculated risk with getting your book. However, they also don't want to be left with extra inventory or your books, should they not be able to sell them? Otherwise, they'll, will be out of pocket themselves. So the risk comes back to you. You need to have confidence that your book is going to be selling. And the hard decision you need to make is, if I don't take returnable, will brick-and-mortar stores want to pick up my book and try and sell it. They won't obviously want to be buying in bulk because they won't have a returnable option. Let me show you my dashboard with a number of returns that I have. Some of the other things that I wanted to discuss in regards to returnable and non returnable as an option for Ingram Spark. So if I go to my dashboard and I look at the number of sales deceit a date so far, 300, sorry, 3,641, book sold, 46 returns. Therefore, net sales, three thousand, five hundred ninety five, forty six is just on 1.28%. I think around about that list is rounded down to one per cent. So I have a one per cent return rate. Now, what do I normally recommend in regards to returns? Well, it is up to you on what your objective is. I tend to have probably three cores of my books as non returnable near the books that I think will sell more online. So if you think you're going to have more of an online book strategy, that's the way to go. But if you want to get into more brick-and-mortar stores, then you may have to elect to allow for returns. You take on that risk. And that's the hardest element of it. I've tried a few different things. And as I said, probably 90% of my books non returnable because I don't want to take that risk. But I do have that 10% of my books that I feel would suit brick-and-mortar stores perfectly, my children's picture storybooks. And yes, I permit for returns to occur for those books. But as you can see, it's around about 1% so far this year. So it's not impacting me too much financially. It's around about $333 so far this year. So therefore, let me just summarize a few key points. Choose returnable if you want brick-and-mortar stores to carry your book. And you are prepared to where the financial risk of brick-and-mortar stores returning any bulk orders that they might undertake. Choose non returnable. If your strategy is more geared towards online bookstores. If you think that the market is more headed towards online books or book sales, or the kind of book that you're selling is more geared towards an online bookstore. Then select non returnable. Also select or choose non returnable if you're not prepared to where the financial risk of returns coming back to you. And you can sleep comfortably knowing that your book, unfortunately, it's probably unlikely to have bulk orders. So you've got to weigh that up. Do you want someone to come along and purchase a 100 of your books? You might benefit financially from that. But what happens if they purchase a 100 books and want to return 50 of them because they can't sell them. So it's a really hard one. It's an independent individual decision that you need to make. I can't make that choice for you because I'm not aware of the kind of books that you sell and your appetite for risk for having books returned as well. So I'm hoping that helps you give us some guidance about returnable and non returnable books as an option when you're self-publishing with England. 25. Category Selection: Selecting your categories will be something that you need to consider when you're uploading your book to Ingram spark. When you're uploading your book, it will provide you with a box that you can enter up to three different categories. I'm gonna show you an example of where this tool appear when you're uploading your book. But when we do get to the stage of uploading the book through that tutorial in this course. That will be a time where I'll enter the specific categories for that particular book. But for a moment, let's just have a look at how you can select different categories, the different categories that are available. And a way that you can actually do some research prior to uploading a book. So you're confident of selecting the right category, because it's important to get the right category so customers can find your book. If you include irrelevant categories, then your book is metadata won't match what you really intend customers to be searching for. And when your book goes to potentially bookstores, libraries, or other online book distributors, they need to match it with the right category. So let's have a look at what it looks like when you are uploading the book. And then we can look at different ways to get the right category before you upload. So when you are on your dashboard and you wanting to create your new book, you would enter the normal details under title, the language. We'll go into more detail about this in the tutorial or the lesson about uploading your book to Ingram spark. As we scroll down further, you can see where it says subjects. So what you need to do is find out what subjects is relevant for your book. We had a book about learning to write for students. And it might be a, it could be a longer form book about learning to ride. It could be a special activity book that is quite comprehensive and it's got different skills and activities and lessons that are built into that resource. What we would do is go to find subjects. So you could have alphabet. This. Then you can choose what it might stand for. Oh sorry, what it might be related to. When you do the categories. You can have a juvenile category and then have an adult category as well. It must either be adult categories or juvenile categories or non juvenile. Whatever it might be. A can't be a mixture of both. So if I'm looking at this book for a younger audience or not choose juvenile nonfiction alphabet. Then I add subjects. Might be. Let's have a look at another one. Handwriting. See if something comes up here. Here we go. So juvenile nonfiction, language arts, handwriting, into that one. There may only be two. That's applicable and that's okay. But you can add up to three. We might try it again. You can go to here. So if you want to go down, you can have a look at all the different juvenile nonfiction. So you might even do Activity Book general. So we go there and we can add that one as well. If you didn't think that was applicable, cross it out, go back to foreign subjects. You might have a look at other things that might be suitable for juvenile. Now, you can scroll all the way down. You can see all the different codes that are available or subject areas as suitable for your book. If this book, for example, we might get rid of this if this book was to do with, let's say, to do with habit development. So if we go here, we go health. Then you start to go down here and we get education. We might look at is different things here. What we're looking for is something that might be to do with habit development. So we might even go to personal development. Normally just put the first few letters in. So could be business development. You can have a look under here. You can even go for personal. And let's have a look, health and fitness, general personal growth. So that might be a good one there. That's juvenile low. So we might need the adult dose. So if we go back here and D growth, then we want to go self-help. Here we go. So we might have Self-help, personal growth, success, and we add that one. You just need to find the right. Categories. Now the way you can research that prior to using this is what they call it's listed here. It's called the BIC, AIC categories. What you need to do, you can just highlight that if you forget one of these. And I'm going to show you another way we can actually look up these categories before we start the upload process to help you get organized before that uploads starts. Therefore, we can just plug them in nice and quickly. If you just wanted to search through the subjects, you can do that as well when you're uploading. But let's, let me show you another way you can actually access this information without starting the upload process beforehand. So what you need to do is go to this website, be ISG.org, you go to BIS ASA codes and you go to Browse complete list. Now it gives you all the list of subject headings down here. If we went to, say self-help, and we look down here and we found the category that we wanted. If we go down here first, if we went to say fashion and style, all you need to do, it's actually copy the code right here. Copy this code. If I can actually get it, Let's start the other end. Copy. And if we copy that code and just put it in a blank Word document as part of that upload pre information. So it actually helped us with the upload process if we went to find subjects and actually put that code in. And I'll push search. Here it is right there. If we did another one. So if we go find subjects, Let's have a look at another one. Let's go to meditation's. So we haul out this, copy it and we enter it. There it is right there. So this will help you get the right category. And therefore you just added. And it's ready to go. Do that for me. Let's try that again. So we get their copy. We do the search, click on that one there, and then we add the subject and it comes up. That's how you can do your preparation early before you upload, list those on a document. And I'm going to show you how I prepare my books for uploading when we get to that listen. Therefore, it's gonna be easy for you to have the name of the book. There, any sub headings, the author categories, any descriptions, all that, all that information into one handy resource access when you're uploading. And that includes these categories. So that's where the categories are going to be. You just need to make sure that you're researching the correct categories and use this website to access them all for free. And it will give you a much better opportunity to rank your book under the right category and be found, which is most important. And as I said, you get the opportunity listing three categories in that section when you are uploading your book or subjects. So there you have it. That's the quick and easy access point for finding the right categories for your book when you're uploading to Ingram spark. 26. Backend Keywords - Adding Metadata For Your Books to Help Discoverability: Increasing your discoverability for customers to find your book. For bookstores to be able to locate your book that they might want for, even treat for their own bookstore, or even online bookstores that will help get your metadata in place so that when customers are searching for your book online, they can actually locate it. Now to help this, when you do upload your book, you're provided with a space to add keywords. Now we can add quite a few keywords in this space. But how do you find those keywords? All the keywords that you need to be, including things that customers are typing to search for your particular book. There's no point having irrelevant keywords and wasting this space. Ingram suggest having at least seven different keywords that customers are using to find your book. Now the metadata, or what we call metadata, is all of your information you're including when you upload the book. The keyword is a component of this metadata and it is gonna be very important. Now, I've used different techniques with this, and I just find it the most, oh sorry, the more keywords I can include in this box here, that beta for the long term, I don't exactly know what customers are searching for, but there are a few different ways we can find keywords that we can include. You can use different software, such as publisher rocket. We can use free software such as going to Amazon, kVp, the largest online bookstore in the world to find out what customers are searching for. And we can also use different techniques that will help us get these keywords. So I'm going to show you a couple of these techniques. You can then find what is most suitable for you. And you can then add the keywords. Importantly, create a spreadsheet with a list of keywords that there. And I'll show you a little technique that I use to include them in the spice. So let's get into the, the way that I find these keywords for my books. The first thing I'd recommend you do is just create a simple spreadsheet, have keywords and the name of the book. And what you then do is start at the different keywords that you locate. You can add. I think it's up to 500 characters for your keywords. So there's quite a few keywords you can add for this component when you upload your book. We want to list these keywords, get rid of anything that's irrelevant. And Kate, the ones that will include. So let's go to the different sources that we can find these keywords. And I'm going to be searching for keywords that are gonna be relevant for my sam and Ted visit the doctor book. I'll use that book when we're doing our upload process. So let me use it as a real-life example. So the first place I'll visit these Amazon and I'm actually going to set it as a US postal code because that's probably where most people are searching for in Amazon.com. Amazon.com under the bestsellers books. And I can actually change it to all departments because I would just want to do it. So I've done a quick little search before of different keywords that might come up. So let's just go through what I started with Dr. Massaro, toddler doctor. And then I have a look in down here and see if there's any books. He's a toddler. Dr. book is one. So I'd go to my spreadsheet and brought that down. Then I go back to amazon again. And I'd see if there's any other books here that similar. Now the while being able to do this is by a Chrome extension. And it is this one just here. It is. A good suggestion. Expand. It's a free download you can get from Chrome that you can plug-in, which will provide you with all these extra keywords that are coming on. So I'll show you again, It's called IMs. So until the guy there is a suggestion expand. I'm going to go and write something different here. So now we do doctor visit. And you can have a look doctor visit book for toddlers. Someone wrote that down. I go back again. Any else? Is log books or logbook? Is anything else here? Maybe if we did doctor visit for kids, we need to do that. Doctor visit. Kid's book. Doctor visit. Again, these are things that customers are searching for. These ones right here. So what I need you to do is to go to Amazon, start typing things that you think customers are searching for, and then write down the different keywords that are showing up that people would then click on. So if we did kid's book doctor visit, I'm going to write that down. Kid's book doctor visit. And these are the books that are coming up. Now, what we could do is we could go to one of these books here. So we go to if we need, we need books for to see if this works. So I'm going to click on this here. And I'm going to go to a different website and show you a different technique. And this website is called Amazon Dash ice and.com. You can see that up here. We need to do is plug in the odd the ISBN or the ice and number from Amazon. That will then show you the book. You scroll down. And it will show some main keywords from the book. They may or may not be suitable. If there's any that are suitable, write them down. I'm gonna go back and see if there's another book I can add. So let's have a look here. See if there's any books that might do. Might go back to the doctor. And let's see what books come up. So we go down here. Let's have a look at this one here. So I'm going to click on there, go back to this website. I'm going to paste it. You can search. The book comes up. This will show this is all free by the way. Again, Amazon Dash, Iceland.com. We're just trying to get keywords. Some books are going to show plenty keyword, others may not show any. So we keep going down. Probably not many on that one. Let's go back and try one more book. Picked another book. Going to the doctor. Again, it's got a few home dr book has come up a couple of times. It's Ahmad edit home dr. Book. At that one. Now I'm going to go to a different site now. And you may not always get the keywords from these sites, but it definitely does help. So let me go to different, so mighty saving, just go Google. And if I just put home kids, Dr. Book, and let me go down here and it will provide with you. So this is called Keywords Everywhere. Keywords Everywhere. This is another Chrome extension. And you can have a look and see the different ones here. So we thought we might do is just go export. That will provide us with a CSV file. And we're going to click here, bring it up. And I'm going to copy these here. Copy them. Go to my spreadsheet, and I'm going to add them, rot there. So that's another way you can get it. So it's called keywords everywhere. It's a Chrome extension. So, so far got 11 different keywords from something that I can use for free. Now there's a couple of other paid ways you can do it. So there's publisher rocket, which is this one right here. I've already plugged this in. Publisher rocket is a one-off payment. If I go back to Home, is a platform or software, you pay once to about a 100 US dollars and you have lifetime access to it. It provides you with different keywords, searches, competitor analysts category searches. There's plenty of information you can find. If you wanna do a keyword search, you can do other books, kindle or audible were just do books. And we just talk. Dr. If you go get a rocket and it'll bring up the books here. So if we go to doctor visit, this will bring up different keywords. It will also provide competitive schools to tell you how many people are searching for it as well on Amazon. So this farther from city one searches this book. A doctor visit board book. Mine's not a board book. A board book is usually square and that thick cardboard. But you could put it in as a keyword, but I don't want customers searching for that because mine's not a board book. It's irrelevant, irrelevant keyword, but there might be other ones. You can have a look here. Let's go kids Dr. Kids Dr. Books which have already got their kids doctor to have that one on there. I'll get rid of this one. Kids Dr. Note on that one. What you can do is use these platforms to get your keywords. Once you've got your key words, we can then add those to our list. When we're adding or when creating a document for uploads. And that's a feature list and coming up very shortly, we're going to show you everything you need to get together in preparation for the upload and having these keywords is part of that process. So keep searching. Do Google searches use Keywords Everywhere, use KP, use Publisher rocket if you want to. I've mentioned book bulk before, book bolt, have an opportunity where you can actually search for keywords are quickly show you that now. And I've just signed into my book bolt account. So I go two keywords and you can go search, and then you can find different keywords. So if we do dr book, let me do a search. This will provide different keywords that people might be searching for. So it's another algorithm that you can say. So you can see the most frequent keywords here to see if there's any that might come up. You can have a look through. It's going to Dr. book toddlers. Did we have that one? And some and some of them may or may not make sense, but it's what customers are searching for. So you've got to include it because there's some weird and wonderful ways that people search for books. So that's my list. I might continue to add to that list depending on what keywords are fine. But make sure you save this list somewhere. Then we're going to create a document which has got all the information on it for where I upload to Ingram Spark and adding these key word is one of one of those processes. So keep that there. And the other thing you can do once you have your keywords, you need to have a semicolon after each of these keywords. So there is actually a, a free platform that you can convert all these to a semi-colon. I'll show you that now. This website is called indeed limb.co. What I need to do is insert my keywords, which is just here. So we're going to copy these, go back to this at them. Now, what we wanna do is add our semicolon. And then what we do is push them across there. Sometimes you add the spice latte at the spice. And we can just go through here. Hold that space there. Just add the capital. I like couple to go. Just like that. Then what we can do is select the whole lot. I'm just going to copy it. Then what I'm doing is going back to my spreadsheet and I can add them, rot there. So then when I do come to the upload process, they are all set. So I'm going to save this keyword list now, ready for upload later on for England Spock. So hopefully that helps you with the different keywords and load heading keywords for that applied process. 27. Developing Your Book Description: Welcome to this lesson. I just wanted to quickly cover off adding your description along with adding the keywords as part of your metadata, it's important to add a good description. The description will capture the customer's attention, and therefore, you need to have a bit of structure around what that description looks like. So let me just go to a document that I've created, including an example of a description that I provided for, that I created for the habit switch. And this might just give you a little bit of an idea of the steps that I took and the reasoning behind the description. Now when you've created your description, then you need to put it into the description box. When you're uploading the book, I'll show you where that description boxes right now. It's on page one when you're uploading the book. And I'll get to the upload stage in a few lessons time. But we'll be entering the description right here. So let me grab a description that I've already created. And therefore, you can just see some of the features that are available for the description using these different options up the top here. So let me go and grab a description. I'll include it here and then we can make some adjustments. By using these elements. I'll just grabbed my description from a Word document and pasted it. That's all I've done for the moment. Now, the box here allows you to include minimum 200 to 400 bytes. So you can see this one is closing in on the 4 thousand. What you can do, you can have a look at the different areas here. So if I highlight it, It's a heading two. So if I wanted to reduce it to hitting three, I can I can highlight different areas that I can add. Bold if I wanted to. I can underline or italic. I can. Different features that I can also use Grammarly, which is jumping in right now to help me fix it. Now some of these, I'm going to dismiss that one comes saying get rid of the comma. So this is why I like Grammarly, because there's actually, you can attach it to your platform to be able to reach in and make sure the spelling and grammatical, grammatical areas are increased or improved. As you go through. What we need to do is just make sure that I've got everything here, all my life to highlight this just here. And I've got the dot points already. If you wanted to, you can highlight that a whole section. And you do have numbers, numbered lists right here. And it goes down. So what I've done here is I've got the main heading and then I'll go into the body of it. The reason why someone would want to buy the book, and I'll go into the structure soon. I've also got different things or product features about the book. And then I've also got a call to action at the bottom here. Once I've done that, then I can leave and I can then go into the keywords. So that's how you include your description. But let me just go into a little bit more information about the description and the format and structure of that. That might actually help you with your books in the future. It's like creating a captivating description. The key tips create a headline that captures the attention of the customer number to include key product features. Number three include headings and dock points for include a call to action. And five, if you want to use Grammarly, either free or a subscription to check for errors. So this was more description. So what I've done credit headline. So do you want to change your habits and change your life? Include key product features which have got in here as well, and including the headings of dot points. I've also got questions about how that might suit the reader when they're going through. Give me an example. So have you ever tried to improve your diet fitness, or your financial success but keeps slipping back to your airways. Have the plans you've previously tried to implement focus more on the short-term outcomes rather than lasting success that long-term supportive habits can build. Do you find that the popular trends are not providing you with the results you'd hope for. Are you looking for an easy but sensible approach that you can build around your current lifestyle. If so, is this solution, the habits which I've got a few questions in there. I mean, to bring the reader or the customer into questioning. Yes. I think that's something that I need. I guess I do really want that. I will also bring them into a situation where they're thinking through their daily habits in their structure and they're supportive habits. Then I bring together why someone should buy the book and what credibility that I have. Then I go into the different dot points. Then they might be a bonus involved here and then the call to action. So that's what I've included for the habits which, but I wanted to bring to your attention the key tips when you're creating it. And also, if you want to get Grammarly, then I recommend that. Now this document here is included in the resource that I'm providing at the end of the course. So you can download that resource and this information is in there. So it'll be easy to access and you can have a look at those key tips through that document. So hopefully that helps. And remember to make your description, spend some time on it, get it right because it's what captures the attention of the customer. And you need to ensure that it's correctly placed into the right area when you're uploading your book. But I'll show you more of that when we go to upload the book in a future lesson. 28. Getting Prepared Before the Uploading Stage: We are now getting very, very close to the exciting process of uploading our book. But first, what we need to do is get ourselves organized. We need to streamline all of the information. So when we do apply the book, it is on hand. Now I've created a template and I'm gonna be showing you that template in a moment and I'll actually complete it and have the final form or do they go? Now in that template, I have different things that I include. What I need to include, things such as the title, the subtitle, the ISBN. Language I'm using is the categories that are particularly want my book to go into or wherever keywords for that back, back into metadata. I've also need to have the trim size. What kind of book MR. going to be creating is a paperback or hardback. How many pages does my manuscript contain? What color paper will I be using? Is it a standard black or white? Is it a standard color? Was it a premium color? Is there a discount that I'm thinking I multiply with my pricing then with the files. Do I have my PDF version of my cover and my manuscript ready to go? Then finally, is there any discount codes that are going to apply? We avoid the upload processing fee. Let's get into the lesson. I'm going to show the template to start with. Then I'll fill it in and it will be prepared for the next lesson, which is the upload process. And these are all the different things we need to have organised. This is the template and there are quite a few, but it's important to have all of this information listed. Some of them only take a few seconds to include. Some of them take a little bit longer, but it sees preparation that you do that will help make the process much more streamlined when you do upload your book. Let me go ahead and I'm going to complete all these sections for my book. When I do get to the upload process, it's so much easier to refer to that copied across and it makes the process much easier. So I'll go and complete the details right now. And I've now completed all the information based on those subheadings. So I've got my title, my subtitle, I've got my ISBN, the language I'm using, the description which I've put in there already. I'm going to be the author. My different categories, like keywords that I've got now and I've got a semicolon. So I'm just going to fix this one here. I just noticed that one put semi-colons in there. The book trim size will be an eight by eight inch hardcover, 42 pages. It is a hardcover book, paper top. I'm going to do standard color. I might look at the premium just depends on what the price is, the price of the book. I anticipate it's going to be about $16.99 based on my competitors, based on trying to get an okay compensation based on this book. Wholesale discount will be 50 per cent. See if I can get it into brick and mortar stores, then I've got my checklist. So have I got my manuscript in PDF format, ready? Is my cover in PDF format also ready? And do I have the upload discount code really, if it's applicable. So I've got all this information now. The next step will be going through the official process of uploading the book to Ingram Spark. So I'm excited to show you through that process. Let's get into it. But before you do, if you haven't already go and prepare all of your information. So you have it all at hand. It's nice and easy there for when you go through the upload. Hopefully that is helpful for you and it gives you an insight into what I do in preparation for the upload process. 29. IngramSpark Upload Process: This is a really exciting part of the course. It's the part where I actually upload the book to Ingram Spark. Now it's gonna be quite a long lesson. So just make sure you've got everything ready. Now, when I do upload the book, I've been prepared, I've got myself organized and I've got all my files ready to go. Now there'll be parts of this upload process that I'll go through slowly just to make sure we cover everything off because there's some really important things that we need to do. So without delaying anything any further. Let's get into this lesson about the upload process for Ingram spark. Now I'm about to walk you through the upload process, so I have my documents ready. Now. I need to sign into my dashboard and I'll start the process from the very beginning. So you have an understanding of what you need to do when you're uploading your book. Step number one is to sign into your account. So I'm going to login now. And this is, once you've created your account, you'll be able to do this. The next step we need to do is go to titles. And we're not going to do is choose to add a title. So just up here, I'll click Add Title. What are they need to do is choose what option. Which do. Is it a print and a book? A print book only, or a book only? In this instance, I'm going to choose a print book only. I click this button here. Now what do I need to do is click which one is appropriate. Do you have with false ready for upload? Yes, I have all my files. I've got my manuscripts and I've got my cover. They're both in the PDF format. You can also have now, I would like to see the available options for creating the false or no, but I'll enter my title information in files later. This one is applicable to me. So then says, great, that means you had the following properly formatted files. Do you all have the print jacket or cover that's in the PDF and the print interior. I click both of those because I do have them. Well, would you like to do you can either print, distribute, and sell your book globally or only printed book. So you choose this option if you just wanted to sell the, have the book available for your business. For example, if you had a conference coming up and you just wanted the book, he didn't want to be selling that book globally through the 40 thousand distribution channels. And you just want it to have that book available so you can go to your dashboard, just get them orders copied. So order is printed and you can get them shipped to you. But we're going to go to print, distribute, and sell book. The next page on now need to start entering the title information. So this will go in here. So what I need to do is go and get my document. And I've got all my information here to go. So I'll copy each of these sections. Go here, click, Paste. Next. One language. I can choose any of these languages that my book is going to be uploaded too. So if your book is written in English, we click English. If it was written in Japanese, you click Japanese, plenty of different languages to choose from. So I'm gonna go English, the print ISBN. I'm gonna go back here. I'm going to copy this. Then I go and enter that in their publishing rights. I own the copyright or hold necessary publishing rights, or this is a public domain work. The public domain work is something that's available freely to the public on the internet. Mine is my own. I hold the rights to these, so I'll click that button there and it will go into information about does your title includes someone's name, the name of famous company include trademarks are pitches include peaches copied and pasted from the web. Include the work is someone other than yourself or include any misleading covering inflammation. And I'll click No. If it applies to you. Yes. My title includes one or many of the above if that applies to you, but mine definitely does not. Click No. Now the next bit is this one just here. So this is we add the subtotal. Sometimes you miss it. Quite easy to miss. Make sure you take that. And I'll need to go and click my subtitle, which is just here. Copy it. Go back here. Click Done. Now it doesn't have a series. Name. Is your book part of the series? If you're unsure about any of these, just click on the little question mark and that will bring further information will help for you to decide. Now it's my books not part of a series at this point in time. Series number, addition name, or addition number. You can remember click on any of these if you're not sure, and that will go through and clarify if you need to enter that information. So keep going down. Authors and contributors. So this is where you can include the author's nine. We can include the illustrator, can include many different things, depends what you want to do. So I'm going to keep as author, I'm gonna have my name. I'm not going to have more middle or suffix. And you can also have different information here as well. So you can include a biography about yourself, any contributor, prior work, Any affiliations you might have. You can also include this information if it's applicable to you. Now, I could include my biography and Ahmad do that on this occasion to show you. So I'm going to go and grab my biography information and include it in this section just here. So I've now included that information in there. Any contributor prior work and include that as well. You can add a contributor. If you had an illustrator, then you can add that there as well. So you can go down to whereas Illustrator, illustrator. If you had an illustrator, you can include those details there. You can put whatever you want to. You can leave that if you need to. So you can just delete that and you don't need it. Categorize your title so you can include what they call the imprints. Now you can have your your publishing name if you want to. We can have your own name. It just needs to be an imprint name that will appear in the book or on the back of the book. This is part of the metadata that will go in. It sometimes doesn't appear on the back, it will just appear within the metadata and against your ISBN number. Include the selected imprints. So you can go here. This is the imprint name is displays the publisher on most retail sites if you want the imprinted be different than your business. Don't click the link to add another imprint. I'm going to leave mine. There's a lot of graduate publishing group. Now this is the subjects, this is where I need to go and choose those subjects that are head. So if we go find subjects, and I'm going to go to my document and I'm just gonna get rid of that one. And I'm going to go down here. And I'm going to choose this route. They're copied that code, go back and I'm going to enter that code there and go search. And then I click on that one and I add, I'll do it again. I'm gonna go to a different code. This is my second category. You are allowed up to three categories. Click that one and then add. And then I'm gonna do one more. Now remember, when you're adding the categories, if you start with, say, juvenile fiction, you can't then add an adult, a category, it must remain with juvenile. So I'm gonna add my third, which is this one just here. Go back. I'm going to find subjects into the code. It's not coming up this time. Now comes up, click that one, and add. So now I've got three. So it says here, you can select the category credit code to help potential buyers and retailers and distributors in search engines understand what you're talking about. Such required. So you can have one because that's required. But three helps ensure the broadest discovery for your title must be accurate and specific to what your book is about. Let's click out of that. I've added my three subjects or categories. Select the audience. This is where you need to select what age appropriate is your book. So if you go juvenile, which mine is, or we can select, usually trade general, if my book was a book about habits, habit development, od clicked trade general. You can have a young child if your book is for failing to 18-year-olds, if it's a professional scholar. So I would say science textbook or some sort of book about accounting as doing a qualification for accounting or engineering, then you might do professional scholar, if it was, say, a science textbook for schools, and you might choose that one or a college textbook. So you can choose different ones. So it might be four high schools, elementary or college. This occasion, on this occasion I'm choosing juvenile. Now, it is an opera, so it is compulsory because of this red asterix to choose the age range. So my book is gonna be suitable for 32 probably. Maybe eight-year-olds. And the grade range would be K. 23 or four probably would do three. I can show more fields to improve the optimization. Now this is when you can add extra bits in here that will help the metadata. So Rachel subject into the primary geographical location works information on stories about if a if a work covers multiple locations is better select a broader, more inclusive region. I don't normally fill this in, but you can fill this in if you want to. Because mine isn't specific to a country. It could be any English speaking country. So you can include that if you want to now Fermat subjects. Subjects or category codes are used by global retailers. Bookstores, libraries published is described as content for international discovery. So this might be helpful. If you click subjects here. You can then go through and choose what might be suitable for you. So I'm gonna go through and just have a quick look at these Society. So mine is about health. So if you keep having a look down here, if there's anything that is suitable here we go, health relationships and personal personal development. So mine is more about a family and health. So we'll have a look here. And there's probably not a lot Drucker probably choose from if I go to mind, body, and spirit, Let's have look here, see if there's anything that might help. Is nothing that is going to be a bad show visiting the doctor. But let's have a look. Keith is any others here? Have a look. Can't see any amount, pause it and see if I can find a suitable. And I found one here, Children's Health. So I'm going to click children's health. You can also do foreign qualifiers. So is there anything here that is suitable? Again, don't click it. If it's not. For all educational levels. The preschool learning, possibly. So I'm going to click that one, their table of contents. You can include the table of contents if your book has a structure or a high-content book that has different set of contents. So for example, my habits, which book I had a list of contents that I included in here. Now this particular book is a children's picture storybook. Therefore, it doesn't have a table of contents. Now, you can click here again as well. You can find out some more information about what you can include. Here is a good opportunity to add more metadata. If you do have a table of contents that you can add in that section. Review quotes. If you're, if you've already got some review quotes by a launch team, then you can include these review quotes in this section here. Now, the review quotes, they need to be authentic. They need to be genuine and real, and you must include where they're from as well. Now you can structure them so you can have different text sizes, so you can adjust all of that information at this point in time, this book is brand new. I don't have any review quotes, are not going to include those that this point in time and the upload. But if you do have review quotes, you could include them here. The total description. This is where you have the information about the book and a descriptive copy appropriate for public display. Display described the working straight forwarding, consumer-friendly terms. Bolding key sentences can help your work stand out in certain websites. This is where I go back to my Word document and I've got my description right here. So I'm going to highlight this on this occasion. This book is a hard cover book. So I'm going to copy that there. And just made sure everything is in place. So you can highlight anything if you want to. You can change the color as well. You can even change the color. So you might have a blue and you can change that. You might have some other words that you would like, just making sure that all the spelling is correct. I've got some Grammarly which is picking up these grammatical changes I need to make. And then you can also change any headings you want to along this bit here, I just go through the spaces if you need to. Just check everything is suitable because what you want to do is make sure everything is accurate as he can to start with, you can always adjust the description. There's no charge. For adjusting the description, but we'll get charged if you change your cover or your manuscript once you've published the book. But the description can be changed at a later date. So let's keep going down here further. Make sure it's all good. And I can see that that's all good. Now, you can have 4 thousand bytes of only use 1297. Now, the keywords, this is where we need to add those keywords that I grabbed, which are all here. So you've got the semicolon which separates each of them. So I'm going to copy all of those. I'm going to go back here and I'm going to paste All my keywords have been included. Says here. You can use up to 500 characters total. Include keywords in your book description to help with discovery of your book, include terms and phrases that potential buyers may search for. Let's click out of that. So I've included my keywords. Now, all this information really helps with your metadata. So we're going to click here and you can do a short description. Now the short description is going to be short. It's only 250 bytes. That's already saying 11. I'm not sure why there's already something being used because I haven't added anything yet. But let's go back here. And we might see if all of this, if I do this and copy this bit, Let's have a look here. Paste that. And you can already see that it's exceeded the 250 bytes. So that's where you just need to try and get something that's fairly short and concise. So let me try and shorten that now. These under the 250 parts permitted, and I've made that quick adjustment. So it still flows. And I need to add the full stop. And you can see how it's under the 250 parts. Next thing you need to do is click Continue. We're now up to the print information. So this section just here, select the trim size. So these are all the trims sizes that I can choose from. I'm going to choose the eight by eight inch, which is just here. I can then choose the different interior color and paper. So I'm going to choose color. And then you can either do standard, standard color 70 or premium. I'm gonna use a standard color 70. You could choose if you wanted to, the black and white. If you choose, chose black and white, then you just do the white, black and white printed on £50 PayPal. But on this occasion, I'm choosing the standard color 70 on the 70 ounce paper. The Barney. Do I want paperback or hardback? In this instance, I'm choosing the hardback and I can choose the case lemonade. If I need paper back, I can do perfect bound. That's a glued sperm with cold lemonade, but I'm doing the hardback, which case lemonade or they're there. I choose the cover, finish. I'm choosing gloss. Now you can choose Matt as well. I choose gloss for any books that are going to be handled a lot because I find that the gloss is easier to clean. The mat sometimes has, you can see little fingerprints and, and marks and some quite a bit harder to remove. So for a children's book on choosing the gloss and the hardback covers off, think, look better in gloss as well. The book top. So this is going to be standard color, eight by eight inch. And on they're going to choose or do the page count. So my book is 42 pages. Now the market. It's gonna be in the United States. You can also choose any other countries as well. I'm just going to choose the United States in the United States dollar. And this will tell me the printing costs. So print costs and earning shown do not include GST or any other taxes. If I went back here and I'll change this to standard. So let's have a look. Idols 51 for standard color, 70 on 50 ants paper, it goes to $7.90 for premium, Tindall is 37. So you can see the differences. If I was to do paperback and I'll change it the perfect bound, then it's gonna be $3.70. So you can see the change in the cost based on hardback paperback. The color adds up favorite, look a lot more so we can make sure it's color standard hardback finish. This needs to adjust again, I'm just going to do this solid adjusts automatically. Not sure why it's not changing to the cost. Just want to make sure everything here we go. The page count which I have. So I'm just gonna do 42 if I do applicable and down. That's reverted back to a $1.51. So the color, eye, color, standard color, hardback case, lemonade, gloss, tells me the book top of the page count of lift that in the United States, but she could select other countries if you want that different pricing to show you what it's going to cost. Now, our print pricing. So what does he say here for detailed information at pricing, your book for England's global distribution, clicky so he could go there and review. But as I mentioned in a previous lesson, you need to get the pricing right. Now. I've suggested in here that the processing then I'm going to have this book is $16.99. Let's have a look what that works out to be based on the printer cost of prints. Also the pricing which is just here. Then calculates all the process here for me based on need, not It's States pricing structure that are set. What we need to do is to work out our wholesale discount. Now this is something of a gray area that I'm still trying to work through regarding the best offer. Now, remember, if you want your book or if you think your book is going to be placed in libraries or even more brick-and-mortar stores, then you need to offer a wholesale discount that's gonna be attractive for those stores. You can set it as high as 55% and every retailer preference. Now, the brick-and-mortar store won't receive that full fifty-five percent in content group to receive a percentage of that butt. It's a personal decision that you need to consider what your best options are. I'm going to set mine at the moment at 50 per cent with our other. And I'm going to set it at 50 per cent. But let's have a look and see what I'm getting in return as well as kappa is compensation. So see how it's negative. I need to set the book price so that it is a compensation in the positive. At the moment, it's just under $1. I might even consider going into 45 per cent. And it's a wonderful and 93, I'm probably going to lay that 45 per cent. I think the bookstores, which still hold my book, if it's at 45 per cent, but that's the very low end. Gotta be conscious and not overpricing my book as well at $18.99. I think that is right on the border of potentially being a little bit too expensive. But for the compensation, I need to ensure that being the negative either. That's where creating the hardback is a challenge. Paperbacks is a lot easier to do the pricing, bidding. This example, creating the hardback, I wanted to show you. The processing unit is set up for the retail and with the wholesale discount would be if a bookstore purchase your book. Now the return option, you can do know, which means that if a bookstore ordered 50 of your books and I didn't sell them, then you would not be liable for that cost. The catch is, bookstore is unlikely to put your book on sale in the bookstore if I can't return them because they don't want to be holding excess stock, but they can't get rid off. Now. You can have yes. Deliver. If you did yes. Deliver. Yes, deliver means that they can return them and there'll be delivered back to you at a cost. So if a bookstore ordered 50, they only sold five, you'd have 45 returned to you at your cost. And that can be very expensive and can be not a great invoice to get from Ingram when you have to pay that. You can also have yes. Destroy. Yes. Destroy. If we go to here, yes, Destroy means copies can be returned Ingram and you will not receive a physical copy. Opponents return. If you select this option, you will be charged for the current wholesale cost of each copy returned. But now she being in handling fees will apply, will destroy any return copies received. This option is selected. Also, changing the return status for a title can have a negative impact on your profits. It's a really tricky one, very, very tricky. If you wanted in a brick-and-mortar store, then I would probably select Yes. Destroy to begin with. C. If brick-and-mortar stores or potentially carrying your book. Again, the transparency by Ingram to tell you here your books are selling doesn't show at this point in time. I'm really hoping that that changes in the future. But I'm going to have yes, destroy. If I feel like it's gonna be solved more online, I would have no If my book was a more of a journal for grandparents to discuss their lives and to write things in it, which I've done books before. I have returned as no, because I know that 99% of those books or online books and not even have that at 35 per cent. And I'd have no. Therefore, my compensation is going to be $3.83 if the book is purchased online. In this instance? I'm not really sure, but I'm going to start and give it every opportunity to be carried in a bookstore. And I'm going to do is destroy. I want them I don't want the books returned to me. If a bookstore over orders, can you imagine if they accidentally pushed to order 200 copies and they sold farther than the new head, 195 copies that were returned to you at your cost. So you just need to be careful with that. United Kingdom on now working through the different countries. So this is English pound, euro, Canadian dollars, Australian dollar, US dollar down here. So I'm going to choose the same option for this as well. 45 on under yes, destroy European Union. I'm going to do the same 45 per cent. And I'm going to destroy Canadian dollars are gonna do 45% and I'm going to have yes, Destroy Australia. Now, you might note that there's no pricing here. That's because the books are printed the United States. What I do is tend to match it with the Australian dollar because there's not a great deal of difference, is a little bit of difference, but not a huge difference between the Canadian and the Australian dollar. So I'm gonna do twenty-three dollars. And if I did the 45 per cent here, it'll give me a good indication of what it's going to be. $3, I could probably reduce her price to 23, and I might do that down to 22. Therefore, that the author compensation after all the printing costs that I would receive if a book is sold. Global Connect, that's where you could sell books in India and other countries around the world are normally match it with the United States pricing. And then I can also do 4545 per cent here as well. And you see there's no option here for years, destroy it. You might like to increase it if you want to encourage international countries to purchase your book, if you did 15%, then that would do it at $1, will just under $1. And that could be an option, do you think will probably wouldn't be selling many books internationally through markets like India. So I'm happy to make it a bit more attractive for them. Then you need to click these boxes. I understand that applying a discount less than 55% and limit the likelihood the bookstores in some markups will purchase my title, which can limit the titles reach. I'm going for 45, so on. I'm going under 55 per cent. That I understand that and I understand the risks involved with doing that. I understand that slitting, Yes. Destroy return option means copies of the title can return to Ingram and I will not receive a physical copy in return, but I'll be charged the current wholesale cost of each copy. So the wholesale price will be charged for. So you need to keep that in mind. And I accept all prices. Understand the automatic currency conversion reflects the pricing ended today, but will not automatically updates the value of each currency top changes outside of my account. The Australian dollar or the US dollar rises or falls. That could change the pricing structure that is listed just here. So you need to make sure that with your pricing that you're not going to have it. So goes in the negative because you do not want a negative return appearing on your account. So just accommodate that as well. And I think Ahmad even have to change this because I would prefer to have crossing over dollar in cases fluctuations in different pricing structures and Ingram of pain known from time-to-time to increase their printing costs. And what you need to do is go back into your account and adjust every single price if you start to go into the negative, so you'd better, it's best to have pricing structure that allows for increases in printing costs. Now we go down here, Print Options enabled look inside the book. If your book is going to appear from Ingram, Ingram onto, for example, Amazon. Amazon have a look inside feature and some other online bookstores too as well. So you can click this box if you want a look inside, which is generally the first ten per cent of the book. Large texts addition is a large text. Mine is not. And he's a right to left content. No. So I'm just going to leave that blank. Publish publication dates. Then you can just put that as today's date or whenever in the future this bookmark be available. So I'm going to select, I'm going to go to the July, show more fields to improve. So you can click here and you can do an on-site guide if you wanted to. I don't normally do on cell digest publication date. Then I go Continue. Now this is where I enter my information for the prints and the print cover. Notice how it must be in a PDF format and you can exceed 1.5 gigs. So I'm going to click Upload and go and get that title ready. I'm just going to click on one manuscripts, go open. So this is the interior white for this to load up. That will allow me to sorry. That will give me the time just to see as it loads up. And once it gets to the end, it is uploaded. And then I'm gonna do my print cover. So I'm just going to wait for this to load up. Then once the grain upload liners disappeared and you see that your information is uploaded. Now I'm going to do the same with the cover. Make sure you get the right files in the right places so you don't want to be uploading your cover into this section and your interior into this section. So once they both uploaded, you can see the PDF has been done. Once you've done that, just double-check everything here. So Sam and Ted visit the doctor. I've got my ISBN, the publication date and the book top. Just make sure that these all accurate and now we go continue. So next step is the title metadata validation. So this will tell you whether they picks up any little areas are not. So the total metadata has no errors. Sometimes you get some content file validation error. Now, it may or may not pick it up, but you can sometimes have a red box that appears. Now we'll just wait and see whether that appears or not. And it says My Content files have now areas. Now there could be a red box that pops up here. And it says that some of your colors may not print up as you expect. But it'll have a little check box down the bottom that you can take and say, I accept that. Now I've had that Eric come up and I've ticked it and I've never had an issue with the printing, the colors have come up as expected. The other error that I have previously had when I first started was decided fonts hadn't been imbedded. Now you need to make sure that your fonts are imbedded when you're saving it as a PDF and go back to a previous lesson when I mentioned that as well. So once you have both validations ready, time to continue. Just check all the information here. Make sure you got the title, the author, the trim size, what color paper? What's type of paper? Is it a case Lemonade, which is the hardback lemonade top. I'm doing gloss 42 pages and ISBN. Now in your order summary here, it'll tell you the pricing. So we've got our digital cover setup fee and the digital book block setup fee, collectively, forty-nine dollars. Now what I'm going to do is enter my promotional code. Now, I'm going to do that. I can actually use a special code that came through from Ingram that I had an email for earlier this month. And I'm going to use that code. Or I could use my ally membership code that allows me five free uploads per month. And you can review one of the earlier lessons about using codes for this because we want to make sure that we've when possible, but we don't have to pay the 49 volts. So let me just go to that e-mail where it gives me a free upload. And this is the code that expires August 31, 2022. So sweet savings on top that in to my promo code area in Ingram as I'm sitting at my title, now got sweet savings as the e-mail suggested, that's applied and invalid promo code. So I need to go back and make sure I'm entering the correct primary code. And I've entered it again and it has worked. So there we go. So the 0 total, which is great, saving me 49 US dollars. Now I need to make sure everything's good now, I can't stress this enough. You need to make sure that you've double, triple checked your cover and your manuscript to make sure everything is accurate as you want. As I've mentioned previously, if you have something that's inaccurate on your cover or inaccurate in your manuscript and the book is goes through the process. You will have to pay a $25 fee to make those changes. So please make sure you check everything for any small little areas that you should be changing right now before you click Submit, make sure you do everything that accurate. Make sure you're checking the title, Everything's there. The cover file is accurate and your interior fall is accurate. Are now gonna go agree. And I submit. Now this will now go through the process for approval. Now the next stage will be a email from Ingram for me to check that my file is accurate. So it says, congratulations, your title submission was successful. So please allow one to two business days for technical fall review. I'll show you that a mile and there's a review that we need to do of that file called a proof copy. And once we're happy with that proof copy, we send it through. We click Okay and acknowledge that everything is ready and it is ready for distribution. So I'm going to now await the approval e-mail from Ingram and once that's received, all film, the next lesson. 30. The Internal Review and Approval Process: Welcome to the lesson. I'm excited to say that I've now received an email from Ingram spark to let me know that my book is really to prove and to hopefully give the approval. But before we get there, let me just run through the approval process once that book has been uploaded. So we've done now uploading process, which was the previous lesson. Now there's an internal review by England to make sure it meets all the specifications. Then you will receive an email which are now have. So I'm going to show you that email and we're going to go through the approval process to make sure everything is accurate and as we want it to be. Then we previewed that PDF document and then we approve it and it goes live. So let me go to that e-mail. I'll show you what that looks like. And then I'm going to go through the approval process to make sure that everything that I'll want ease in place because this is the critical time if you are to make changes at the time is right now. So let's get to that e-mail. This is the email that I received from Ingram looking at the date. It took that 2.5 days for it to come through. Now, what I need to do, I can either log into my account or I can approve it by the approved April fraud here. So what I'm gonna do is click on that right now. Now I need to login to my account. I'll now be taken to the page where it has titles pending your approval. It will have the thumbnail of the cover. You'll have the ISBN, your book title. What you need to do is hover over the book title and click. Then it comes up what this says in total approval in reviewing a proof, please note that the title cannot move forward without your approval. If you see typos or want to make changes to your texts, you'll have to make those in your original file and upload to revise fall. In reviewing the proof, you should look for issues related to the look of your book, including takes two images cutoff or pages. All pages are running together. Images that have moved or blurry font so characters not displaying properly on the screen colors representative and will not precisely match the final version. Click on the title below to download the proof. So what we do, we have a look at these details, make sure the title matches what we want. It got your ISBN and the format. I want hardback case lemonade. In this example, we scroll down, we have a look at details. Then what we need to do is download it or get an e-mail. I'm going to download the proof or what I call the proof. And I'm going to double-check everything. So it's downloading now. Just wait for it to download. They want to do is click on it. And this will take me to the page. Now you will have a first couple of pages that are Ingram Spark pages. Of course they're not going to appear for you. We scroll down and it'll go through some information talking about a proof hair lines. So when reviewing a proofs and PDFs, you'll often see hair lines. These thin lines are result of a transparency flattener. Each pod PDF creators and will sometimes appear in text boxes. Fortunately, these headlines are only via Zoom your PDF and will not print when the book is produced. So you can see there's like a hair line that runs down here. So let's scroll down. Now this is what your cover is. So I've created the cover. You can see the ISBN barcode down the bottom right-hand corner of the back page. Remember on allowing for that foldover for my hardback, we scroll down a bit further and you can see the cover has come up perfectly. So this is the hardcover. So yes, it might had that extra trim there, but I wanted it to be perfectly aligned and I'm really happy with that. So what we do, we scroll down here and we check all the images as we want, all the right things in place. So I go down and on, make sure I've got everything here. And the pages, perfectly aligned illustrations are great. Again, all good. And then the book keeps going now. All I'm going to go through the book now and I'm going to check everything to make sure that it meets all the specifications that are need. And what I need to make sure is that I'm happy with the color resolution that's happening. There's no typos and I want to make sure that there's no errors at all. So I'm going to scroll all the way down to the bottom, the last couple of pages now of editing a chart there About the Author. And you'll see how it's got a couple of blank pages. That's okay. It's got proof on them that's not going to appear on your book. The last page may appear and it's going to blank with a little barcode. Then I've got my back page. That's how it should look to you. Now, the main key things you need to look for, particularly with the back page. You want to make sure that the barcode isn't covering any writing. As I mentioned, the template that was provided to me had a barcode in the middle, but they've placed it on the bottom right-hand corner. So you need to allow, I think from the middle across to the right for your barcode, depending on whether it's gonna be placed. Now I'm going to scroll all the way up to the top and just show the cover again. And these are the things that you need to check and double-check to make sure that they're appropriate for your print and that you're gonna be happy for that to go ahead. What I'm looking for with the front cover is there's no white lines or anything, no writing that's going to drift over anything that's gonna be cutoff that's very, very close to the edge, but I'm okay with that. Still, it's still in the boundary. Ideally, you might want to have it a few millimeters to let to the left, but I'm like, Hey, with that. And then the rest of the manuscript is good. I've read over it, triple checked it for spelling errors, and I'm very happy. Once that happens, then you can go back. You can say that document if you want to, and you go back and you go to this process here. So after review, please select approve action below. Lot graduate approves his title. The Life graduate proves his title for printing distribution, South Florida's place bomber account or retailers, the loft predatory previous toggle for printing from orders placed my account only. So that's only if you want to print books from your account and you're not wanting distributed across the 40 thousand options that are available through England. Or the law of graduate does not approve this total. So if you want, if you mount found the mistake, you would click this button here. The law credit has revise content to upload. Now you won't be charged the twenty-five dollars during this process. If you find an error, you will only be charged if you make the book live. They need Assad to make changes. And that's why this time is so critical. So if you wanted to make changes, you click there and you'd go to the page where you can either upload a new manuscript or a cover or both. It's up to you or the law of graduate rejects the proof requests for further review, please provide your rejection. No, it's not. I've never had to do this. It's only if you had some issues and you can send some data, adds details here. And then you can also add a confirmation email. So I'm very happy with these. Remember if you wanted to revise and upload new content because you'll cover exactly as you want or your manuscript has spelling areas and you need to change those and add a new manuscript. Do it right now in this process by clicking the button right here. So I'm going to now click the top button because unhappy, prove it, I'm ready for distribution. So we click down here and we go continue. Do you want to promote your title? This is when you have an opportunity of using the marketing provided by Ingram through the what was it called? I can't think what was called, but it was the little catalog that Ingram provide you the opportunity for $150 to market your book. You can either go, yes, I'm not going to be marketing more toggle through that publication. So I'm going to be no. Now what happens? We just wait for a moment and name. It will say that the book has been approved and we are ready. So you would just say here, the order is not submitted until payment term has been accepted. I had the free code that has been waived for me. If you had to pay the forty-nine dollars fee, that would be what would be happening or an annual accepted. But there's no fee payable for me because I've used that code except just white. And thank you all. It's been submitted for processing. So that is it. And you can expect within the next 15 minutes or less that your book will be available for distribution globally and you can go and purchase. You can order copies yourself if you want to. You can let everyone know that your book is now published. So it's a very exciting time. So now I'm on the homepage and you can see that the title is now available. So if I have lochia, I can see the details case laminate, my details submitted date, publication date, and a little globe at the end here means it's now available for global distribution. Such an exciting time, the book is now live and I can now promote the book and it can be ready for purchasing by customers across the world. So our hope you enjoyed that process. It's, as I said, it's very exciting when you book goes live. And I'm glad I was able to show you the process for scented. 31. Getting Help From Ingram Customer Support and Troubleshooting: In this lesson, I want to talk about customer support. There are going to be times when you need to reach out to customer support because, uh, you might have an issue or a concern, or you just need some general help to get your book uploaded. Now, what I'm gonna do is point you towards some ways and get customer support and also help with any troubleshooting that you might have. So let me go to a couple of different places to begin with. Then I'll show you how to reach out to Ingram via the support tab on your dashboard. So firstly, that there are three different email addresses that you can use depending on where you're located. So for us, you can reach out to Ingram spark support at Ingrid content.com, for international, Ingram sparc International at Ingram content.com, and for Australian residents, Ingram spark, Australia at Ingram content.com. Now, you can also go directly to the support tab. We can see it just highlights are brought here with the arrow. When you're on your dashboard, you can click on that link and that will take you to a support page. Now, if you don't want to email directly, you can fill in the form and that will help you reach the required customer support that you need. Now, I have heard that there are sometimes delays in the way that Ingram can get back to you regarding support issues. One of the most effective ways that I've seen has been through the Ingram Facebook group. There seems to be a better connect and a better resolution process through the Facebook page. So if you don't have much success initially with the email or the support tab on your dashboard, then I'd definitely recommend that you reach out to the Facebook group. Now, I'm creating a document that was supplied as part of this course that will have a lot of these links attached to it. So you'll be able to reuse that document to look at the ways that you can actually reach out to customer support. Let me jump on in my Dashboard though, and show you the couple of ways that you can use your dashboard. Achieve some answers hopefully from any questions that you might have on your dashboard. Once you scroll down the page just under home, you've got a support tab right here. If you click that support tab, then you can either go and check out these different things here so you can tunnel setup instructions, placing and reviewing orders, the help center. So you can do the health center or even a live chat. If we're willing to help center, you should take it, take us to a separate page and you can actually find out different things that you can learn or ways that they can help you, including videos. You can also search in the **** can we help you? Now if we go back to Ingram again and we go to support, now, we can also go contact us. If you want to have e-mail us, then you can go email us there. And then you can submit your request so you can enter your email address, location, your account number, that will be on the top right-hand corner of your dashboard when you're on the homepage, pine page, the subject description. If you have an ISBN for the particular book that you're having issues with an any attachments. So you can add files and then you can submit. So you can do, you can reach out to support that way as well. If we go back again, it is just down here. And you can also, as I said, go to the live chat and that will give you a way to be able to reach out to Ingram and get the support that you need. What have been maybe the top ten things that I've had issues with that you may face yourself. I've listed the top ten here, and I'll just go through each of these very quickly, knowing that these are likely to pop, possibly come up for you during your time with Ingram? There might be plenty of others. You are concerns that you may face or have issues with. Unfortunately, I can't address all these issues for you if they happen to come up. The best place to reach out for support is either the Ingram Facebook page or through notifying them directly through the support tab or emailing them directly. Unfortunately, for me, it's gonna be very hard for me to be able to fix any errors or issues without having access to what the bookmark b, or other processes or things that you may have missed during that process, but Ingram will certainly be able to help you out. So let me go through these top ten. Number one would be a file upload error. Now I've had an issue myself where I've uploaded the manuscript under the cover upload and the cover under the manuscripts, of course, is gonna be an issue there. And you might have something where it says that fonts haven't been imbedded. So make sure you do some research to ensure that your fonts are embedded. You've got the right, you're saving it the right way so that your colors are also rich and colorful. And the way that you want them to be turned out with your file. And also remember to make sure you save it as a PDF file for both your manuscript and you'll cover next one. Your delay in review of books approvals. So when you send your book through for approval, it's suggested that can take up to one to two business days. Before I've seen approvals take five to six days, even a week. Some people have even read that it's taken longer. So you just might need to be patient. If it gets to one week, I would reach out to Ingram through the Customer Support and just request an update on where the approval is at the current status of your book. The status does change, so it can be either in review, there's I think there's three different statuses. One can even be on hold. So if they're finding this issue with the integrity through the integrity catalog component, then there can be a hold on your book. So that is something that causes confusion and you just need to wait for it to move through that process. I've had books on hold for three to four weeks at times. So that can be frustrating. As I just mentioned, the content integrity. So you might get a rejection of your book. Should they find that it doesn't meet the requirements. That is an issue that you could face if you don't submit the book that meets their requirements. So make sure you go back to the lesson where I mentioned content integrity and the types of books you can submit through the Ingram before you upload a book. So you've got an understanding of what criteria they request and expect. Number five, negative compensation and returns. If your book after printing costs is in the negative, then that is going to start showing on your account and you go backwards fast and you go forward. Also, if you click that, yes, returns are eligible for your book and you have bookstores that are buying bulk and then returning them. Then also you might be required to pay an invoice for those returns. So that can be something you may face. And that's where the decision of whether you allow returns or not comes into play. Number six, confusion with the author compensation payment schedule. I've provided a lesson in the course about how long it will take for you to get paid. Remember they have a 90 day processing schedule. So if you published and sold a book in January and you got ten sales, will the revenue from those ten sales wouldn't be paid until April 90 days after the end of the first of that month. Number seven, not knowing where your book these being sold. Now there is a way of trying to determine where your book is being sold. And it's called Book Finder.com. I'll quickly show you how you can find your book because Ingram don't give you a list of where your books being sold. So it's actually very hard to market your book directly. And that is one frustration. I do have Ingram, I wish I knew where the book was selling so I can direct more marketing towards that source. At this point in time, that's not offered. Hopefully that will change. But let me show you book font.com and all you need to do is enter your ISBN and start to do search on where your book is being sold. So I just entered my ISBN number into the top bar here. Press Go. And then if I scroll down here, I can actually see where my book is being sold. And you provide how many here. We've got 32 different places that the book is showing for my ISBN. And there's also a couple of use books being sold. I'm not sure if anyone would buy a used book for $102. However, these interesting with the prices as well. So through Amazon selling for $9.14 Australian. But then if you go to this site here, it's selling for $44.48 dollars. I'm not sure why it does that, but that is a way of being able to find where your book is selling. It's not a comprehensive list because we don't know if it's in brick-and-mortar stores or in libraries. So we'll just give you a bit of an idea. So it's called Book Fonda.com and you put in your ISBN number and push the go to find where your book could be listed around the world. And number eight, I've received this a few times, which is the ISBN is already in use. I know that I haven't used a particular ISBN because I might have just purchased it from Barker.com. But for some reason there had been a little bit of a glitch in the system for Ingram saying that the ISBN was already knew. Now of course, this will show if you try and use the same ISBN for book you've published previously with a new book. So it's important to keep a list of your ISP DNS with the title and maybe when you've uploaded so you can keep track of that. But there could be something that you come up against where it says the ISBN is already in use when you're uploading your book to Ingram on Page Number one. Number Number nine, sorry, the print quality based on paper selection is not suitable. I've had this before where you've got a book that has some illustrations in it or require some writing, you might do the 50 book. But then when you get an author copy, you do realize that the paper is quite thin and some of the words might be showing through to the next page. And if you have to write in that book, then the ink mark move through to the next page. If it isn't suitable, then what you also will need to do, you can change the paper thickness, but you're also will need to re-do the cover because the thickness in paper could potentially change the spine thickness. So along with changing the paper thickness, you will also have to pay for a reviewed cover to accommodate the extra thickness depending on the size of your book. And number ten, book report delays on your reports dashboard. The way that the reports works on Ingram is that they need to wait for the online bookstore or the brick-and-mortar store to report your sales. So they can be delays. Sometimes find that on my head the same orders reported on my dashboard, say on the Monday. And then there might be a big update, not until the wind solar Thursday. And they might be couple of days where nothing changes at all. And then suddenly there's a big update. So there can be delays. And I've seen people say, Look, I know there were ten books sold, but it's not showing in my report. Well, they can be delayed and it could be one to two weeks, even three weeks for that reporting to come through. There can be delays on the dashboard. And this could also impact when you get paid and how you get paid based on those books sales. So just know there can be delays on your ports dashboard and it may not be updated every day. It might be every few days. That is reported through to the top ten issues you may face. There are probably plenty of others that you might come across, but as I said, please reach out to Ingram spark to be able to help me. They need these different issues. I won't be on and unfortunately be able to help you with many, many of your issues and nearer groups that specialize in helping and are definitely recommend and encourage you to go to those groups to help you with any issues that you might have. But I have provided the e-mail addresses and the support tab off showing you on the dashboard. And also the Ingram Facebook group is another cool one to get into. And I'm going to talk about different community groups you can get into in the next lesson. 32. Join IngramSpark Community Groups: Welcome to this lesson about the Ingram community. There are two Facebook groups that I would recommend that you become part of that can help you both with addressing any concerns that you might have or reaching out to other self publishers to get some feedback or get some help as well. So let me show you where you can access both of these Facebook community groups for Ingram Spark. So the first group is directly to Ingram spark and you can go to facebook.com forward slash Ingram Spark. Again, these addresses will be provided in the a brochure or the support guide that I'll give you at the end of the course that also includes a project that you can actually work through to complete. The other group is the Ingram spark author community, which is this one just down here. So you can see the link below in the yellow oval. I'll also provide that link directly for you in the support guide. There are 15.5 thousand members. There is another great way of reaching out to self publishers who might have either had the same challenges or difficulties or concerns you've gone, who can actually help guide you? There are many, many helpful people as part of that community. And you can get many different answers. But spy scrolling through to find out if any of your current concerns have been addressed already. So hopefully, those two groups will really help you to get the additional support you need for Ingram spark. 33. Placing Book Orders: In this lesson, I want to run through how to organize book orders. You might have books that you wish to order for yourself. You might have books that you want to organize for your business, friends and family. They might be bulk orders that you could be arranging or you might even take some samples to a bookstore to see if they'll actually hold your book. Now what we're gonna do is go onto the dashboard and only show the process that you need to follow to order either other unaltered copy or multiple books depending on what your strategies let me get into the dashboard now. From your home tab on your dashboard, you just go down to the icon that says place an order. So you can place an order here. Then what you need to do is you can enter any books that you've got by title, by ISBN. So if I wanted to organize one for say habit, switch, click, Enter, it brings up the two different format. So I've got a perfect bound or case lemonade. So if I just did the perfect bound at art and to order, now this is gonna be in Australian dollars for me. Depends on what country you're in and what you wanna do. Mop, different printing costs are associated with what you want to do. I've got my information here. Now. If I want to add more totals to my order, then I can simply scroll down further. And I can add more books than if I wanted to do one job launch. Then I want one of those. Then you add items to order. Now you can also add more books. So if you want a three books or three copies, you can do that as well. So we scroll down here. We go to order quantity. So if I wanted four copies of this, I do that. And then I update the order. We just update the order. So it's processing it. Then we go down further and it will give you an updated process. Now, you also can see how quickly you'd like your order printed. So you can either choose economy, which is printing five business days, express prints in three business days, or rush in one business day. And how quickly would you like your order delivered? So you've got economy or premium. Again, these are in Australian dollars. Your currency may be different depending on what part of the world you're in. Once you are finished, you can either add more books. So I can add more books. Down the, down below. You can delete books just by doing the bin. And once you've done, then you submit order and you will enter your credit card details and the address that you would like the books to go to. So that is a simple process of how to order your books. And you need to check this box down here as well, that if you chose that, you've got the painting on the top. So if you're on premium, then they will provide tracking for that. But if there is a box down here, you'll need to check that before you move forward. So hopefully that helps with the order process. I'm going to clean my order because I don't require those books around at this point in time. But that is how you do the order for England Spark. Before I go, there's actually one thing you can actually choose, the print location as well of where you want it. So you've got US, UK, UK as well, and Australia. So you can choose the different location. So if you, I've had someone where I had a book that needed to be delivered to the UK. And there were located in London. I then did the print location as London. Therefore, it was nice and quick. And I didn't need to be shipped from Australia to get to the UK. And that's the benefit of using Ingram Spark as well. They've got printing facilities around the world. They can actually reach your destination quite quickly. So that's just an extra thing you might need. And on, at times I do have promotional codes. If you order between 1015 books, there might be a 5% discount. If you ordered 200 books, that might be a 20% discount. So keep an eye on your e-mail for any bulk ordering promotion codes as well that occur from time to time. 34. How to Edit Title, Book Information and Pricing: So if you have some changes that you want to add to your book, or if you want to change your pricing, change something in your subtitle. There is awake and edit your title from the dashboard. I'm going to go to one of my books now and just show you a few of the little tricks that you can do to seamlessly change your details. But also if you happen to need to change your cover or your manuscript, I'll show you what you can do that as well. So let me jump into my dashboard. I'll show you through that process. Somewhat more dashboard and under title, you can search under different ones. You can do author status, ISBN, format, submission date. You can do that. I'm just going to go under the title of the book and I'm just gonna do search. And this is how you can edit the details. So wait for it to load up. And what you can do, you can see the main title here. You can go over and you can place an order or you can do different actions. So we're going to edit the title. So go edit title and you've got the basic information. So this basic information will be the title. And you can change that. So if you wanted to change it, you can change that. You can alter the language. You can't change the ISBN, but you can change the subtitle if you wanted to. You can just click on the little pen and then that allows me to change it. You can also add series name details, series number details, and addition name and number. You can go down here and any of these fields that you hover over, and it gives you a pencil, you can amend as well. I've got my biography. I've wanted to change that or click on the pin on the side here. And then I can edit all of that information. You can add contributors, prior work, you can add a contributor. You got the imprint details, you've got your different subjects so you can change those by clicking on the little pencil as well. You can change this. You can add those details, the keywords, you can add more keywords. And I definitely encourage you to continue to review the keywords and keep adding them to your metadata. You've got the full description. So on this one I've actually used HTML code, but we can just go back and use the normal description without using the HTML code. If I go down here, short description. So I've got my short description here, I can add Review quotes and table of contents. So you can do all that information straight from the dashboard. The other thing you can do is go to print information. And you can look through the different information here so you can look for if the book is enabled for distribution. We got the printing information, so size the book. And you can note, see how I can't change any of these because these print information is locked in against your print ISBN. Now if we go Edit here, you can change the book top. But you will need to know that the source is your title is currently enabled for distribution, meaning retails already associate your existing speaks with your current ISBN. The only change allowed for titles already in distribution is for the cover from gloss to Matt or vice versa. Vice versa, changes to trim size, bonding interior color or paper type will require setting up this title with the new ISBN. So you just need to make sure that again, that's why you need to check everything very carefully before you approve your book. So you can change the paper top and the top there. If we scroll down, what we can change is the print pricing. So we would just go Edit. And if you press a piece and they cover, it may also change that. We've covered this in a previous lesson. So you can just change the retail price and the wholesale discount. For some reason it's not showing return but down. But for some reason it's not giving me that. But what you can do is change the wholesale discount. So if I change that to 50 per cent, then that would then change the compensation payment and highlighted in yellow. If I wanted to change that for the United Kingdom or could do the same thing. 50, European Union, 50 in each place I do it. It will change the pricing for the Global take 50. So you can see that the next state is going to be applied is in about a week's time. And when it's highlighted in yellow, it means you've changed it and you need to scroll up and push Save, and then that will save it. And you've also got whether you've chosen yes destroy or no, print effective, these ones come into place. And next thing we want to show, I want to show you is you can upload new files. So if you wanted to change your cover or your manuscript, go to here and go for revisions. And if you do, it would just be like you're uploading the book. I'm not gonna do this because I don't want to remove my tiles availability. But it is just as simple as adding those to them. They will then take you through to a page where you need to pay the twenty-five dollars if you're doing a cover and twenty-five dollars if you're doing a manuscript, it's $25 for each one. So you just need to make sure you don't want to be paying $50 to change the manuscript and the cover if you can avoid it. So that's how you upload new files. So that's got all the details there you need. You can go ahead and change different elements, but there are some things that are locked in against your book. So that is the basic information and how to change. Hopefully that helps you. And if you can avoid it, make sure you get everything right before you push a proof. But if you didn't need to go and change things, how to access that. 35. Marketing Options With IngramSpark: One of the keys to selling more books is by marketing and advertising your book. But what services does Ingram Spark currently offer for marketing your book? I've tried a few different things that have previously been available and they've announced a new way of marketing. So I'm going to show you that publication and that goes out to many different bookstores and libraries. And it also allows your book to get more exposure. My current experience and my previous experience has been mixed. I have paid about 80 US dollars previously for a few books to be in publications provided by Ingram spark. But it's actually been really difficult to even gauge whether that's been beneficial or not because I'm not actually being shown where my book sales are coming from, either their publication worthwhile. Well, the jury's out on that one because I'm not quite sure. I think there are probably better ways of marketing or book through different social network communities that would be better and better time spent. But I'm still going to show you this publication by Ingram Spark because you never know it might make a difference for your book and it might be something you'd like to consider. Let me show you that publication and Hagen get access to it by your dashboard. From your dashboard, you just go to the Marketing tab on the left-hand side. Under marketing, you will see what is called Ingram, our page. And the page is a publication that goes out to the various different bookstores and libraries. And they can actually see your publication. Now when you do pay the $150, which is quite significant, you'll get a small lethal a spot in this publication, you'll have a little tile or your thumbnail of your book cover and a few small details about your book. You've got the page title list. We've got the homepage, you've got an Ingram catalogue catalogue discovery page. You've also get a world read a newsletter and an Indie why newsletter. But I don't know. I, I'm still not convinced that disease the best way to market your book for a $150. I think there are better ways out there. You can make different videos. You can go to different Facebook or social media platforms. I just think there's much better ways you can do it then using the Ingram, our page catalog. But you might find that it could be suitable for your book. And if it is, I encourage you to look further into it. But that's the only way, right at this point in time that Ingram actually offer a way to market your book? Ideally, loved him to set up a platform that would be similar to Amazon. But I would like to be able to focus more attention on marketing and advertising my book. And I would think that with Ingram, who have got a large, very large distribution channel, they could potentially set up some more marketing opportunities for indie authors. So maybe you look at and discover other ways that you can market your book. This is one way through Ingram, but I think that there might be some other great ways of getting people to know your book, discover your book, and search for it through different search engines. And there should be. Another couple of great ways you can do is just by doing some more research, but that's what Ingram Alpha so far for the marketing on the dashboard. 36. Further Additional Resources From Ingram: Now, as we draw closer to the end of this course, I just wanted to remind you of some resources that are available through Ingram. Now, there has been plenty of information that I've been able to share with you throughout the course. But you just might need to reach into the resources of Ingram directly. Some of the answers to your questions can be found throughout this course. So I've created a bit of a flowchart here for you to refer to. Remember, customer support should be your number one go-to if you can't find the answers within this course. But also remember the Facebook groups and the community groups as well. There is your dashboard and there are how-to videos on the Ingram dashboard that you can access as well. And those videos can be very helpful for you in a number of different ways. Remember the community Facebook page, which I've just mentioned before. There are two main groups. Is it Ingram content group, Facebook page, but there's also the Ingram in the Author page which you can access. And there are many like-minded indie authors that are maybe have the same questions or self facing similar challenges to what you are. So make sure you refer to that page. Next thing is the PDF resources that are available both on through this course, but all throw also through Ingram directly. Just down the bottom of the screen there is a download or a PDF checklist that Ingram spark to offer, so you can't check that out. And I'll also put that in the links of this course two. And finally, review these courts go back over previous lessons. There might be some little bits and pieces that you've missed that you might need to check back over again. There might be some important things that could be changed as time goes on. I might need to update some minor things as time goes on to keep these course updated, to check back if the changes are happening on Ingram will all work to change those in the course as well. So there's some things that you need to think about if you can't find the answers from the course, definitely go back to the Ingram dashboard, the Ingram website. And you're bound to find plenty of other information that should be able to help you with any questions or concerns that you might have. 37. 7 Tips in 7 Minutes: And welcome to this lesson, seven tips in seven minutes. I'm going to try as best I can to meet that timeline. So let's get into it right away. Number one, do not rush the upload. As I've told you before, the upload process is important to get, to get all the elements right, particularly when you get to that final stage of the approval, if you don't check everything properly, then you might be up for the twenty-five dollar fee that is associated with uploading new manuscript or a new cover. And you want to avoid that. So try and get all of that correct from the very beginning and work through the process slowly of giving everything organized before the upload. So that is tip number one. Tip number two would be to outsource your weaknesses are found that when I first started publishing, I guess due to budget, I was trying to do everything. So after getting used to what my strengths were, I started to really focus on that. And initially I was actually outsourcing my covers and I've actually brought those back in-house because actually enjoy the cover creation. But I do look at definitely outsourcing the ePub conversion and also different areas of my marketing such as creating video trailers for my books. That's something which is quite technical. I'll get some excellent results. So make sure that you look at outsourcing any weaknesses that you have because you may spend some money at the front end, but the investment that you make definitely give you a stronger return in the latter stages of your publishing. My third tip would be to save significantly on the Upload charges by having potentially an ally membership. Now, I'm providing my resource guide as part of this course that provides a link to ally. So you can check that out. But for the cost of the annual membership, you can upload so many books for free. Now, if you consider, if it's around about a hundred and fifty, two hundred dollars for the membership, then really you only have to apply for books for the whole year to get your returned back. And also that covers those five free uploads, also covers any changes to your covers or manuscripts. You can actually use that code for that as well. The other thing is to keep an eye out for any of those discount codes the Ingram provide occasionally, if every few months. So you can utilize that as I've done in this course to get a free upload. So keep an eye out for those discounts or join LI for the free upload, five free upload codes per month as it currently stands at this point of creating the course. My fourth tip would be to know that it's a race towards quality, not quantity. I hear a lot of people say, how many books is it going to take me to make a thousand dollars per month? Well, it might just take one, but it could also be maybe ten books. That depends on the quality of the book that you're delivering to your customer. The higher the quality, the more in demand, the bit of the niche, the more books you will sell and also your marketing. How much are you marketing your book and advertising it so that people are aware of it? Remember, quality will win over the long term rather than quantity. You might get some initial Buxton and quickly, but if they're not great, you'll get poor reviews and it can damage your brand. Make sure that you focus on the quality of the books that you're creating for Ingram. And therefore, you'll have a much longer-term income stream from creating those quality books. Tip number five would be to spend more time on niche research. Don't always think that the idea you have for your initial book is going to be a great seller. It may be of interest to you, and yes, you do need to have passion in the project or the book that you're creating. But you've also got to think about the effort and the resources you're committing to making this book. You don't want to just sit on the online platform or in a bookshelf and not move because you want to get it into as many hands as possible. And you can do that by spending some more time on niche research. So make sure that you're aware of your product, how well it's potentially lock of the cell and maybe reach out to 20 or 30 people and check if they think it could be a seller and get them to give you some honest, transparent feedback that really will help and will save you a lot of time and effort creating books. If you're creating the books in the right areas. My sixth tip would be to think carefully about your publishing name, a new brand. So what do you want it to represent, say in the next five years? It's something that's hard to work out initially because it could change. You don't want to have a brand name that potentially is associated with one particular niche. You might want to burrow into the bits. So if you're publishing does change over time. You don't need to be changing your website or your website name or your publishing name or your brand. Maybe have it a little bit broader. That would be my recommendation, but just spend some time to get that element right. It's like creating a business name. You do, You do want it to represent what you're doing, but not so narrow that it limits your ability to expand or scale at another stage. So that would be tip number six. My final tip would be to encourage repeat customers. So what can you include inside your book, whether it be a downloadable PDF or something they can fill in or a website link, they can go to what adds value and encourages those customers for to make additional purchases. The repeat customer is great. It takes a long time and effort to get an initial customer. But if you can retain that customer that will become loyal to you and they'll become a raving fan. So if you can do what you can to provide excellent value, then that will be a wonderful way to encourage those customers to speak highly about what you do and your books and to return again. So that's tip number seven. I think I'll just be on the seven-minute mark, so I'll finish there now because I'm do have 30 seconds left. I thought I'd give a bonus tip. So this one is be mindful that any changes you make to your culture or your manuscript, if you find any errors, could say it takes some time to come into effect. What do I mean by that? Well, if you're if you've made your book go live and there's five or six people that have ordered that book and you make a change to the cover, those orders need to be fulfilled first before your cover will be changed by Ingram, they have to put your book on hold so that it doesn't sell anymore until the new cover is put into the system, then your order or your cover and your book will then meet the new standards that you need. Buddy for orders are already placed on your book, then they need to be fulfilled by Ingram and send out and printed before the new effects and come into place. So just make sure that you're aware that if you make changes, do them well in advance, and don't sell a 100 books first and realize you've made a mistake because those 100 books need to be fulfilled first before your new change will come into effect. I might have gone over time now, but that wasn't important. 38. Farewell and Conclusion : Well congratulations. If you've made it all the way to the end of the course, are thoroughly enjoyed. The opportunity of being able to share my experiences, knowledge, and my own journey with Ingram Spark. I do hope that the flow of the lessons has been helpful. And remember at anytime, go back over the lessons, if there's something that you've missed, then there could be something in that lesson that will help you. I would also encourage you to reach out to those community groups for Ingram Spark because they also will be able to help inspire you, provide information and knowledge, and address any concerns you might have using the platform. Now there might be other courses I've created that you might also like to join. And they're all about children's picture storybooks, learning how to create book covers. There's a variety of courses that's really suited for everybody plays if you've liked this course, I'd love you to provide a review. Reviews really do help me gain traction in the self-publishing community. And it would be greatly appreciated. Thank you so much. I really enjoyed the opportunity of teaching this information to you. In the future. I will wish you the very best with your self-publishing journey. See you later. 39. Beware - This Mistake Was Very Costly!: Hello and welcome to this updated lesson regarding the option of choosing returns or no returns. Now, I've got a personal example where a book that I had loaded up a little while ago, I'd left having returns as a option for anyone that did, perhaps a bulk order or even individual customers that want to return the book. Now what can potentially happen if you do permit returns to occur? So I'm going to show you what happened. Thiamine December 2020 to report where I had a bulk order that was returned. This will demonstrate why you seriously need to consider where you do, whether you do permit returns to occur or whether you have not to permit them. Now, it was a costly error on my behalf by doing that. And I'm going to show exactly what happened. Weimar report. So let me show you that now. I can see I've entered the date range are the first to the 12th, 2022 through to the end of 2022, I've selected the US, US dollar and print on-demand. So let's go to that now by scrolling down by 70. So what I'm gonna do now is scroll down to the book that I'm referring to. This book right here. I did have it at 55 per cent and there was a return of 231 copies that end up costing me $829. So the book was priced at $7.99. So therefore, I'm not just having to cover the cost that I would have been out of pocket based on the publisher revenue. But the full cost of the book, and that equates to $829.98. It made a big impact in my revenue for December 2022 or lower still did very well. But we can see here that that's not what you want to occur. So please consider whether you do allow them or not. Now, one other update I've been doing is changing a lot of my books in the US to 30% of the retailer discount rather than 35 per cent. So in the US you can actually lower it down to 30%. All other markets, 35% as the wholesale discount as a minimum. So that if my main preferences, the books online and not, not to worry too much about online bookstores, which this may have happened in. I've actually reduced it down to 30 per cent. However, it has some books that aren't selling it all. I might kick it up to 55 per cent to see if I can get some sales. Now that's what I've done here, but it's been at a costly price. But I thought I wanted to provide you with a real-world example of what can happen if you permit returns. So hopefully that helps you.