Blurb vs. IngramSpark

I’ve shared a little about our publishing choices in previous posts, but today, I wanted to get more specific about the printing choices we’ve made.

For your reference, we printed The Shoephabet with Blurb as a 60-page, 6×9″ softcover trade book with economy color printing. With IngramSpark, we printed The Monsterbet as a 48-page, 6×9″ soft and hardcover trade book with economy color printing.

Self-publishers typically use a Print-on-Demand (POD) printer, and we are no different. This means you can order 1 book or 10,000 books (maybe someday we’ll order more than 300 at a time). While printing one book is more expensive per book than 10,000, for those of us not pursuing traditional publishing (there are lots of reasons why you might not want to), POD offers exactly what we need.

Blurb

We started with Blurb, because I could figure it out. I had used their free software for years, making many family and baby photo albums. They have easy templates that can be tailored to your liking, tons of book sizes and options, and a simple drag-and-drop system for placing photos into your book.

I priced out the kind of book we could afford to print and sell and landed on their trade book. We personally don’t buy many books (we let our library do that for us!), so we knew if we wanted to sell a book, we’d like to keep it at the $10 mark. Blurb allowed us to do this! We couldn’t afford to print hardcovers (for our length of book, it was $15-$20…our cost to print!), but we weren’t really planning on selling that many anyway.

Blurb also works with InDesign, which is my graphic designer’s (aka my hubby’s) program of choice, so he did some reworking of my design (which is getting a post of its own!) and sent it to the printer. One thing we really appreciated about Blurb was the very detailed guide to trim lines, margins, spine text, and more. Their instructions held our hands throughout the whole process and made us confident in what we were printing.

The print quality at economy printing is good–not bad, not great, but for our price point, we could definitely accept it.

Once we decided we were serious about selling, we chose to print 100 books to get the 10% discount. The discount barely covered their shipping costs, which are completely and ridiculously HIGH. Depending on how many you order at a time, your shipping fee will vary (1 book has a $6.99 shipping fee, 100 books had a $100 shipping fee). For our first order, that added one whole dollar to the price of each book! That’s a big deal when you have already-small margins.

Well, our books sold out fast, and we ordered 300 more–better discount, slightly cheaper shipping per book. We had a print quality complaint with the second printing, and Blurb was happy to make things right. *customer service applause*

With Blurb, it took less than two weeks to receive our orders, so we were pleased with that. However, their customer service reply time could benefit from some attention (waiting three to seven days for a reply is far too long when you’re planning events to sell your product!). After I addressed the wait-time issue with them, they did reply a little faster.

Blurb allows you to connect to a company/system called Ingram, which shows your book to 39,000+ bookstores, including Barnes & Noble and Amazon! (<—Check out those links; we’re there!) But because you’re now selling through retailers, your price goes up and your margins go down (wah wah). Selling on Etsy was working for us, but not everyone has and not everyone wants to make a new account; however, nearly everyone on the planet has an Amazon account! Plus, after speaking with B&N about a local author event, they said we had to be connected to Ingram to be placed in their system…or do the whole process manually (it sounded pretty dreadful). In the end, we decided it was worth it to take the step into retail.

IngramSpark

As we prepared to print our second book, I did more research on printing options. Although Blurb was affordable, it was still pretty pricey (and nearly double the price of other POD printers). I chatted with the illustrator of this book (we connected through Etsy), and she shared her experience with IngramSpark. Why did that name sound so familiar? Oh yes, Ingram! Same company, and even more interesting, they are the printer that Blurb uses. All this time, Blurb was just the middle man–no wonder their prices are so much higher than IngramSpark’s!

We gave it a shot. If Blurb held our hand, IngramSpark walked on the other side of the street. You literally submit the PDF of your book and go. A little nerve-wrecking, but we had more confidence this time around, knew a little of what we were doing, and decided it was definitely worth the lower cost. Plus, libraries had been asking for hardcovers, which we just couldn’t do with Blurb. Totally affordable with IngramSpark.

We received our first shipment of 200 softcovers and 100 hardcovers a few weeks ago (we jumped straight to the big numbers as the momentum for The Monsterbet has been much greater). The quality is exactly that of Blurb (duh, same printer), but the hardcovers are even more beautiful than I could have imagined. These were made to last!

IngramSpark’s customer service has been faster than Blurb’s, but we have also had fewer questions/concerns.

The Verdict

We will stick with IngramSpark. Now that we have experience, we don’t need the hand-holding we once did. Blurb was perfect for our first book, and honestly, if I didn’t have a graphic designer in my household, I likely would still be with them. But I’ve got a professional working on this book, so we’re happy to pay the price in user interface if it means a better margin on our book.

I’m curious if others of you have printed through either of these vendors…or have used Amazon’s CreateSpace and have something else to contribute to the conversation?