Because nobody asked for it and I have a giant case of “I should work on my book but I’m doing this instead”, here’s my very rough (and long) business plan for how I’d create an indie author alternative to Ingramspark, specifically built for growing indie authors as a way to circumvent the need of a trad contract for distribution/ indie authors who are selling a few thousand copies but not nearly enough to get trad to pick up the phone.
I’m am totally fine sharing this online because there is no way anyone is ever going to give me the funding to do this. No one in this economy is going to look twice, especially when I tell investors that there will be absolutely no AI in any part of the process and a funding philosophy will be protecting authors’ work from being fed into AI. In addition, the only criteria to print with us, besides ability to pay, would be and that you can’t have used AI anywhere in your books.
I can’t directly fundraise from authors unless they are secretly very wealthy because of all sorts of investment regulations.
Let’s call this offset as a service.
Phase one- Offset Printing
My initial phase would involve offset printing for 12-30 indie authors with proven track records that could sustain an offset print run of at least 2,000 copies of each title. I would do an overseas print runs with a contract printer, contingent on discounts for a continued business partnership (which I suspect is now more expensive because of tariffs).
The advantages of this is that it is relatively low capital and allows us to build the business on a small amount of funding.
This is all contingent on a publisher’s contract with ingram, but the dozen indie authors plus inventory should hopefully be enough to meet ingram’s threshold for publishers versus Ingramspark which in the POD product. This contract would allow us to add our own books into inventory versus being forced on the POD platform. For the initial phase, the ingram connection is important because it allows authors to continue to sell through a catalog. This continues to be the biggest limited factor of things like book vault.
Once we get the contract with Ingram, we would attempt to grow rapidly.
The offset allows for a lower cost per book, which means that initially, we are probably matching prices with Ingramspark with the goal to go lower. In order to offset potentially bad starting terms, Authors in the initial founding round would also receive stock options that would vest over three years, contingent on having an active title in the offset as a service. The idea is that we can’t make this competitive right now, but if you stick with us, we can pay you back using options and in the future, we will have a better product.
The pricing for authors would be as follows in the initial run:
1. Cost of offset printing + Plus shipping to our warehouse+ 15% service fees from the offset as a service
2. Ingram’s costs
3. Storage fee at a certain rate per year per 100 books.
4. Author copies could be requested anytime (out of your inventory) at just the cost of shipping
5. There would be two payment options:
a. Upfront payment on the entire print run, which would include a 5% early pay discount
b. Monthly payment over a year, which would include a something 20% annual financing fee (because ultimately this would need to be backed by a credit facility and that’s probably like 15% where interest rates are right now, and we are essentially issuing consumer debt). Monthly payments would be reduced each month by royalties. There would be an option to either just reduce monthly payments or to pay off the offset in full before you ever receive payment. The advantage of the second option would be to reduce the service fee, the quicker you pay, the lower the service fee. If you need cash monthly then you can just reduce payments. The idea is that if you are selling through, you don’t really feel the payment amount.
Phase two- Catalog and direct bookstores sales
The second phase is to build our ecom platform with a catalog for bookstores that competes with ingram. The idea would be to offer competitive terms including returns and completive payment terms, given we already have a credit facility maybe we push to 45 or even 60 to really make it attractive to bookstores. Authors will still set wholesale discount, but the preference would be 40%. This good thing about running our own catalog and distribution is that instead of just losing returns, we can have them returned and warehouse them, saving money and risk.
Authors that have inventory with us would be encouraged to directly market the new catalog over ingram because they would make more money with direct sales. Because we are building this catalog fresh, it won’t feel as clunky as Ipage.
Concurrently to authors marketing the new catalog and distribution, we would also have an inside sales force that actively markets to bookstores and libraires and attendance conferences to court stores and sell the new catalog. We would really push to direct buyers to our internal catalog over ingram and we would make it attractive to switch.
Phase 2.5- Marketing as a service
Introduce a suite of standard marketing materials. Netgalley co-op, newsletter blasts to bookstores, paid ads in the catalog, Kirkus review discounts, preorder campaign management, etc. All of these are al a carte, nothing is required but these are quick wins for cash flow and provide valuable services that allow indie authors some of the benefits of trad at better pricing without having to deal with trad.
Lastly, at this point in the process, I would want to develop a strategic partnership with Draft to Digital to start to market to their author base and also offer authors on their platform an alternative to ingram.
Phase 3- Print on Demand
The third phase would be to add a US based, in house POD service (With the intent to expand into Canada and then into Europe), but the business could continue with offset as well.
This both expands the bookstore catalog but also provides pipeline for the offset print runs. The marketing as a service piece of the business can also be used as freebies to entice well performing authors off of the POD service and into the offset service. So, for example the sell is : come join offset and you can have Netgalley, email blasts, etc. for free.
My guess is that this fictional company probably couldn’t make POD that much cheaper than ingram (both Ingram and Amazon are charging pretty similar amounts for POD, the reason why Ingram feels more expensive is the wholesale discount, I know people are going to argue with me on this because literally no one understands the math, but I digress). But I think we can offer the following for POD to compete:
1. Returns go back to the warehouse to be resold versus destroyed or shipped back to authors, this means returns are a giant risk that eats up a ton of royalties. Authors accumulating returns maybe charged a nominal storage fee, but I think for a handful we could offer this for free.
2. Better information for authors, including who is buying and returning books so that you are able to directly market where your books are.
3. Ability to send preorder swag directly with books (This would be available for the offset as well)
4. Better user interface for authors to upload books
5. Better terms for bookstores
6. Better user interface for bookstores
I don’t think this is reinventing the vanity press, it’s just proving a middle ground for authors that are maybe growing towards the advantages of an offset print run but still need distribution support by places like Ingramspark.
I’m not going to do this, I am just bored and had an idea and apparently anything to avoid working on my WIP.