Thanks for the reply!

a follow up question. You say 1. With us, it's a $10 fee/book/year for Ingramspark.

Does this mean, even if I buy the LTD, I will still need to pay $10 annually per book to have my book on Ingramspark?
I hope I have misunderstood as this would unfortunately make this deal useless. Ingramspark is a one time fee, why would anyone use your platform that requires a yearly fee for life? It make zero financial sense, but I hope you can clarify.

Thanks for the reply! 1 important follow up question.

You say "1. With us, it's a $10 fee/book/year for Ingramspark."

Does this mean, even if I buy the LTD, I will still need to pay $10 annually per book to have my book on Ingramspark?

I hope I have misunderstood as this would unfortunately make this deal useless. Ingramspark is a one time fee, why would anyone use your platform that requires a yearly fee for life? It makes zero financial sense, but I hope you can clarify.

I'd be glad to clarify that!

Setting up a book title on PublishDrive for Ingram does not require any kind of fee. Your files get handled and converted for free. However, there is an annual fee of $10 to actually send out your book to Ingram’s network. The amount is:

- Paid only for the titles you wish to distribute to Ingram’s network
- Paid until the title is available for sale with Ingram’s network
- Refunded if the distribution to Ingram’s network fails to occur for any reason

This is Ingram's requirements, not ours, so we cannot change this, unfortunately. We are sorry to hear if this means our service is not fitting to your publishing needs, but please take into consideration that we offer a wide variety of services and distribution channels in addition to Ingram! We are hopeful that you will find something else we offer that can make our deal seem more favorable to you.

Please let us know if we can help further!

Thanks for explaining!
-Was the $10 per book/year deal a custom deal arranged between Publishdrive and Ingramspark?

Publishdrive definitely serves a need in the market to distribute to all the smaller channels. They are not worth the time to submit to each marketplace, since the majority of sales come from the big players such KDP, Ingramspark, iBooks and Google Books etc.

I completely understand if it's beyond your control, but you should definitely include this cost in the main section of the deal.

Buyers on Appsumo expect to get a lifetime deal for a one time fee. If they see an unexpected annual fee, even its beyond your control, it could lead to a negative response from the community (annual fees on Appsumo is like self promotion on Reddit, it doesn't go down well lol!). Sumolings appreciate pricing transparency, and I wish you all the best with your sale on Appsumo :-)

Thank you for taking the time to share your feedback with us! We are happy to learn from the Sumoling community and will update the description of the deal to point this out 🙂

A few more details I would like to add to my previous response:
- We do not charge a revision fee for books distributed on Ingram. You can change your print files as many times as you want! According to our knowledge, it costs $25 every time to make a change to your files at IngramSpark.
- It is cheaper to test the market with our service. If you don't sell many copies of a new title, you would lose $50 with IngramSpark and only $10 with PublishDrive.
- We handle all the technical requirements of your file that Ingram has (PDF version, font embedding, color profiles, vector barcode and color needs, flattening).
- A dedicated cover PDF is generated automatically for all print distributors specifically (Ingram, Amazon, China CNPIEC) to comply with their different requirements (different spine size, for example).
- Sales data from Ingram is displayed on our sales dashboard and it's updated every day!

I hope these factors can help you make your decision :)

That is a good point about the revision fees!

I've now heard from others, that similar aggregator platforms seem to also have to pay an annual fee for Ingramspark, so Publishdrive does fit with the current market prices. Book publishing can be an elaborate and time consuming process outside of selling on Amazon, so platforms like yours are great once you have a scalable business!

I've heard of Publishdrive before during my research so I will take a deeper dive into your platform. You're abacus integration for sharing royalties is also very interesting! It's a monthly fee, but $3/book/month to split royalties is the cheapest I've been able to find so far!

I'm glad to hear you found my response useful :) Please let us know if there is anything else you're curious about!