Ingram Spark has officially launched today and should be suitable for self-publishers and small/medium sized publishers. Spark gives you a very simplistic user interface and makes it easy to manage your ebook publishing needs. What makes this different? It allows you to opt into having your physical book distributed to thousands of bookstores that rely on Ingram to deliver them to their retail environments.
There are a few key features to Ingram Spark that are worth mentioning. It has a conversion service that will take your PDF, Word, or other documents and convert them to ePUB or another ebook format of your choice. Most of the time, ebooks and tangible books require an ISBN number and customers will be diverted to Bowker to complete the transaction. You can track your sales on a unified portal that documents all of the important metrics. Every 24 hours, the data is repopulated, so most of your data will remain current. Speaking of sales, you can establish different prices depending on the markets you want to target. You can target specific countries or market to all of them, within the USA, Canada, European Union, and Australia. You can establish a publication date for when you want the book to be live, which aids publishers in adding their entire catalog in advance. When it comes to getting paid, you can attach your bank account to the portal and set a threshold limit on when the direct deposit will be made.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
