Depicted at the top of this post is the author copy of the hardcover edition of Rags and Muffin, which I received from Amazon KDP before the book went live (hence the “Not for Resale” stripe across the middle). My initial thought was that it looked really good, very professional and well put-together. The cover art is printed directly onto the case, and it came out crisp.
Recently, my wife, unaware that I could order additional copies at cost, ordered a few of these from Amazon in order to give them as Christmas gifts. When her copies arrived, I immediately noticed that they looked markedly different from what I had originally received from Amazon. Here is a side-by-side comparison:
My author copy is a thicker book, and a little better looking. You can also see that, in the copies my wife ordered, the title is not quite centered but shifted to the right. Even more baffling, if you look closely, you can see that my name overlaps Rags’s sneaker in the author copy but not in the ordered copy. I at first had no idea how that was even possible since I uploaded the cover as a single PDF file.
My first thought was that I had inadvertently uploaded the wrong cover image to Amazon KDP at some point. I have been shuffling a lot of files around to get this book published, so that would be likely—except the book should have failed to publish if that were the case, since Amazon has exact specifications for covers and will automatically reject anything that doesn’t fit.
After hunting through my files, I finally found the answer: The cover art on my wife’s copies is the cover for IngramSpark, the print-on-demand service that more or less holds a monopoly on distribution to libraries and brick-and-mortar stores.
Since Amazon KDP has only just recently begun offering hardcovers as an option, this may be a new discovery: Apparently, Amazon shipped IngramSpark hardcovers to my wife instead of its own hardcovers. That may indicate that Amazon outsources printing whenever possible. I have not tested if this is also true of paperbacks.
I’m not entirely happy with this. Amazon appears to be turning out a better product, as their version of the hardcover looks better in every significant way, including the binding (both are glued, but Amazon’s at least has a cloth backing). Not only that, but I can correct the contents of the Amazon version instantly and for free if necessary, whereas the contents of the IngramSpark printing are locked in by IngramSpark’s prohibitive pricing.
This has got me to thinking—is IngramSpark actually worth it? Their distribution is better, but since I’m small fry, my chance of being picked up by booksellers is remote anyway, especially since I can’t afford to buy back unsold copies. Almost all of my sales are certain to come from Amazon anyway, and if Amazon is willing to sell an inferior product in lieu of its own better product … maybe I should just kill the IngramSpark version and sell exclusively on Amazon. For this reason, I am already enrolled in Kindle Unlimited: It forces me to offer eBook versions on Amazon exclusively, but I know from indie authors with much greater reach than I have that eBook sales on other platforms are negligible.
