How do books get distributed and marketed?

If you missed part one on how books get written and printed, go back and read that post here.

Before I wrote this post, I didn’t really know how traditionally published books got distributed on a mass scale except for the primer from Melody Ann Owen. Two resources that were extremely helpful were:

• Khaliela Wright’s blog post (2020)
• Jane Friedman’s blog post (2024)

Here’s what I’ve learned.

 

How books get distributed

If you self-publish:

Choosing a self-publishing platform like IngramSpark, Amazon KDP, or Lulu determines how wide your distro can be. Here, the printer is your distributor, and you give up a percentage of revenue for this service.

Breakdown:

List price of my paperback book on Lulu (USD): $24.99
Printing cost: $12.28
Lulu’s fee: $2.54
My profit: $10.17 (40%)
The customer pays for shipping.

List price of my ebook on Lulu (USD): $9.99
Lulu’s fee: $1.89
My profit: $8.10 (81%)

(Note that the fees and my profit vary depending on where the buyer purchases the paperback and ebook.)

Say you printed your own book and are selling it on your own site. Take away the printing and shipping costs from your retail price, and you have your profit. (Lulu has a program that allows you to sell your book on your site using their plugin, while they cover the printing and shipping—one of my author clients is using it.)

You can also hit up bookstores and ask if they want to carry your book, but this is tedious work for an author, so most don’t go this route, at least not outside the cities they live in. Check out this past post on how to get your book in independent bookstores.

If you printed your own book and have a bookstore sell it on consignment, take away the printing and their fee from your retail price, and you have your profit.

I wonder if there are agencies that help you contact indie bookstores nationally or internationally—if you know the answer to that, contact me and I’ll update this post and give you credit.

A few folks who wanted to read my second book said that they requested it at their local library. I discovered that libraries is part of distribution, so I started digging around and found Library Bound, a wholesaler that caters to libraries across Canada.

I sent my sell sheet to Library Bound, and it accepted my title within 24 hours. (No library orders have come in so far, and my local library, Vancouver Public Library, isn’t even carrying a copy of my book!)

If you’ve published 3 or more books, and they’ve each sold 5,000 copies, you can explore the distro options available to traditionally published authors below.

Just know that once you’ve signed a contract with a distributor, you can’t work with anyone else. Some distributors won’t even let you sell on Amazon, so know what you’re agreeing to. Traditional publishers sell 60–70% of their books through Amazon while self-published authors sell 90% through Amazon.

If you’re working with a hybrid publisher, they may help coordinate an initial print run, get your book warehoused, and fulfill the orders that come in, but they better damn well be doing marketing and sales too.

Jane Friedman says, “If you do invest in a print run, know where and how those copies are going to sell. If you’re banking on the publishing service provider or hybrid publisher to sell those books for you through ‘distribution,’ you may have a sad story to tell in the near future.”

 

If you publish traditionally:

Here’s where it gets more complicated. There are two types of distributors: wholesaler/fulfillment, and retail.

1. Fulfillment distributors or wholesalers ship books when they’re ordered. They take care of warehousing and fulfillment and often offer free shipping—a huge cost savings. They do not require exclusivity, so publishers can potentially work with multiple wholesalers. Once an agreement is in place, the warehouse accepts orders, bills customers, and ships books on the publisher’s behalf.

Examples of places that order from wholesalers include schools, libraries, booksellers, big box stores, grocery stores, gift shops, museums, and wholesale clubs (hello, Costco!). They have their own supply chains and to reach them, the book needs to be in an existing system.

Wholesalers send their catalogues to clients either monthly or quarterly. These are not pretty, with eye-catching covers; they’re just a list containing the title, author, and ISBN. Wholesalers make their money on volume, so they won’t stock a book unless it’s in high demand.

A wholesaler allows a bookstore to place a single order for multiple titles from a variety of publishers. Because a large percentage of books never sell, returning unsold copies may occur in one transaction, too.

Wholesalers simply fulfill orders, so marketing falls to the author/publisher. They typically take a smaller cut of sales but require a larger discount than retail outlets, resulting in smaller royalties.

The main benefit of using a wholesaler is that bookstores will take a chance on a book in their existing supply chain and increase the likelihood of the book appearing in more stores. By working with a wholesaler, the publisher does not need to handle sales, and can put more effort into marketing.

Breakdown:

Retail book price: $24.99
Less 55% wholesale discount: $13.74
Less printing cost: $6.66
Profit: $4.59 (18%)

The major wholesalers include IngramSpark and Baker & Taylor.

2. Retail book distributors pitch and sell books directly to wholesalers, bookstores, libraries, and other retailers. The Big 5 publishers can afford to maintain their own warehouses and sales teams, but most small and medium-sized publishers turn to distributors. If a publisher signs a deal with a retail distributor, it can’t work with anyone else.

Full-service distributors connect indie publishers with fulfillment, sales reps, warehousing, etc. They manage contracts with warehouses, bill customers, and ship orders.

They provide marketing services and sales teams, and work to reach submarkets and retail outlets other than bookstores. A dedicated sales force actively pitches books to retailers. They secure orders for hundreds or thousands of books prior to the book launch date. 

Distributors take a percentage of the net sales. They never lose money on a sale, even though the author might. Wholesalers, bookstores, and online outlets pay this fee to the distributor. Distributor fees vary wildly from 10% to 30% and their discounts range from 55 to 75%. The larger the publisher’s sales, the lower the distro fee. Distributors may also charge other fees.

Breakdown:

Retail book price: $24.99
Less 55% wholesale discount: $13.74
Less printing cost: $6.66
Less 10% distribution fee: $2.49
Profit: $2.10 (8%)

Over 90% of book sales now happen at just a handful of accounts: IngramSpark, Baker & Taylor, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon. This means that distributor sales teams are less important than they used to be.

Major retail distributors (as of 2020) included: IngramSpark, Independent Publishers Group, Diamond Book Distributors, Hachette, National Book Network, and Penguin Random House Publisher Services.

You can find more distributors via the Independent Book Publishers Association and Nonfiction Authors Association.

For the self-published author, IngramSpark is both distributor types, but is more like a wholesaler because it doesn’t market or sell your book directly; it just makes it available to bookstores.

If you’re thinking you may as well go the traditionally published route because it gives you the best chance at distro, I hope you’ve got enough of a following to sell 25K books at launch, because that’s what publishers expect.

Remember, your sales earnings are way lower (5–20%) than if you self-publish (20–80%). Just because your book is in all the bookstores chains across the country, that doesn’t mean they’ll all sell.

Unless it becomes an instant classic, books usually have a life of a few years. Books that don’t sell go into the recycling bin or (worse,) trash. From an environmental point of view, the print-on-demand process offered by online platforms is better.

 

How ebooks/audio books get distributed

This is a lot more simple than hardcover or paperback and is the same process whether you self-publish or publish traditionally.

IngramSpark, Lulu, and other platforms like PublishDrive, BookFunnel, StreetLib and Spotify distribute ebooks and audiobooks online (BEWARE of Spotify owning the rights to your book!).

In my quest to make my ebook more available to digital libraries through OverDrive, I loaded my ebook to PublishDrive, which had an equally easy-to-use interface as Lulu. Within a month, my ebook was available on OverDrive.

I learned from a recent interview below that PublishDrive switched to a subscription—not revenue model, but your first ebook is free.

Audible has the greatest market share for audiobooks and pays authors 40% of all a la carte net sales and member net sales. It only distributes to Amazon and iTunes, so it’s up to you whether you want to go exclusively with Audible or other platforms.

 

How books get marketed

If you self-publish:

You’re responsible for marketing your book. Selling just on Amazon might be good enough, but consider the other 10% of folks who like to buy at bookstores or other online retailers. Knowing your reader is everything here. You can even do market research ahead of time to determine where you’ll distribute.

You get to choose your retail price. I wish I could have sold my book for C$25-30, but because of the (colour) printing cost and the other distro fees, the absolute minimum I could sell it for is C$36.99 online unless someone buys directly through me (or on consignment at Vegan Supply the year I launched).

I’ve blogged aplenty about what I did for my second book, but other considerations include:

• invest in a good book cover
• collect endorsements
• organize an in-store book launch and/or virtual event
• media outreach, including podcasts and collaborations with content creators
• online & social media ads, including Amazon
• sponsor newsletters, podcasts, YouTube channels, and events
• target reader communities like BookBub and Written Word Media
• collect reviews
• enter award contests
• speak at events where you can sell your book

The higher your marketing budget, the more you can do to spread the word about your book.

If you’re working with a hybrid publisher, it may or may not help you with marketing.

 

If you publish traditionally:

Being mass distributed makes it more accessible for more people to buy your book, so the marketing can be easier, but it doesn’t mean you get to skip out on all the items above.

My client who is traditionally published did in-store launch events, media interviews, has sold/signed copies at conferences and TEDx, and gives away copies to podcast listeners via Patreon, but still needs to sell an extra 15K books to reach the next royalty hurdle.

I find traditionally published authors who put in the extra effort end up having more notoriety in the end. James Clear‘s a great example of this. I finally read Atomic Habits in October and it’s one of the best books I’ve ever read—but I might not have known about it unless an aspiring author told me about his podcast interview with Tim Ferriss.

 

Need a book coach, ghostwriter, editor, or formatter to help you write and publish your book so you can get it in the hands of readers? Read more about my services here and contact me if you’re ready to begin!