by Gene Turnbow | Sep 6, 2025 | Books
People like to complain, and when they have trouble with something the first thing they do is try to shift the blame to somebody else. It’s never them. So naturally, if something is a little harder, it tends to attract negative attention.
And so we come to Ingram Spark.
If you’re not aware, Ingram Spark is the single largest, best established, and by far the cheapest print on demand service outside of Amazon KDP itself. They provide a catalog service from which libraries and bookstores can order your books, putting you on the same technical footing as traditional publishers when it comes to distribution. There are other companies that do this, but Ingram Spark is far and away the biggest and most recognized name in publishing, outside of the Big Five publishers.
“The Big Five” in publishing refers to the five largest trade book publishing companies: Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette Book Group, and Macmillan Publishers.
Now we get to the crux of the complaints: their interface. I read through all the documentation on their web site, and found it straightforward. There were no confusing bits. Everything did what it said it did. If you follow their instructions for formatting, you will have a printable book that you can be proud of. What it does not have is things like extra features that spell-check your manuscript before you hit the submit button, or a previewer right there in their interface that shows you what your book will look like. Instead, they prepare a digital galley proof to show you what your cover and each interior page will look like. You download this once you have all your digital assets uploaded, and it takes them an hour to get back to you with an email showing you where to download it. You open the PDF locally, on your own machine, instead of tying up their server with that task, then you give them either a thumbs-up, “Yes, everything looks fine” or thumbs down, “No, I screwed part of this up, I want a do-over”. It’s missing some of the bells and whistles as compared to the Amazon KDP submission system, but really that’s all. Then they send you another confirmation email so you can double-check your digital galley proof, and you’re ready to go.
They anticipate that if you’re using their service, and you can read and follow instructions, that you will have a successful outcome. That confidence is well placed. There’s nothing broken about their interface. Everything works exactly as described, and the documentation is clear and has no ambiguity whatsoever. My hat is off to whoever maintains their on-line operating manual.
Humans, however, frequently make the error that they are dealing with a person, not a careful architected enterprise grade software interface, and expect them to adapt to variations in user performance and accuracy that just isn’t possible in real world situations.
I honest to gosh believed people were smarter than to think that changes they made were instantaneous across a multi-national company with distribution centers all over the world, but apparently not. Authors have put up indignant videos about it, having not read and understood the instructions, and expecting Ingram Spark to compensate for that on the fly.
Ingram Spark is a huge, huge system, and they expect you to know what you are doing. The secret sauce is to debug everything on KDP, which has a 1-3 day turnaround time on changes (they claim 3-5, but I’ve never had it take longer than one day), and only when you are dead sure you have it right do you upload to Ingram Spark, and even there the cover art will need adjustment because they compute their own templates. Using the KDP ones won’t work, you have to do the cover art over or it will not fit properly.
I have heard tell that the cover art as printed by Ingram Spark can be slightly more saturated than KDP. I’ve ordered a physical proof copy of Juniper Fairchild and the Alterwhere from them to see for myself, but I expect that a production artist used to variations in printing services will be easily able to compensate—and for all that, it’s likely something you’d only be able to see if you had an Ingram Spark edition and a KDP edition side by side in order to make that comparison. Even professionals would not be able to tell the difference without an A/B test.
If you are self-publishing, or you run a small press publishing company like Helium Beach, you’re going to have to get to know Ingram Spark. There are really no other viable options in terms of distribution and unit cost. There are potential pitfalls, but if you just sit down and read the instructions, you’ll be just fine.
Have fun with it.
by Gene Turnbow | Sep 2, 2025 | Writing
… and yet, I know nothing.
I haven’t even learned all the ways there are not to publish a book, but I now have at least a general idea of what I’m doing. I can tell you this much, publishers and agents really do earn their pay. There is a lot to know, and a lot to know to avoid.
For one thing, you can’t launch your book without both TikTok and Instagram. It’s harder to get traction on Instagram, but at least it’s mostly free of scammers trying to sell you author’s services. Apparently this is a thing on TikTok. You’ll get a pile of followers quickly, and that really does help, regardless. However, some non-zero percentage of these people are folks trying to sell you book trailer or fake reviews for your book, neither of which helps you, and both of which will drain your bank account with little to show for it.
The clue, by the way, that you’re talking to a scammer is the number after their name. If they have under a hundred followers, they are very probably not a fellow author. I hadn’t known this when I started out, and got buttonholed by one female author who got me talking about my book, then offered to sell me fake reviews. I told her to shove off. A week later, she contacts me again, under the same login-name but with a different number at the end. What I think is happening is that this author, who looks legit when you look her up online, is actually being spoofed by an illicit organization that uses her name and likeness, and by accident they’ll contact the same potential clients, thereby giving up the game because the second one doesn’t know what the first one talked about with you and repeats the same lame sales pitch.
I also found out that there are a bunch of book review services that are used by bookstores and libraries, but that nearly all of them want to review the book three months prior to press time. If you’re self-publishing, you don’t have three months. The time between a final draft and publication might be as little as one week.
In the world of publishing, things move at glacial speeds. For a major publisher, a three month delay is nothing. For a small press or an independent author, though, that’s a fiscal quarter. Nobody can sit around on a book that long, it’s financial suicide. For the next book I’ll add that into the marketing and distribution plan, but that obviously isn’t happening for Juniper Fairchild and the Alterwhere.
The most cost effective way of getting reviews for your book is through either Goodreads, or through Booksprout. Booksprout lets you substitute cash for the social elbow grease you have to apply to make Goodreads work for you, but it seems to me that Goodreads is probably the better long term plan. It has a social environment Booksprout doesn’t appear to have. and it’s vastly vastly cheaper. Either way, building a mailing list is essential, even a small one will perform better and do you more good than no mailing list at all. I think failure to do this is why so many indie books fail.
I’ve also encountered something interesting. Apparently an average review of 3.5 stars out of 5 is considered decent. I’m having a hard time with this idea. My review ratio is more like 4.75 stars out of 5. My writing style has been compared to those of Neil Gaiman (I know, I know, but remember him as a writer, not a human being with questionable personal values), T. Kingfisher, Terry Pratchett, Lewis Carrol, J.R.R. Tolkien, and L. Frank Baum. Once I step outside my protective bubble of my personal advance review list, I might do more poorly, but people don’t tend to make those specific kinds of remarks unless they mean them. When you say things on the internet, they tend to stick around.
Anyway, the point being that that fellow I found with a 3.5 stars out of 5 review average seems to be selling very well. I’m hopeful that this speaks well of my own potential.
Of course I’m scared to death that it’s all a data mirage, and that I’ve been basing my research on people who were either lying or didn’t have a clue themselves, or both. There’ll be no way to know until release day.
And now we wait.
-30-
by Gene Turnbow | Aug 5, 2025 | Business, Writing
I am not, and have not been, in my thirties for a very long time. That said, I probably don’t have the time to wait around to pummel hundreds of agents with my manuscript until I am “discovered” by one of them. I have therefore decided to take matters into my own hands.
Helium Beach is an imprint I have been operating through Krypton Media Group for about five years now, as of this writing, and I was using Patreon money to buy short stories for publication. Needless to say, this sucks as a business model, so after a couple of years I stopped buying articles. Now, though, Helium Beach comes back into play. I am releasing my first novel, Juniper Fairchild and the Alterwhere, through this imprint, and I have established it with various publishing agencies and companies. The eBook and the paperback release on September 8, 2025.
And now I am swimming through the sudden realization that what I know about social media you could drown in a teacup. The learning curve has been soul shredding, terrifying. Yet, failure is absolutely not an option here, so despite the emotional trauma at having to get my feet back under me at 68 and start a whole new career, here we f**king go.
I’ve learned how to do internal design, cover design, how to work with an editor, the importance of using one, doing endless rewrites, doing my own cover design, and everything else while I keep my radio station running—the radio station, by the way, without which I would have had zero shot at any of this and would have been truly starting from scratch. The station, SCIFI.radio, has a social media reach of about 140,000 pairs of eyeballs due to its presence on five or six social media, and without that springboard I honestly have no idea how well I would be doing as an author. Probably not well.
It’s been exhausting, having to learn all this on top of having to write the book in the first place. I can see why a lot of indie authors never sell more than a dozen copies of their book. I think this just might be the most challenging thing I’ve ever done, not because the work is that hard, but because it’s so alien to how I think. I was raised to believe that if I did good work, people would notice, and I would rise. And that’s not actually how things work at all.
Quantity over Quality
You might find it appalling, but success has more to do with how you twiddle the knobs than the quality of your work. I mean, sure, the quality has to be there at the end, or your sales success will be singular and short-lived, but to begin with, before anybody’s seen your actual work, you can get quite a long way before you actually have to deliver the product.
TikTok and Instagram, for example, are currently considered the platforms for marketing and selling books. Nothing else really moves the needle. Facebook, which I had been relying upon for years, absolutely doesn’t. Yet, both platforms favor videos of a length between seven and fifteen seconds. You’re not doing much selling in seven seconds. You have to fall back on repetition, posting a couple times a day, sometimes for months, before you start to see a benefit. I can tell you, it’s exhausting.
I was just reading about one young lady (whom I will not name, in case she wants to try again and do better next time) who had somehow managed to get 4,900 pre-orders on her book, and then the book released, and all the people who bought it felt cheated because little attention had been paid to preparing the book for publication. It was poorly written, poorly edited (which could have fixed the “poorly written” part,) and contained numerous spelling errors. She got probably a $30,000 payday out of it as a first time author, and yet somehow had managed to run the prerelease guantlet without getting a proper editor in the mix; the point being that it is possible to learn the intracacies of the sales engine without having an actual salesworthy product.
The Actual Path
By this time you can figure out for yourself why indie writers usually fail. It’s not enough to write a great novel. If you’re an indie author, you have to not only write your book, but you’re responsible for all the things your agent would normally do for you, and all the things your publisher would normally do for you. You have no idea what you’re facing until you do it for the first time, nor do you have a clear idea of just how deep this rabbithole goes. The successful self-published author has mastered every single one of these tasks.
And here’s the kicker to all of it. The decision to self-publish might have been the right answer, even if I want to be traditionally published later. An astonishing number of agents now only accept authors with proven sales records and established social media spheres, because they can’t risk gambling on somebody who doesn’t have either one. The publishers are getting this way too. It used to be that the proving ground for new writers was selling short stories to the trade magazines, but they’re all gone now, and that hasn’t been true for probably half a century now. Writing shorts is still a way to polish up your writing skills, but if I’m honest here, writing short stories and writing novels are two completely separate skill sets. Success in one does not require or suggest success in the other.
Anyway, long story short, if you’re an indie author trying to climb to the top, don’t give up. You’re doing it right. There is no slush pile anymore. Indie publishing is the slush pile. Persistence will win the day.
by Gene Turnbow | May 15, 2025 | Uncategorized
I’ve started querying agents. This might take a while.
I keep reading about how long it takes to get an agent, and that much of the time “no” doesn’t mean your book is bad, it just means it doesn’t fit the flow of what they’re doing this year.
And, I have to assume that most people who query don’t even know what a query is supposed to look like but submit anyway, i.e., most people who think they’re writers don’t actually have any idea how the game works (and it is a game). That’s got to be skewing the numbers big time.
When I wanted to get into the FX industry, I just went ahead and did it and ignored the people who said how hard it was or that I would never pull it off. The same thing happened when I went into the game industry, and when I wanted to get into UCLA Film School, and when I wanted to work in feature animation. I did all of them. The lesson I learned is that all the horrible statistics take into account the most wildly stupid and self-destructive applicants in each pursuit who never get past the front door.
Screening applicants for positions at the feature animation studio taught me that for each successful hire, there would be 300-400 applicants, out of which perhaps a dozen might have the basic requirements for the job, and only two or three might actually have everything we were looking for.
That’s only about 3% that make the “I’m not an idiot” cut. And less than one in three of those got hired. Which is FASCINATING, because that’s the same ratio of would-be authors who start a book that go on to see their work published. It doesn’t prove correlation, but it suggests it really f-ing hard.
It also suggests that I’m probably a lot closer to getting published than I think I am. We’ll see.
by Gene Turnbow | May 14, 2025 | Books, Business, Writing
I’ve finished the third draft, and still frankly doing little tweaks here and there. I’ve learned that most agents, if not all of them, request the first three chapters of the book to read when you submit a query, so I’ve been polishing. A word here, a phrase there, suddenly it all seems to have outsized importance. And then, of course, it makes me want to go through the entire book and do that to every chapter.
When I’m alone with my thoughts, when I’m writing the story, that’s the sweetest, most engaging part of the entire process, but now I’m faced with having to do the one thing I’ve never ever been good at, the one thing that terrifies me more than anything else I’ve ever done in my entire life that didn’t involve doing something like playing electric guitar and singing on stage, solo, in front of an auditorium filled with my high school peers and their parents (this was when I was 17), encountering a band of thieves in my own home, led by someone I thought was my best friend (this happened when I was nineteen), or diving in the driver’s side window of my mother’s borrowed car to grab the emergency brake as it was about to dive off a cliff off the end of a pier into the Pacific Ocean (this happened when I was twenty), or having to pull over to blow out an engine fire on my way to work and then get back in the car and drive the rest of the way to work (this happened when I was 40).
I have to sell an agent on the idea of representing my book to a publisher.
I’m terrible at salesmanship. Throughout my life, any time I’ve been confronted with having to do it, it’s always been a horrible experience and I’ve failed at it miserably. But this time I can’t afford to fail, because the rest of my career as a writer depends on my being able to pull just one more miracle out of that dark secret place in the back of my trousers where flying monkeys come from.
I’m doing all the things I think I’m supposed to. I’ve gotten myself an annual membership on QueryTracker, which is a web site meant to help you find agents and keep track of whom you’ve submitted to and what they said, or didn’t say, afterwards. I’m considering entering BookPipeline’s unpublished author’s contest. To be honest, though, I have no idea if that’s a good idea, or if it would help me in the slightest. They don’t even start judging until September, and that seems a very long time from now, and I’m impatient to get started pitching agents.
I’m told that I need to start working on my next book while I work on selling this one, because the publishing industry runs at the speed of books, which is to say, not very speedy at all. Even if I get an agent right away, which isn’t terribly likely, I might see my seventieth birthday before the book is published, assuming it ever gets there. This prospect does not fill me with confidence. I’m sixty-eight now. I don’t want my life to go by while I wait to see if I get to be a real writer. Frankly, the odds aren’t good.
I will tell you something, though. The reason most people fail at getting an agent is that their work isn’t finished before they submit their queries, or they query the wrong agents because they haven’t done any research, or they can’t follow simple instructions given them by the agents. Frequently they just have no idea how writing a novel works, and have written something unreadable, and their books are nowhere near where they need to be to submit. Your book doesn’t have to be in its final, polished, perfect form, but it needs to be as good as you can make it, and it should have been through the hands of a professional editor before you submit (mine now has). The odds of my getting an agent are probably far, far better than I believe they are, because most of the field is just self-disqualifiying.
Now that my manuscript is finished, the real adventure begins.
Wish me luck.
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