Amazon is a giant, but they aren’t the only game in town, by far. The other on-line (and storefront) biggie is Barnes & Noble, plus the other thousands of other “smaller” chains and independent bookstores out there.

If you decided to go with a traditional POD like Outskirts Press, their upper-tier plans offer distribution to Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Ingram, and Baker & Taylor. Those last two are key, because they’re the big-boy distributors to thousands of booksellers. I want access to those distribution channels, but I can’t get there through Lulu or CreateSpace (and as I noted previously, the price model with traditional PODs won’t work for a book as long as mine). BookSurge is also not an option, in my opinion, because they don’t have a relationship with Ingram. I wonder if that could be because Ingram owns Lightning Source, which is BookSurge’s main competition. Hmmm…

And that brings us to the focus of this post: Lightning Source. Now, for those who don’t know, Lightning Source is one of the world’s largest – if not the largest – print on demand company (with operations in the U.S. and U.K.) that is used by most POD publishers – but not Amazon’s CreateSpace – to actually print the books. But they don’t offer the “author friendly” services of the traditional PODs or Lulu: if you want to go to Lightning Source as an independent author/publisher, you can, but they put up lots of caveats and warnings that this is not a venture for the faint of heart!

Why? Well, in short, they require you to do everything needed to get your book properly formatted for print, without any hand-holding services. This includes creating PDF files to very specific standards and a number of other things that – to many authors who may not be computerphiles – may be too much to handle.

In my particular case, I’m not put off, as I’m an official computer geek. I even went ahead and bought the necessary software (Adobe Acrobat Pro) to do the formatting, since I figure I can use the software for other odds and ends, too (and write it off as a business expense). But this isn’t something everybody’s going to want to do!

But the main advantage of going through Lightning Source and getting to the larger distribution channels is the price: while I have to confirm their current pricing, the last I read was that for a regular 6″x9″ perfect bound paperback, the cover was $0.90, plus $0.13 per page. By strange coincidence, that brings the price to almost exactly the same ($9.71) as the author price (for when you want to order books yourself) from CreateSpace under the pro plan ($9.66) [Note: Since I originally wrote this Amazon reduced the price a tad more, bringing CreateSpace's author price just a little under Lightning Source]. Hmmm. Coincidences, coincidences.

In terms of distribution potential (which you have to somehow harness up to your marketing to really take advantage of), Lightning Source is hard to beat. They distribute to Amazon, Baker & Taylor, Ingram, and a variety of other book distributors.

But one of the real powers of Lightning Source is that you get to control the retailer discount, from a minimum of 25% (it used to be 20%) on up. With CreateSpace and BookSurge, it’s fixed at 40% for sales through the Amazon catalog.

So, this gives me quite a few pricing options to play with for the larger distribution market. If I give myself a royalty of $3.00 and a minimal retailer discount of 25% – which probably only Barnes & Noble would consider picking up (Amazon won’t anymore, unless someone sells it in their marketplace) – the retail price would be around $16, which is reasonably competitive for a novel the length of In Her Name.

But I’d still have lots of wiggle room to try and make the pricing a bit more enticing to retailers that want a bigger discount. Taking it way up to a 50% discount, the retail price would be $25.25. That’s getting fairly steep for a novel, but most retailers are going to mark the price down anyway and put the book on sale: if they knock it down by 30%, the actual sales price goes down to $17.68 or so (which isn’t too unreasonable for a fat 6×9 trade paperback). So the retailer would still walk away with $5.05 and I’d get my $3.00 (note: I’m not particularly stuck on royalty percentages, but I figure that $3.00 per copy isn’t chump change, and you can always play with that figure in your overall pricing).

Now, the catch is the fees. Right now, setting up a new book has several costs, per title:

1. The ISBN fee ($125 from Bowker)
2. Cover ($37.50) and bookblock/text ($37.50) setup
3. $0.90 fixed fee + $0.013 per page
4. Wholesale distribution fee ($12)
5. Any changes to the cover or bookblock are $40 each

So, as you can see, the initial setup will cost roughly $200, including an ISBN from Bowker. That’s not a king’s ransom, but it’s a much steeper admission fee than you pay with CreateSpace or Lulu (although less than what you’d pay for a package from BookSurge or other PODs like Outskirts Press).

You can tinker with the numbers however you like, but the bottom line is that if you want access to the largest possible market beyond Amazon, the best access is through Lightning Source. But that’s only if you’re willing and able to handle all the technical parts of getting your book ready (or can find someone to do it for you), and you’re willing to pay the higher up-front fees.

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