Further, the breakdown of revenue shares across channels is by far the best I’ve ever seen. Extremely clear, excellent use of graphs + colour.

Sidenote: does anyone know how to deal with a possibly malicious review on amazon listings? Someone copy pasted the same one star review on each of my books. I contacted Kdp support, they seemed sympathetic. But when amazon emailed back they only looked at one review, not the set of them.

Every single figure has the same numbers for every scenario; only the colors differ. That's a clue that there is something wonky in the choices they made regarding the visual display of information.

- Retailers expect to pay a 55% discount off list and return books that don't sell. (https://outskirtspress.com/articles_trade.html)

- Many retailer won't work with anything that's self-pubbed or POD, although the latter issue is changing as quality improves.

- Distributors want to have review copies, art, promo materials, etc. in hand many months before the official release date (6 is typical) which forces planning and editorial deadlines to start at least 18 months in advance.

Ingram is a silent giant in the U.S. book publishing industry. TFA mentioned IngramSpark for self-pubbed authors, but Ingram has other wholesale and distribution programs aimed at traditional and indie publishers as well as the iPage book database, which many retailers and libraries use to place orders and find titles for their customers/patrons. This post outlines their approach to indies: https://www.ingramcontent.com/blog/demystifying-book-distrib...

https://aerbook.com/store/mwl/

This is a rudimentary but still fair description of the basic process of trade book publishing, and you conceivably could make more money self-publishing, assuming sales are roughly equal in both cases. They probably won’t be, but you could still come out ahead. A few folks have done quite well with it, but you will be doing all the work needed to make that happen.

NEVER cut your copyeditor and proofreader. NEVER NEVER NEVER.

You still have the responsibility of creating a quality product. You can sell a few buckets of poo, but that market is very small.

Sustained quality is a prerequisite to a writing career.

I was looking at https://www.ingramspark.com/environmental-responsibility and saw this:

> The purpose of print-on-demand book manufacturing, is to reduce our environmental impact.

That misplaced comma is already enough to make me think these folks aren't serious about books (money from books, sure, but not books.)