Not gonna lie… I’m irritated as hell right now. As someone who runs a small press and self-publishes, I (and many others like me) am at the mercy of conglomerates such as Ingram Spark to print my books. Over the years, I thought I had finally found a balance where I would order my books and receive them before the book’s release day (or shortly thereafter if there are extenuating circumstances). This time, however, I got f-ed, plain and simple.

Ingram Spark has been notoriously worse this year with printing and addressing concerns via customer support. It’s easy to find Reddit threads, Facebook posts, and Instagram comments full of other authors and publishers who have had a difficult time getting through to customer service at Ingram Spark. A “support ticket” is what it sounds like: it’s like when you go to the DMV or the meat counter at the grocery store and you take a numbered ticket which marks your place in a waiting line. When they call your number, its your turn.

Ingram Spark’s waiting period at the time of my first ticket was 3-5 days. There is also no phone number to call for assistance and no email to reach out to, just a form on the website.

It took me over three weeks to get an answer from them when my book’s files got stuck in limbo for the epub version of Into The Darkening Dust. When they did finally clear (after I started three separate support tickets), Ingram emailed to say “Upon review, its now showing as “available” in your account.”

As if they hadn’t just been holding my files hostage for three weeks. As if they didn’t have to explain why it happened. Guys. It got fixed. Great. But WHY DID IT TAKE SO LONG? Was it a glitch? Was it because they don’t have enough people to go through files? Are they outsourcing to AI??? What is the reason?

That avoidance of taking responsibility seriously got under my skin. When prompted at a later date to rate the feedback I received from customer support, I responded negatively, explaining my frustration, how this impacted my book’s release and the ability to get pre-orders started in a timely fashion. How I never heard why they sat for so long and why no one from customer support responded for three weeks.

Another issue that compounded me being able to do anything with my files is how the Ingram Spark website uploads and processes files in their system. If you create a linked paperback and ebook together, they are tied into one another so that they can be listed together on retail sites and, assumedly, processed with efficiency by Ingram. However, if one file (epub) is held up because of an issue (whatever that may be), you are unable to edit or do anything with the paperback or hardcover files, too. This meant that I couldn’t do anything to the hardcover files (like upload new ones or alter anything) for three weeks, too.

I didn’t receive any response from this feedback. Instead, when I went to print my eventual edited hardcovers, I got a month’s wait time before those hardcovers shipped and made it to my door. A month. I’ve never had such a long wait for laminate hardcovers.

I’ve printed three other laminate hardcover titles with Ingram Spark and two jacketed hardcovers. This isn’t my first foray with them and this certainly isn’t any longer of a book than previous titles that have been printed.

With other platforms like Draft 2 Digital going to a paid system for new authors/publishers and Amazon being a spineless and horrible company all around, it means that many of us are stuck with Ingram. Ingram Spark, in the last few years, has gotten rid of its need to pay in order to upload titles and more recently, the need to pay in order to make changes to files of previously uploaded books. With the loss of such distributors such as Baker & Taylor, National Book Network, and others, it’s feeling as though more and more people are being funneled into fewer distribution and on-demand printing options.

The squeeze is real and its painful for us indies and self-published authors. And we’re not even going to broach AI which is a horrible nuisance getting steadily more horrible as the days drag on.

Presently, I’m doing my research into local printers to see if I can find something that will offer a more reliable and cost-efficient option for printing small runs of books. Up until recently, my experience with Ingram has been decent (not perfect, but mostly good). I don’t know if things will get any better but I’m anticipating that at the rate that indie publishing is flourishing, their services are not likely to speed up any time soon unless there’s some kind of drastic change to how they process their files.

For now, I’ve gotten my meager order of 10 hardcover copies, enough to fulfill my pre-orders on my website. I’ll likely be debuting the paperback option for this book ahead of my pre-planned fall release, just to mitigate the printing issues Ingram has caused.

That’s all for now, folks.

Until next time,

Kat