EPISODE 231I

Welcome to season one of 2021! We'll now produce ten episodes every quarter, plus the monthly Encouraging Words episode. With the extra time, we're able to make some improvements to the show -- including a full transcript for each episode. Enjoy!

Today's guest is Ben Hughes, Business Development Manager at IngramSpark. Ben has a long history in publishing, both in traditional publishing and in working with independent/self-published authors. In our interview, he explains what IngramSpark does as a company, how they work with authors around the world, and what you can expect from them in the future.

Ben kindly agreed to take questions from the audience, so leave your question in the comments section below the YouTube version of the show. https://youtu.be/CzMt8-YIRFw

The transcript timecode begins at the start of the interview, so you'll need to add about 8 minutes (8:03) to the time to jump to that spot in the full episode.

TRANSCRIPT

[00:00:02.160] - Kitty

Today's guest is Ben Hughes. Ben is the business development manager for IngramSpark in the U.K. In this role, he oversees all lines of business as they relate to IngramSpark, including the customer service team, and has been in this post since January 2020.As the needs of authors develop in an ever changing publishing landscape, Ingram Spark is adapting to ensure that its author platform is second to none in terms of service, author, education, distribution options and customer satisfaction. Ben leads on these areas of focus for the U.K. business while also working closely with the parent organization in the United States and the other global office in Australia. With experience across physical and digital bookselling and publishing, Ben has worked for the lightning source, part of the Ingram business, and prior to that spent five years at Penguin Random House in various sales and operational roles.

[00:00:55.800] - Kitty

Welcome, Ben.

[00:00:56.740] - Ben

Thank you very much, Kitty. Thank you for having me. It's fun to see you. So it's been maybe well, by the time this goes live, almost a year you and I met in person in the last week of the Old World. I know it feels like a long time ago, and in some ways it is, but in others it's not really. And obviously, a lot's changed since then. But, yeah, you came to see us in sunny Milton Keynes in the UK where we're based. And yeah, it's great to great to see you again. It was so fun.

[00:01:27.330] - Kitty

I have to say that was one of the best parts of my trip. I mean, here I had never been to had I ever been to England before, maybe for my husband's a twin and his twin brother went to England, happened to be on their birthday, and we went to meet them for a weekend. But this at most was my second trip to England. And the most exciting part for me was going to the IngramSpark's facility.

[00:01:51.120] - Ben

I actually remember how excited you were and I think it was quite infectious. It was quite a small group. So we have these days where people can come, just for your listeners for context- we invite people to come and see where we print the books and what we do and how it works. We do these days maybe what we try to do one a month, but depending on what time of year it is, obviously we get less uptake the closer we are to Christmas. There are certain times of day where people are too busy. And yeah, that day it was quite a small group.I can't remember quite why, but it was nice in a way that it was a small group because it meant that we got to spend more time talking to each individual and it felt a little bit more personal, which is good.

[00:02:28.770] - Kitty

Yeah, yeah. It was actually because there was going to be a ginormous group that you guys had planned for because of Mark Dawson's event. But the corporation, the corporate part of your company, the parent company, had said, no, we can't do large events because covid had started becoming an issue. But three of us didn't get the email and we showed up and you guys were like, well, three people. That's OK.

[00:02:51.780] - Ben

I know. And it feels it feels kind of surreal now to think that, you know, we even did that even at three people. I haven't been to the office where we were since March last year. So now it feels kind of surreal. But hopefully we can get back to a point in time where we can invite people again because it's a fun part of what we do. And for any author, seeing a book go through the production process and end up on these little conveyor belts, it's quite fun. So that's a good part of the job. And we hopefully we can get back to that soon.

[00:03:25.140] - Kitty

Yes. And I just have to tell everybody, whenever this is an option for you, you have to go, because one of the women that I met, her name is Ulfa, and she and I are now fast friends, but she and I started jumping up and down on the production floor and she was like, we're seeing where books are born. And we were both so ridiculously nerdy. Excited.

[00:03:46.530] - Ben

Yeah, it is . For any book lover, it's a great thing to do. And yeah, you know we have some lunch. We have a nice time. We can have a chat. So yeah. I'm glad you had a good time. It's good.

[00:04:00.540] - Kitty

It was awesome. So let's talk about some of the things that I learned about IngramSparks, so there's a huge company called Ingram and then IngramSpark was created, I think , after authors started trying to ask Lightning Source if they can individually publish. Right. Because I remember I got an account at Lightning Source kind of near the end of that.

[00:04:21.390] - Ben

That's right. So you're right. Ingram Content Group, Ingram is a is an enormous American family-owned company. Still a family owned company based in Nashville and Tennessee, started off as a barge company going down the Mississippi River. Still, does that today. There are lots of different offshoots of the Ingram family name. And yeah, in the book business, Lightning Source is our kind of bigger main organization, which has catered for traditional publishers in a sense, and looks after some of the biggest publishers you'll have heard of , all of the big trade publishers, all of the biggest academic publishers, as well as some smaller independents as well. And you're right, there were limited author options at the time, and when I say author options, something that is perhaps more tailored, maybe a little bit more competitively priced, etc, and something that also understands the needs of an author as an individual over a business like a big publisher. So, yeah, at the time, I think it was around eight years ago now, my old boss, Robin Cutler, who is now retired after twenty- five years in the industry, she left her post at Amazon and came and set up IngramSpark within the Ingram family.And we've been looking after authors ever since.

[00:05:43.280] - Kitty

And I have to say that my experience has been that you look after authors very well and it's actually even in your bio, you know, that one of the things that you try to do is have the best author platform out there. So do you want to talk a little bit about when first of all, I'm not sure how many people don't know that much about print on demand publishing. So some of the audience is going to have already done it. Lots, but let's just kind of talk about what that is.

[00:06:17.990] - Ben

So quickly just kind of whistle stop tour of what sort of print on demand is. It is kind of, the clue is in the name. We don't kind of print books and keep them on shelves in thousands, hundreds and thousands. What we do is we can print one or ten or one hundred or five or nine, you know, and quite often that means that, you know, an author or a publisher can be far more flexible with their approach and also have more control over their inventory.They can spend less money up front on physical stock that they have to keep somewhere and invest money into and maybe spend that money or that time on something else, like editing or jacket design or marketing, for example.

[00:07:03.170] 

So Ingram and as an offshoot of that, IngramSpark is one of the kind of market leaders when it comes to print on demand and for the sake of acronyms, which Ingram is built on acronyms, we refer to it as POD. So if I say Pod 100 hundred times in this podcast, you know, I'm referring to a print on demand and so linked to the POD system of printing books, we also have a global distribution network. So not only can you print your book in the quantity that suits you, you also have access to every single retail channel you can think of.

[00:07:41.780] 

And that's globally, not just in the UK, not just in the US, not just in Australia, where we have our main kind of organizational buildings, but also far beyond that. We have print partners all across the globe, China, Russia, most of mainland Europe. So really we're seeing, it's a kind of, advent really for potential for where authors can sell their books. And, you know, in the last five, six, seven years, you know, we've had authors go from selling one copy to their friends or family to selling thousands of copies a year worldwide just by kind of learning how the distribution network works, educating themselves more on how to market a book.And we help with all of that stuff as well.

[00:08:28.640] 

So POD in its essence is, the book doesn't exist until somebody orders it to. Somebody hits by and then we receive that order through the metadata feeds that we manage and we print the book. And a paperback book will take us maybe two to three days to print before it's out the door. A hardback book might take slightly longer to be more of a manual process, but still the best working week we can have a hardback book out the door on the way to the end customer.

[00:08:57.110] 

So it's a really it's an amazing process. It frees up a lot of time and capital for authors and publishers. And really one thing that I tried to say is it gives back a lot of that control to an author to do what they want to do, when they want to do it.

[00:09:11.690] - Kitty

Yeah. And I have to say that one of the things that I was not to say surprised, but I'd never been in a printing facility like that before. I used to work in the magazine world for a short while and went to a totally different kind of a printer, a something press. I just lost the word. Yeah, yeah.The other kind of printer,

[00:09:32.330] - Ben

Like an offset printing .

[00:09:33.680] - Kitty

Offset, that's what I was trying to say. Yeah. Yeah. And so this is quite different and quite the same.And one of the things that was really a joy to me as an author, knowing that, you know, this is where my books are going to come from for for certain distribution channels, is that the quality of just even one book or one hardcover book? We watch some people actually do physical, like it's not just machines, some of it's physical people who are making sure that everything is perfect and looks beautiful.

[00:10:04.670] - Ben

Yeah, and that's a good point to make. So for a long time correctly, there has been a bit of a perception problem around print on demand books. Certainly in the UK, I would say less so in the US, but in the UK I would say definitely. I've spent my career so far working in trade publishing mostly, and so I'm kind of used to a certain level of quality when it comes to the finished product. And I think even I held this perception for a long time was that POD was maybe the kind of hallmark of a lesser quality. It's what people do when they're looking to save money. And that can be true. But for some people, it's not true and we cater for kind of both ends of the scale. So if you think about a trade publisher, when they start to put books to POD, it means they're not selling as much. And that's an opportunity for them to save money on that book. They can maybe bring some of the finishes down, they can change the paper type, they can maybe take off some of the fancy, you know, printing foil or some glitter. They can start to remove those things that the sales demand declines, but that's only one part of it. Lots of people use POD as their primary source of printing, and we cater to that end as well. So to that point, we've invested literally millions of dollars in bringing our printing equipment up to the standard of what you would see in any kind of traditional offset printer, clay or CPI for any UK listeners will be familiar with those printers, to the point that now, you know, I can say as impartially as possible you could hold a POD book in one hand and a traditional offset book in the other, and you would have to be a pretty keen maybe production expert to be able to tell the difference. Certainly from a customer point of view, the difference between those two things has come almost down to nothing over the years. And that's a that's a really big deal.

[00:11:59.570] - Kitty

Yeah, you guys have a kind of a display room that you showed us all the different kinds of things that you can do, which is amazing. Like I think of things in terms of novels and non-fiction books.But you have like I should let you describe it because it's quite a lot of different things you can print, you can print workbooks and like things for like a conference book and.

[00:12:22.570] - Ben

Exactly. And that's kind of a testament to my earlier point, you know, and as in that, we've invested in developing our technology so that once upon a time we could only really do one kind of thing, maybe a black and white paperback book. But now we have people uploading a large square format, kind of coffee table photography books. We have people doing cookery books through IngramSpark and Lightning Source.

[00:12:50.980] 

We have lots of children's authors, you know, high color density content, square format, hardback. So, yeah, the paper quality as well has come on leaps and bounds. We now use a trade paper that is used widely by most of the trade publishers in the U.K. So on that point, you would not be able to tell the difference. We made no secret of what we can't do as well, and I think that's important to say. So whilst there's lots you can do in IngramSpark, you know, unfortunately, we're not a point just yet where we can add unlimited finish types so we can't do things like spot UV and embossing and things like that.

[00:13:28.120] 

We can't necessarily add lots of nice foils or glitter or ribbons or end papers or things like that. We may do in future. If the demand is there for what we're doing, then we will certainly look at it. But, you know, in terms of where we were probably even five years ago, the the product range on offer now would would suit most authors and publishers to do what they need to do, I would say.

[00:13:52.030] - Kitty

Yeah, you have a and I would have put it right next to me if I had thought that I would bring it up.But do you have on your display area a hardcover novel that has a dust jacket where the hardback portion also has the cover on it.

[00:14:11.670] - Ben

Yeah.

[00:14:12.040] - Kitty

Plus the dust jacket. And when I looked at that, like I was like looking at all the edges in the inside, in the spine. And I was like, oh, my gosh, I am so in love with this. I'm totally going to do my books in hardback just so I can have this really beautiful looking copy of the book as well.

[00:14:25.490] - Ben

Oh, yes. Well, that's quite a new thing that we've launched maybe a year ago we launched that. So, yeah, you're right. Having the jacket image printed directly onto the hardboard behind the dust jacket as well. And for any book nerds or geeks, you know, that's great. And we know the hardback is something a bit special. And we encourage authors to certainly think about doing a hardback. We have people that sometimes do them just as a special, you know, maybe as a prize or give away.

[00:14:52.600] 

But obviously, when when authors start to hit a certain level of sales, you know, hardback book attracts a higher price point. So we we try to encourage people to think of it sort of economically as well. An author can make more money by publishing in hardback as well. And in a kind of modern world, you know, having multiple formats on offer is a good thing. If you can kind of incorporate it into your business and make it work, it can be a great thing to have more than one format.

[00:15:18.940] - Kitty

Yeah

[00:15:19.240] - Ben

People like to have a choice. And I'm certainly a hardback lover. I can see by your bookcase you are, too. So, yeah, absolutely. People. And we're doing more hardbacks now than ever as well. It's certainly an area of our business that's improving. And like you mentioned, a lot of that process is still quite manual. It's why it takes a little bit longer. But we're looking to automate more of our process to make it quicker and in turn, make it cheaper as well. So that's something definitely coming down the line. Definitely.

[00:15:47.810] - Kitty

Yeah, very nice. Now, we've talked a lot about all the different options and things that we can do in a couple of times, we've kind of briefly mentioned distribution and marketing. One of the things that I love and originally signed up to be on your newsletter list, even before I was technically a customer having my books printed there, you guys have the most amazing author education.Like, there's so many videos. I sometimes am like I'm not even sure where to tell my clients to start because there's so much information. So let's talk a little bit about what you're trying to do with that.

[00:16:24.190] - Ben

Yeah, absolutely. And that's you know, I think we mentioned it briefly earlier when you introduced my bio. That's a big part of what we're doing. And, you know, even though IngramSpark exists within this big company and it's a big corporation and we deal with lots of organizations who have you know, they've been publishing books for years, they know what they're doing, they're very professional. We also have a large portion of our customer base that are really starting in the beginning.

[00:16:53.080] 

And they haven't got the kind of practical skills to make a success of their book. And when I say that, I define that in as much as you're selling books, you're writing the book for the with the intention of selling copies. What success looks like is neither here nor there. It could be 10 copies. It could be ten thousand copies. But what we're trying to do with our education is, you know, help authors get a clearer understanding of how the publishing landscape works, what things are important, what you need to consider, what you what you can't take shortcuts with.

[00:17:31.300] 

And that's, you know, there are becoming fewer and fewer things you can take shortcuts with because people expect a certain level of quality. So with the education, that's something that's evolved over time. It used to...