Let me tell you the honest story about my journey as an indie author. My books are mostly journals and pictures books, but I have spent thousands of hours working on them. There is so much that goes into self-publishing a book. And if you have a low budget and plan on doing everything yourself, then it will take even longer!

Lucky for me, I love graphic design, writing, and editing. So, I was able to do almost everything myself, except for the Spanish translation. The good news is that I only paid 20 bucks for professional translation on Fiverr.

In the beginning, I spend many hours researching which platform to publish my books. I learned of two leading self-publishing companies that were pretty affordable.

The first was CreateSpace, which is now Kindle Publishing and the second is Ingram Spark. Both companies have their pros and cons.

Kindle Publishing Pros:

Let me start by saying that the customer service at this Amazon-based company is great. No, I don’t get paid to say that, but it is worth noting my good experience with them during and after publishing.

Second, you can self-publish for free with Kindle Publishing. Yes, you read that right, you can publish for FREE, and there is no set-up fee or fee for revisions. They will even give you a free ISBN.

So what’s the catch? I get this question a lot. Amazon benefits from authors who sell books. Period. You publish on Amazon, then you sell on Amazon — which is also a huge pro!

Kindle Publishing also earns brownie points for their printing. It is high quality, crisp, and professional. And they are quick to replace any bad printing jobs, which happens on occasion. Another pro is that buying author book copies is pretty cheap. You can order them through the Amazon website at any time, with quick delivery.

Kindle Publishing Cons:

The cons for Kindle Publishing is that you can only publish in paperback. Another downside is you can’t reuse their ISBN’s with other self-publishing companies.

Also, Kindle Publishing has a ton of rules for the final book submission. This can be intimidating, I submitted my first book over 20 times before it finally got accepted!

Ingram Spark Pros:

I am going to admit that I’m not a big fan of Ingram Spark, but they do have some cool benefits worth considering. For instance, Ingram Spark has options to self-publish your book as a hardback or with a sleeve. Opposed to Kindle Publishing, which only allows you to publish a paperback. The other good thing about them is that they have high-quality printing. Also, the printing is a bit cheaper than Kindle Publishing, so you get more royalties. You can also order copies at any time, like on Kindle Publishing.

Ingram Spark also allows brick and mortar stores to buy your books at a discount on their website. For example, if Target wants to buy your books, they can order and pay for x amount of copies. The downside is that if they don’t sell all the books they purchased, they will return the unsold copies. Then you have to pay them back. So there is a bit of a risk. We’ll call this a pro and a con.

Ingram Spark Cons:

Their customer service is awful! I printed a few copies of my books and half of the books were misprinted. I called and emailed them and never heard back. Imagine printing 1,000 copies and 250 of them were crap, not even sell-able. This was a huge turn off for me.

Wait there’s more. They charge a set-up fee of $49 dollars for print copies and $25 dollars for eBooks. Then if you make any revisions, they charge you again. To put this in context, I submitted revisions on CreateSpace over 20 times for one book. So, if you are using both platforms, it’s best if you make all revisions on Kindle Publishing first. Then when you were sure that your book is at its best version, then submit it to Ingram Spark.

You also, have to buy your own ISBN’s, which are very expensive. One ISBN cost $125 on the Bowker website, which is the only safe and legit place to get an ISBN.

In summary, both companies have their pros and cons. I recommend researching different self-publishing platforms to see what works best for you. Avoid vanity publishing scams! Both of these companies pay royalties every 90 days and the cost per printed copy is still pretty cheap.

As I mentioned earlier, there are so many steps to self-publishing and this is only one of them. Be patient with the process. At the end of the day, always remember that the most important thing is getting your book out there. So don’t get bogged down with the details, take one day at a time.