The Dancing Hippo is one of the first picture books Bright Hawk Productions has published. We learned a lot!
We learned Ingram Sparks is NOT where you want to go. Well at least not for printing, and neither is any other service like Book Baby. They did help in wholesale distribution but the 100’s of dollars spent to print the books was a complete waste of money for Bright Hawk Productions. They even set up the pricing to make it hard for an independent publisher to make money on prints. Sad, because when I am buying a book like “The Dancing Hippo” I want the author and illustrator to make money and maybe a little trickle down to the publisher for supporting them. Most of us agree with this model, but I can assure that printing with IngramSparks will lead you to exact opposite.
The only way an independent author & illustrator can make money on IngramSparks is to raise the price of a well illustrated children’s book, hardback to over $20. In our research around the USA visiting many children’s books stores we found that a book over $20 was rare, and it usually had some extra special presentations like fold out pages. IngramSparks takes a percentage, not a flat fee for printing and then also overcharges for shipping prices. Also, the quality of the books from IngramSparks was despicable. The binding was falling apart and many of the pages had large white lines down it, then after distributing 100 books with more than a quarter of them damaged, they took over 2 months to replace the books. Never again will I print with IngramSparks they were so bad, they were embaressing!
We researched deeper and now with the experience of IngramSparks under our belts we moved on to an independent printer where we were delighted with their environmental concern, their low prices and amazing far superior printing. As we receive these books we regret that we didn’t start here, and that’s why we put this page up. So that if you, or someone you know, is thinking about printing a book they will consider a private local high quality carbon neutral printer, Puffer Printing.
CONCLUSION: If you order from Amazon, your supporting IngramSparks, Bright Hawk Productions will get a few pennies. If you order from our website you can get a better print, a better Ebook and more of the money lands in the pockets of the people that created the book. Does that feel good to you? Yah me too! Tell your friends, share this page!