If you want to order print copies of your book, then your print book must appear for sale on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or Books-A-Million. If you do not see the retail listing for your print book on either of the mentioned retailer sites, that means you are not able to order copies yet. We have absolutely NO control over Ingram’s processing times.
*** WE NO LONGER TAKE DIRECT PRINT ORDERS. ***
Since we are continuing to grow (YAY!), we have made the decision to change some of our processes to better streamline everything for all involved, and one of those things is how you will order copies of your books. Unfortunately, you will no longer be able to get your books at cost BUT you will be able to get them deeply discounted through Author, Author. As you know, when you ordered directly through us via Ingram those sales did not count as you were getting the books at cost. Now, when ordering through Author, Author you will earn royalties and those book sales will actually count as sales!
Harbor Lane Books, LLC is not affiliated with Author, Author in any way, shape, or form. We simply want to give our authors a great option to order their books at a deeply discounted rate while also getting credit for all book sales. In addition to the order going through Ingram from Author, Author and it being royalty generating and counting toward your sales, they also report to the New York Times for list consideration. Their customer service is also wonderful and they were extremely helpful in explaining their processes to us, so we believe you will be in great hands when ordering your copies through Author, Author.
Please go to https://www.author-author.net/page/author-purchase-program to purchase copies of your book, and they will place the order through Ingram.
If you do not want to order through Author, Author, the you can order your books through a local bookstore or bookseller, and they will order your print copies from Ingram as well.
We are now able to create links where you can order directly through Ingram, please let us know if you prefer this and we will get the links created for you. The price set on these are the lowest we can possibly offer. Please note, we do not believe these will count as actual sales.
As you may already know, you could run into issues with bookstores ordering your copies due to the books being POD and this is why:
All of our books are made available in Ingram’s catalog (ipage) where a bookstore owner, bookseller, retailer, library, school, etc. can order our books with a 55% discount. This is the industry standard discount amongst traditional, major house publishers. It is very rare for an independent digital publisher to offer a 55% discount. We do this because we want to see our authors’ books on bookshelves.
We do not allow print returns. It’s bad enough that ebooks can be returned and, unfortunately, there’s nothing we can do about that. Why do we not offer print returns? Because we would have to deduct returns from future royalties to authors. This gets messy, it’s disheartening to see, and there have been horror stories with small presses allowing returns on POD books and then bookstores return bulk orders that they weren’t able to sell, and then those publishers are out thousands of dollars because Ingram deducts it from what they pay publishers. If one author’s books has thousands of dollars worth of returns and Ingram deducts all of those thousands of dollars from ALL of our book sales, then that affects ALL of our other authors who were supposed to get royalties. If the incoming royalties don’t cover those returns, then we’re in the hole and have to pay back those returns out of our company budget which will take away from what we’re able to spend on marketing and advertising, covers, editing, other business expenses, etc. With all of that said, we do not have any plans to ever offer returns. Bookstores simply don’t like this because it is more risk for them, this is why working with small independent bookstores is better than working with the chain bookstores because they’re more inclined to support indie published books and they’ll place smaller orders. Chain bookstores (like Barnes & Noble for example) have the capability to order POD books through Ingram and they will receive the 55% discount, but oftentimes they will say it’s against their “rules” or against their “stocking policy”, it truly just depends on each bookseller at each store because some booksellers are very supportive of indie books and they will place small orders for a “local authors table” or “local authors shelf”. An alternative to get shelf space at B&N, if they are refusing to stock your book, you can ask them about a “contingency agreement”.
At this time, we do not do traditional print runs. In order to do a traditional print run, we would have to pay a printer upfront to print a bulk amount of copies (in the thousands), and we’d have to pay to store them in a warehouse. Since we are a small business that simply isn’t feasible for us nor does it fit our business model of being an independent digital publisher. We may look into this in the future, but it will be on a limited basis based solely on sales of the book(s). Realistically, we’re talking a book would need tens-of-thousands of sales for us to consider a traditional print run.
We are NOT in control of ANY part of the ordering process, printing process, shipping process, or delivery process of your books.
Harbor Lane Books 