To publish my first book “1 Maze 1 Book” I used amazon.com’s publish-on-demand service called CreateSpace.  First, let me just say how happy overall I’ve been with this service.  The site is very helpful in setting up your book’s layout and getting it ready for publishing.  If you’re looking to self-publish I would have no problem recommend people at least look at Amazon’s solution.  It’s pretty cool to see your book show up on the pages of Amazon and ready for anyone to order a copy.

However…  I ran into a snag of sorts.  The trim size of my book is non-standard.  In this case the trim size of “1 Maze 1 Book” is a nice 8.5” x 8.5” square.  Because of this trim size, Amazon could not offer much in the way of distribution beyond the Amazon website itself.  In all fairness – that’s pretty good by its self, but I figured if I’m going to publish I wanted to at least try all avenues of distribution.  With this in mind I also singed up for Ingram Spark’s publishing service.  Without getting into all the nitty-gritty the idea wold be that Amazon would supply copies to Amazon, while Ingram would supply copies to everyone/anyone else.  

The result?  Well, as soon as my book became available through Ingram, my book practically disappeared from Amazon’s search listings.  Normally, if you typed “1 Maze 1 Book”  into Amazon’s search feature, the book would show up as the second listing (behind “The Maze Runner”).  If you searched just for “maze book”, my book would show up on page 4 which still wasn’t too bad.  Now, however, my book shows on on page 11 under “maze books” if I’m lucky; and sometimes my book doesn’t show up at all when you search it by title and other times it shows up way down the first page with several titles that have nothing to do with mazes coming before it.

Now, I can’t say for sure if this has to do with having two publishers.  I know that Amazon has not always played nice with other publishers and have sometimes listed books as being “out of stock” if not coming from Amazon directly.  Amazon wants to make money (of course) and so it isn’t surprising that books would rise and fall from their listings based on sales, but the fact that it took such a plunge right when the new distributer went online seems suspicious.  

Anyway, I’m not complaining… yet.  I haven’t been able to focus as much on my book this winter as I would have liked.  Now I’m getting back into the swing of things and will hopefully be able to right the ship so to speak.