Understanding IngramSpark’s Murky ‘Wholesale Discount’

by Karin Fisher-Golton

When you publish a book through IngramSpark, you’ll need to set what they call a “wholesale discount.” Their use of that term and the way it is presented is very easy to misunderstand. 

Over the last several months I’ve done internet research, had several interactions with IngramSpark customer service, done reality checks with three independent booksellers, and had a talked with the very helpful Andrea Fleck-Nisbet of the Independent Book Publishers Association (IBPA). In this article I describe why IngramSpark’s wholesale discount setting is unclear and what you need to know about it, especially if you are hoping to get your book into independent bookstores.

When you are setting up your Title information on IngramSpark’s website, on the Print Info page, you’ll see an area called Print Pricing with a column of fields, one for each country, headed by the label “Wholesale Discount.” When you click on the field for the United States you’ll see these choices:

If, like me, you have talked with shop owners and/or sold them off-set printed books yourself, you understand that booksellers expect a discount of 40% on wholesale books. So it is very easy to read IngramSpark’s choices and think, “Well of course they’d prefer 55%, but 40% is standard and that’s fine,” and choose 40%. What’s easy to misunderstand is that this IngramSpark “wholesale discount” is not the discount that retailers will receive. It is the discount that another branch of Ingram (called Ingram Book Company) will receive. And then that branch of Ingram will take their cut and give retailers a different, lower discount. If you want retailers to receive the 40% discount they expect, you need to choose 53-55% in that field. 

I don’t know yet why that range is 53-55% and exactly what discount retailers are offered depending on your choice in that range. But I see that range in a lot of places, including IngramSpark’s own Help articles and other materials. For example, here’s a concise worksheet about discounts from IngramSpark, which both includes these numbers and discusses recommended discounts for other countries and situations. If I learn more about this range in the future, I’ll add a note in the comments at the bottom of this post.

If you are just looking for a quick answer for setting a discount that will give independent bookstores what they expect, go with 53-55% and no need to read on. 

Here’s more information for those who are interested in more details.

If you click on the help button by that same “wholesale discount” field, you’ll see this pop-up note: 

(Note that the linked video did not provide any more specific information when I viewed it.) The information in the Help pop-up suggests that wholesalers and distributors that buy from Ingram could buy the book at the selected wholesale discount. However, when I found a niche distributor who was interested in carrying my book, we found that the branch of Ingram she buys from when she gets her distributor discount only offers books from large publishers. Further questioning of a IngramSpark customer service agent indicated that only Ingram Book Company  gets the wholesale discount set on the Print Info page. So, as I understand it, that Help pop-up would be more accurate if it said, “The wholesale discount you offer is what Ingram Book Company receives for selling your book and is not the discount the booksellers or consumers receive.”

Ingram will not tell disclose what discount bookseller retailers get. They say those discounts are different for every customer. I tried different discounts and checked with booksellers at three different independent bookstores. All three saw the same discounts, shown below. My guess is that IngramSpark makes different deals with larger retailers.

When I read articles about this issue, the authors made guesses about the discount patterns they saw based on their own conversations with booksellers. Usually they were discovering that, though they thought they were giving a 40% discount, the sellers were only being offered 20%. One guessed that Ingram cuts the discount in half. Another guessed that Ingram takes 15-20%. As you can see from the numbers above, there is no easily discernible pattern.

Unfortunately with children’s books, which is what I publish, an IngramSpark author-publisher who sets a typical market price for a book can’t offer a 53-55% discount and earn at least $1/book, which is the minimum that I want to earn. For those of you who write for audiences with different typical market prices this might not be such an issue. But you still might find this mini survey interesting:

One of my helpful bookseller friends asked a Facebook group of booksellers if they would rather sell a book for a typical market price ($9.99 in the case of my paperback) and get a lower-than-standard discount (36% in the scenario we gave) or sell it for a more expensive price ($10.99) and get their standard discount (40%). Fifteen booksellers responded. Their viewpoints were mixed, but more said they would rather sell it for the higher price and get their standard discount, and several said they won’t even consider carrying books with less than the standard discount. The conclusion that I came to is that if I want to sell my book in independent bookstores and get the most out of my efforts to contact them, I’ll need to raise both the price and the discount of my book.

Since I am writing about IngramSpark pricing and publisher compensation, I want to point out to established IngramSpark author-publishers, that this is a good time to check the compensation you are getting per book sale. On February 1, 2026, IngramSpark raised their market access fee from 1% to 1.875%. This will impact your compensation. The kinda-good news related to this is that, as of the same date, IngramSpark is no longer charging for changes to book files, so if you need to change the price or ISBN barcode on your cover, you won’t be charged for uploading new cover art.

I hope this information saves you some time and hassle, and helps you get your books to those who want to read them.