Identify academic-library acquisition channels

This matters for scholarly, professional, and course-adoptable books, and for most trade fiction it does not, so you can stop here if your book is the second kind. For a book that does fit, being missing from the platform, or profiled under the wrong subject, is easy for academic libraries to overlook, because many of their selections come through it. Authors don't get accounts, so on every route the move is normally to ask rather than to act: a traditionally published academic author normally finds the publisher has this covered, while a hybrid or self-published author has to raise it with whoever handles distribution and may be told the book won't appear. Get a clear answer on whether the book is listed and whether library ebook licenses are available there.

This decides whether a bookstore or library can order your book through the channel most of them use, and on what terms, so when a shop says it cannot order your book this is usually where the answer sits. Ingram's data also reaches many retailers and library vendors, so an error in the record can surface in several places. Traditionally and hybrid published authors normally ask whether the title is in Ingram wholesale, at what wholesale discount, and whether it is returnable, since those are the two terms a bookseller checks before ordering; if you publish the book yourself, you set the discount and the return policy in IngramSpark, and both have real money attached. Get the discount and return terms in writing, then check that the title record matches the other major listings.