The wholesale discount is the percentage off the retail price offered to wholesale purchasers. The retail margin is the percentage of the retail price that the retailer receives.

Note: Bookstores are not wholesale purchasers. Your distributor is. When printing with IngramSpark, IngramSpark acts as both printer and distributor.

When I first set up my print-on-demand title with IngramSpark, I read that bookstores generally require a minimum 40% retail margin in order to consider carrying a book. So, I set my wholesale discount at 40%.

Ingram actually recommends a 55% discount, but that felt excessive. I figured if bookstores would accept 40%, why would I give away more than that?

But then a mystery arose: A small bookstore tried to order my book through Ingram’s iPage system, and it was only showing a 20% discount. That didn’t make sense. I had double-checked that I had set a 40% wholesale discount for my book. What was going on?

IngramSpark support was able to solve the mystery. A representative provided the key missing piece of information: Ingram keeps a portion of your wholesale discount as a distribution fee—something that, as far as I could tell, wasn’t mentioned anywhere in their documentation.

Here’s how they explained it: “The wholesale discount applied to your book is essentially the portion of your book’s retail price that is kept by both the retailer (bookstores) and the distributor (Ingram) combined. Ingram keeps 10–20% as a distribution fee by default, so the trade standard wholesale discount of 55% can be roughly broken down into 15% for Ingram and 40% for the retailer.”

So that explained it: Although I had set my discount at 40%, Ingram was keeping 20% of that—leaving only 20% for the bookstore.

Here’s how this actually plays out with an example: Manufacturer’s Suggested Retail Price (MRSP) $20 book which costs (in this example) $5 to print:

Scenario 1: 40% Wholesale Discount (What I Set Initially)

Wholesale Discount (set by me on IngramSpark)	Distribution Fee (Ingram Share)	Retail Margin (Bookstore Share)	MRSP* (percent left after discount) - cost to print = publisher’s share
40%	20%	20%	($20*60%)-$5
$8	$4	$4	$7

Scenario 2: 55% Wholesale Discount (Ingram's Recommendation)

Wholesale Discount (set by me on IngramSpark)	Distribution Fee (Ingram Share)	Retail Margin (Bookstore Share)	MRSP* (percent left after discount) - cost to print = publisher’s share
55%	20%	35%	($20*45%)-$5
$11	$4	$7	$4

The missing link was understanding that the wholesale discount is split between the distributor and the retailer, and that split is not adjustable—Ingram sets its take.

If you’re an indie publisher or self-published author using IngramSpark, this detail can make a big difference. Bookstores often won’t order your book unless they see a full 40% margin on their end. That means setting your wholesale discount to 40% won’t cut it—because a chunk of that is going to Ingram.

Unless you’re intentionally limiting your book’s availability to bookstores, it’s worth considering Ingram’s 55% suggestion—not because they're being greedy, but because that's the only way bookstores will see the margin they expect.

This little-known detail about Ingram's distribution fee isn’t something I found clearly laid out anywhere. So, I hope sharing what I learned can help others avoid the same confusion I ran into.

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