Distributors, aggregators and who actually sells your book
Authors use four words as though they were interchangeable: retailer, distributor, aggregator, printer. They name four different jobs. Until you can say which of them a given company is doing for you, you cannot say what you are paying for, what you would lose by leaving, or why your book is missing from a shop that stocks everything else.
Four jobs
A retailer sells to readers. It is the storefront: a listing, a buy button, a customer whose money arrives. A retailer decides how your book is displayed and recommended to the people browsing it. Some retailers also print and distribute, which is where the confusion starts, but selling to the reader is the job.
A distributor gets physical books into ordering systems. It puts your title, its price, its availability and its trade terms into the wholesale catalogs that bookstores, libraries and schools order from. A distributor does not sell your book to a reader. It makes your book findable and orderable by the people who do.
An aggregator uploads your ebook to many stores from one dashboard. You send it one file and one set of metadata, it maintains your listings across a list of stores, and it takes a share of what those stores pay you in exchange for the convenience. It is a middle layer you are buying to avoid doing the same admin many times.
A printer manufactures. Ink on paper, glue, trim, box, ship. A printer has no opinion about whether anybody buys the result, and being printed somewhere is not the same as being distributed anywhere.
Why everybody confuses them
Because one company routinely does several of these jobs at once, and sells them to you as a single decision.
The store that sells your book may also be the press that manufactured it, and the same account may be quietly listing it elsewhere. An aggregator may also be a retailer in its own right. A printer may include a distribution option as a checkbox during setup. None of that is dishonest — it is convenient, and it is why it works — but it means a single sign-up can enroll you in three arrangements you never separately evaluated.
The useful habit is to stop asking who is my publisher and start asking, for each job: who is doing this one, what are they taking for it, and what happens if I stop.
Direct, or through somebody
Once the jobs are separated, the real decision is narrow. For each store you want to be in, you either open an account and upload to it yourself, or you let an aggregator do it.
Direct keeps the most money and costs the most time. No middle layer takes a share. You also own the account, you see the store's own reporting, and you get whatever promotional tools it offers its own publishers. In exchange you have an account, a password, a tax form, an upload process and a metadata record to keep current in every single store, forever.
An aggregator costs a percentage and saves hours per title. One upload, one metadata record, one payment arriving. The cuts and terms vary between services, change over time, and are the thing you must actually read rather than take from an article.
The trade tilts with volume. One book in two stores is an afternoon a year, and paying a percentage forever to avoid it is poor value. Eight books across a dozen stores, each needing a price change for a promotion, is a part-time job, and at that point a percentage of revenue is cheap.
In the tools. However you distribute, every channel wants the same two things: a clean file and a cover at its size. One manuscript produces the print PDF and the EPUB 3 together, and one cover design re-cuts for four printers, three bindings and the ebook. Start your book → · about the tools
The hybrid most authors land on
Direct where the volume is, aggregated everywhere else.
Go direct with the two or three stores that produce most of your sales, because that is where the percentage is worth reclaiming and where the promotional tools matter. Hand everything else — the long tail of smaller stores, other countries, library lending platforms — to an aggregator, because the admin cost of each is identical to the big ones while the revenue is not.
The library platforms are the part of that tail worth understanding rather than simply ticking, because they pay on licensing terms that behave nothing like a retail sale: Getting your ebook into libraries.
Which stores fall into which bucket is a question about your book and your readers, not a fixed list, and it changes. Review it once a year, not once ever.
What to check before you choose any of them
The terms are not the interesting part. These four are.
- Can you leave, and does the listing come with you? Find out how you exit, how long it takes, and whether your reviews, rankings and pre-order history survive. A channel you cannot get out of is a channel that can change its terms freely.
- Who controls the ISBN and the metadata? If a service supplies a free ISBN, the service is generally recorded as the publisher of that edition, and moving the book later can mean a new ISBN and a fresh start. See Do you need your own ISBN?.
- How and when does reporting arrive? Ask what you see, how granular it is, and how long after a sale. Aggregated reporting arrives later than direct reporting because it is being passed along, and some of it is far less detailed.
- Is an exclusivity condition attached anywhere? Read for it specifically, in every agreement, including printers and distributors. Exclusivity attached to a distribution deal is easy to sign by accident — Going wide, or staying exclusive covers what it costs.
For print, this decides whether you exist
Bookstore and library buying runs on wholesaler catalogs. A shop's ordering screen shows what is in the catalogs it buys from, with a trade discount and a returns status attached. If your book is not in there, the shop cannot order it — not reluctantly, but mechanically, the way a phone number that was never listed cannot be looked up.
That is the whole reason print distribution is worth paying for. It does not make anyone want your book. It makes wanting your book sufficient. Getting into libraries and bookstores goes into what the buyer on the other end is looking at.
Make your book
The tools are free to use: name your book, bring your manuscript or your artwork, and work as long as you like. You only pay when you want the files without the preview watermark.
Next: Getting into libraries and bookstores · More: Going wide, or staying exclusive · Metadata: the fields that decide who ever sees your book · Paid publishing services: how to tell a deal from a trap · Where to print: KDP, IngramSpark, Lulu and B&N Press