In this week’s episode, I discuss whether or not it is worthwhile for indie authors to pursue selling their books to libraries.
This coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Ghost in the Mask, Book #8 in The Ghosts series, (as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy) at my Payhip store:
CAINAMASK
The coupon code is valid through November 16, 2026. So if you need a new audiobook this fall, we’ve got you covered!
Links mentioned in the show.
Reddit:
Ingram Spark:
https://www.ingramspark.com/hubfs/Print%20Book%20Setup%20Guide.pdf
TRANSCRIPT
00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 327 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is October 29th, 2026 and today I’m discussing whether or not indie authors should try to get their books in libraries. Before we start with that, we will have Coupon of the Week and a progress update on my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects.
This week’s coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Ghost in the Mask, Book #8 in The Ghosts series (as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy) at my Payhip store. That coupon code is CAINAMASK. That coupon code will be valid through November the 16th, 2026, so if you need a new audiobook for this fall, we have got you covered.
I also have an update on my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. My main project right now is Blade of Rifts, and I am 58,000 words into it as of this recording, hoping to get to 60,000 tomorrow. I think that puts me roughly halfway through. I think the rough draft will end up being around 110-115,000 words, but we will see when we get there. I’m hoping to have that out before American Thanksgiving at the end of November, if all goes well.
My secondary project is Cloak of Silver, which will be the 16th book in the Cloak Mage series. I believe I am 5,000 words into that at the moment. Once Blade of Rifts is finished, Cloak of Silver will take over as my main project. That’s probably going to end up being my first book of 2027, though if it’s possible to get it out in December, I will do so, but we’ll just see when we get there.
In audiobook news, Leanne Woodward will soon be narrating Elven-Warlock. Hollis McCarthy has started work on Cloak of Frost, and Brad Wills is working on Blade of Visions, so we should have some new audiobooks before too much longer. The way these things tend to go is I’ll go a long period without any new audiobooks and then they suddenly all arrive at once, but that is part of the fun of the experience. So that is where I’m at with my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects.
00:02:09 Main Topic of the Week: Libraries and Indie Authors
Now let’s move on to our main topic, libraries and indie authors. Writers love to talk about one of their big goals being able to get their books on a shelf in the library. Many writers feel like libraries are crucial to their success and spend a lot of time courting the attention of librarians. As it happens, the transcriptionist for the podcast was a librarian for quite a long span of time, so she offered to share her opinion on working with libraries as an indie writer.
First, we’re going to talk about interacting with libraries as an indie author and what makes sense and what’s not worth your time. Then we’re going to talk about the logistics of making your audiobooks available to library services like Hoopla and Libby. What are the pros and cons of making your ebooks available to the library? So let’s start off with a [former] librarian’s opinion on working with libraries.
[Her opinion will be marked in italics in the transcript.]
This section is wholly the opinion of our transcriptionist who offers her thoughts as a former librarian, but is not speaking on behalf of any of the libraries where she has previously worked. Her thoughts can be divided into three categories.
#1: You’re welcome to ask, but we can say no.
One thing to understand immediately is that even librarians at smaller libraries are contacted multiple times a day by authors or publishers. We may not have the time to respond to every single request individually because we are busy. It’s becoming less common that a library will buy a book for the sole reason that was written by someone in the community. Even a small town can have many local authors and with library budgets ranging from stretched to non-existent, it’s probably not possible to buy all of the books written by local authors.
Emailing every single person on staff at one library is a waste of time and is considered a bit rude. If you feel compelled to cold email libraries, you should just contact the acquisitions librarian or the librarian who specializes in your area (for example, the children’s librarian for picture books) and you should not contact the library director with purchase requests unless it’s a small enough library where they’re the only librarian on staff. Keep your message to a paragraph or two at most, include relevant information like ISBNs, and try to make it sound like a human wrote it and not ChatGPT.
You should also check the website for a document called a collection development policy before contacting the library or librarian. This type of document clearly states if that there are certain things library will not buy such as picture books created with AI or anything at all in the erotica category. Some will even have policies that specifically outline the cases when they will or won’t buy or accept self-published books or books from local authors, so it’s worth the time to look for that policy because even if you donate the books yourself, there may be a specific reason why they won’t be added to the library’s collection that has nothing to do with the quality of your book. [Also, a “free” donated book isn’t free to a library when you consider staff time and resources/supplies spent on processing, cataloging, and providing shelf space for a book.]
So that was her first thought.
#2: What’s in it for them?
There was a really great post on the r/Libraries subreddit when an author bemoaned that librarians from dozens of libraries weren’t responding to his request to host an author event for him. The link to the post will be included in the show notes of this episode because the response from librarians to that author was comprehensive.
Essentially, the librarians responding to that author encouraged the author to draft event proposals through the lens of what the community realistically wants. Since author events and book signings at libraries struggle to get attendance unless there is a compelling topic or an already very, very famous author, you need to make a strong case that the topic is of local interest or in general a hot topic to the general public.
There is a local historian who does a fall presentation of ghost stories specific to my city. Because he is such an engaging speaker, a surprising amount of people buy his local history books after the presentation, even if the books are not limited to ghost stories. His speaking offer is perfectly timed to the season and is an interesting enough topic to draw in even people who don’t like to read or don’t care about local history. That is a more compelling event to the average person than an unknown author talking about a book they haven’t read and most likely have not heard of before.
#3: Is pursuing library sales the best use of your time?
Speaking as a former librarian and someone who currently works in indie publishing, I can say without hesitation that spending hours emailing libraries, asking them to buy your book or host an event for you is not a great return on your time. Libraries can be great partners to an author, but remember that in the eyes of librarian, you’re just another patron. We don’t have any special obligation to you just because you’re a writer, especially if you don’t live in the library’s community. Librarians use professional judgment to guide purchases and both can’t and won’t buy every single thing that’s requested. That’s not a reflection on the quality of your work; it’s just a difficult reality of the profession.
I can say with all confidence that your time is generally better spent improving both your cover and your blurb, creating ads, and most importantly of all, working on your next book than is spent cold emailing libraries, especially using AI generated emails to ask them to buy your books or host your events.
So that was our transcriptionist’s (who is a former librarian) thought on the matter. So now we’re going back to my thoughts.
All that said, the best way to be in a library’s collection is to make sure that it’s even possible for libraries to order your print books and ebooks. In this section, I’ll briefly talk about the practical ways to do that. I’m going to start with print books and then talk about ebooks.
Print Books
In short, the easiest way to do this is through Ingram Spark. There are other options out there beyond Ingram, but Ingram is a massive distributor that works with bookstores and libraries both, so I’ll focus on this one just for clarity. Libraries are more likely to order from a large distributor than from your website or a local shop because creating new purchase orders is not fun (which is if you work in the government or any sort of government organization, you know that the rules around purchasing things are arcane, dense, and often very difficult to navigate). This is especially true with tax exempt forms also slowing down the process. Many libraries also have Ingram well integrated into their workflows, so it makes the idea of buying your book at least slightly more likely if they can buy it from Ingram instead of from you personally at your web store or some other business.
Ingram provides a very detailed set of instructions for making your book available for print distribution that I will include in these show notes for this episode. Essentially, you provide Ingram with properly formatted files and then upload it for print distribution on their site. They don’t send you a stack of books. They send the books to whoever orders them, although you can certainly order author copies.
Here’s a few quick tips for Ingram Spark print book settings:
You should set your wholesale discount between 40 to 55%, and if your KDP print book on Amazon is cheaper, you should set that book to be the same price as the Ingram price.
If you want libraries and bookstores to order, you need to allow returns. Many libraries are not allowed to order a book that can’t be returned, and most people who order books have been burned by books that arrives damaged or with printing issues.
Make sure your metadata and what you enter in [about] the book is completely clean and correct. The ISBN for your print book shouldn’t be the same as for your ebook. You will need a new one for the print version.
Ebooks
Most authors who target the American ebook market would like to be available through Hoopla and Libby, two of the most popular vendors in the US for public library ebooks. To get onto those services, you have to actively work to make the ebooks available for those vendors. Fortunately, this can be simple as clicking a box if you’re already using a distributor like Draft2Digital. For Overdrive (Libby’s parents company), it’s as simple as checking a box on Draft2Digital or through the Kobo Writing Life platform, which also offers Overdrive integration. The checkbox should say something about library distribution and Overdrive. The wording does not currently mention Libby, so it can be a bit confusing if you’re not familiar with library vendors. For Hoopla, it’s also currently easiest to use Draft2Digital and the process works the same as any other distributor on that platform.
If you want people to request the library purchase your book on Libby, you can then do a Deep Search for your book and then click on the Notify Me tag. That is currently, as of this recording, how purchase requests are handled within Libby. Titles with that tag then end up in a very large report. How often that report is checked and how often titles from that list are actually ordered greatly depends on the individual library. The library has to buy a copy from Overdrive in order for someone to be able to read it on Libby. Adding the Notify Me tag doesn’t guarantee it will be purchased, which is a bit confusing to many people.
So with all that in mind, let’s talk about the pros and cons of making your ebooks available to libraries.
Pro: many authors feel an emotional connection to libraries and support the mission of libraries to make books and information more accessible to the public. It makes your books accessible to people who would not otherwise [be able to] afford them or people who only read books from the library for a wide variety of other reasons. Libraries still, even in 2026, buy a lot of books. Even as their budgets get cut and the rising cost of books limits how much they can buy, libraries are still a massive force in book publishing.
But now let’s move on to the cons, which I frankly think are significant and worth considering. A small con is a potential impact on sales. There’s a lot of discussion about how library copies impact book sales or enable piracy, but there’s not a lot of great data available on the subject, just anecdotally. Realistically, I will say based on my own experience that people who can’t afford to buy books, only read books from libraries, and people who pirate books aren’t as likely to be buying your books anyway, so it’s not the more important thing to worry about in your limited available time. The concern about lost sales from library checkouts also doesn’t address the fact that library users might discover you through the library and then go on to buy books from you.
I honestly, in my frank opinion, think the impact to ebook sales from library checkouts is small enough that you don’t really have to worry about it. A more significant concern is whether or not seriously pushing library sales is worth your time.
In 2026, as of this recording, I made about $28 from Overdrive and $361 from Hoopla, which while very pleasant to have, is quite a bit smaller than what I make from platforms like Amazon, Google Play, Audible, and Kobo (especially Kobo Plus). Since I haven’t actively spent time pursuing library sales, that’s fine for me, but I provide these numbers to you to give context about how small a slice of the pie they really are and how low payouts are from these vendors, especially Hoopla.
I currently average under $0.70 per book from a Hoopla checkout, which is far less what I get from even a Kindle Unlimited [Kindle+] read. I don’t actively discourage or prevent library sales or artificially increases my prices when selling libraries like tradpub does, but it’s not worth anything more than a few seconds of my time to click those library distribution check boxes.
Libraries are also facing significant budget cuts and there is a lot of pressure from patrons to order additional copies of high demand ebook titles instead of ordering a wider variety of new books or ordering books just because a few people requested them.
If you were a librarian and you had to choose between ordering 30 copies of Nora Roberts’ new book and one copy of an ebook from an annoying indie author who’s emailing you about it, the sensible and rational choice would be to order the 30 copies of Nora Roberts’ book because that would be a better use of your budget, it would boost your circulation stats, and everyone in your organization is happy.
My sales data from Overdrive and Hoopla over the last few years seems to show that these budget issues are impacting sales to libraries. My sales for Libby/Overrides decreased 82% from 2022 (which was the strongest year), and 2022 anecdotally seems to have been the end of the COVID media rush. Hoopla sales [for me] have decreased 60% since 2023, which is not surprising since many libraries have either canceled Hoopla or put some drastic limits on patron use since then because it’s so expensive.
Based on this data, I feel confident that focusing on library sales is not the best use of my time. To put it in perspective, let’s say you get what you want and you get your ebook into the library or you get a physical copy of the book on your shelf. By contrast, if I look at just Amazon in 2026, I’ve given away about 1,700 free copies of Frostborn: The Gray Knight. Now suppose Frostborn: The Gray Knight ends up in a library ebook catalog or a physical copy ends up on the shelf. Are 1,700 people going to even see the book when it is an ebook in a library system or is sitting on a physical shelf in library, let alone download and start to read it? Probably not.
That is essentially my opinion on library sales. They’re nice. I will flip on the checkbox when it’s available in the distributors, but I’m not really going to spend a lot of extra effort pursuing them because I don’t think the juice is worth the squeeze and it would be better to spend my time and effort on other things such as driving traffic to Frostborn: The Gray Knight so people will download it, read it, and go on to buy the rest of the series.
Now, with all those caveats said, libraries and librarians can be a great ally and a great way for people to discover and access your books, but trying to get your books in the libraries or setting up library events can easily turn into what I call a writing adjacent activity that takes time but does not lead to making much money. It’s never been easier to get your book into libraries as an indie author, but that doesn’t mean it should necessarily be something that you spend a great deal of time pursuing. So that will hopefully help you decide whether pursuing library sales would be a best use of your time as an indie author or not.
So that’s it for this week. Thank you for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. A reminder that you can listen to all the back episodes on https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave your review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and we’ll see you all next week.
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