With the Photographer Program, we've found that the books created by photographers are much more demanding than our retail customers. Full-bleed printing, heavily saturated pages, and complex color models have all made the photographer books much more time-consuming and challenging to produce. For example, heavily saturated pages require more ink coverage and require us to clean the press more frequently.

As part of the Photographer Program, we have implemented additional quality checks in our manufacturing process to ensure that the finished products meet the much higher standards of professional photographers. For example, we perform up to three inspections of each printed page, and each of these inspections is performed by a different person.

The Photographer Program also entails a significant amount of development costs related to customizations and branding of our platform. We've spent the majority of our time focusing our development efforts exclusively on the Photographer Program, and have added some very impressive, photographer-only capabilities.

By making these features exclusive the Photographer Program, photographers are able to offer their clients a very impressive product that they are unable to acquire elsewhere. But our retail customers far outnumber our photographer customers, and SharedInk is losing potential revenue by witholding these features from our broader customer base. Therefore, there is a cost associated with making these features exclusive to photographers only.

We had two options for dealing with the additional costs of providing books and services through the Photographer Program. We could either increase the costs of our books to photographers, or we could implement a one-time membership fee. We decided to not raise the costs of our books, but instead charge a one-time fee. We felt that this was a much fairer way of paying for the costs of the Photographer Program, since you only pay once, instead of every time you buy a book.

We're very confident in the quality of the books we produce. You won't find any other provider of on-demand, offset printed hardcover books that has better quality than us; I firmly believe that. The finished hardcover book product is of such high quality and its pricing so aggressive, leaving you significant opportunity to markup the product to your customer. I think you'll find that even after selling even one book, you'll recoup your one-time membership investment.

We are really excited to work with the photographer community. We'll give you exclusive capabilities and provide a level of service that you will not get anywhere else! But in return, we also need your support in order to make it a mutually beneficial relationship.

Thank you,

Chris Hickman
President, SharedInk, LLC