My CreateSpace Experience Part 5

In this final post regarding CreateSpace we’ll look at completing, proofing, pricing and distributing your book. After clearing the interior reviewer and successfully uploading a cover, it’s time to order and review proof copies of your book. Once you are satisfied that your manuscript looks good and is error free, it’s an easy click to order proof copies.

You are provided with two proof options- a free downloadable PDF of your manuscript as it will appear in your book and the opportunity to order one or more physical copies. I recommend ordering some physical copies and giving a few of them to trusted proofreaders. Even after porting the manuscript to the 5×8 CreateSpace template and carefully checking the text with the interior reviewer I still found errors in The System – A Detroit Story – which was published as an eBook and on the market for months. It was profoundly embarrassing.

In few days a box will be on your porch with your proof copies. It’s exciting to unpack the box and hold a physical copy in your hands, feeling its weight and flipping through the pages. Even though I’m first and foremost an eBook author, I’ll admit it seems “more real” holding a physical book.

I believe the only way to catch all errors in a manuscript is to read every page out loud. Errors pop up like prairie dogs. Why? I have a theory. When you read without articulating you are not seeing the words, but the images created by the words along with other sensory stimuli induced by words. It’s semantic and has meaning. When you read aloud you are merely parroting the printed words and are not sensory or image focused. It’s purely lexical. This method works for me. That being said, proofing is a painful, boring and time eating process for you and your proofreaders. Thank, reward, and do something nice for your proofreaders. It’s as boring for them as it is for you and they will catch errors that you will not.

After you approve your proof the next step is to set pricing and distribution. CreateSpace calculates the estimated cost of your book when you provide the  book size, ink and paper type along with a page length. This is the price that you the author will pay (along with shipping) for production copies.

Pricing depends on where you distribute your books. I chose the U.S., the U.K. (pricing in pounds) and E.U. countries (pricing in Euros) since my eBooks sell relatively well abroad. This will bring up a form where you set your price. You can experiment with different prices and dollar to pound and Euro conversion takes place automatically, along with royalty calculations. I try selling my books as low as reasonably possible since my eBooks are priced at $2.99. It looks fishy to a reader to see a book priced at three dollars for the eBook and fifteen dollars for the paperback. Be careful making this decision. If you sell a lot of eBooks in the U.K. and Europe then give it a shot. All three of my books are available in paperback in all of the markets. If they don’t sell well overseas, I’ll pull them out and drop the U.S. price. That’s one of the beauties of self publishing- pricing is flexible and you make the decisions and can react fast to your markets.

If you already have your eBook on Amazon, your paperback will automatically be linked to your Kindle book page. CreateSpace offers an expanded distribution service which I have not used. If anyone reading this has experience with that, please post a reply or link to a post here.

Overall, my experience with CreateSpace was absolutely positive, and I wouldn’t think of going anywhere else to produce paperbacks. The only roadblocks were the template error and my ignorance and inexperience. Now, I can port an eBook and get it into the paperback market in a matter of days. So will you once you get the hang of it.

My CreateSpace Experience Part 3

If you’ve read the first two installments, then you know we’re ready to move on to preparing your manuscript for upload to CreateSpace. The next step is to format your book using a Word template, converting it to a PDF file, uploading, correcting formatting errors and proofing your manuscript.

The first thing you need to do is choose the size of your book. CreateSpace offers several sizes and defaults to 6×9 inches. You should make this decision carefully. I chose a 5×8 book size. Why? For several reasons. I planned on pricing my books as low as reasonably possible and the smaller the book size, the lower the production cost. The same with your choice of paper and ink. I use white paper with black ink, plain and simple.

Another reason 5×8 is a good choice is that the physical book is highly portable. A few 5×8 books take up a lot less space in a backpack or carry on piece of luggage than a 6×9 or larger versions. Also, due to the smaller page size, the book will be thicker than a 6×9 version. With eBooks, readers seem to prefer shorter books and accumulate a lot of them on their eBook readers, but it’s just the opposite with paperbacks. Who would pay eight to fourteen dollars for a 150 page paperback? Not me or anybody else I know. When people spend money for a physical book, they like it to have some heft, and a 5×8 300 page book feels like they’ve gotten their money’s worth. And they have, if the price is low. My books are thrillers designed to be read in a few hours and are usually a little under 300 pages long. This formula and book size works pretty well for me, and it might for you, too.

Once you’ve decided on the size of your book, CreateSpace provides a Word template for your book size, which you download for free.  CreateSpace recommends using the template and so do I, with a couple of caveats. I use Scrivener to write all my novels since it’s a great tool for large documents and contains eBook compilers- .mobi for Kindles and epub for Nook and other readers. This got in the way of using the template as-is.

I downloaded the 5×8 template and started porting my Scrivener based manuscript for The System – A Detroit Story. Here’s where my ignorance came into play, big time. I spent hours copying and pasting the text from Scrivener to the template, messing up the template’s preset margins in the process. So much so, I had to start over from scratch after all the text was transferred. The edges were ragged and I had the margins adjusted equally for left and right pages and couldn’t get them reset properly.

Here’s what I did to make life and the conversion easier. From Scrivener I saved the manuscript as an RTF file and changed the page size and margins to those in the template. Then I did a copy and paste from the RFT document to the template. That process went smoothly and the margins were untouched.

Once your manuscript is ported to the template, a PDF version needs to be created. CreateSpace only accepts PDF files as manuscripts. This is no problem if you use Word- just save your manuscript as a PDF. I saved The System as a PDF and checked it in Preview (I use an iMac). It looked pretty good so I uploaded it to CreateSpace. CreateSpace then checks the PDF for “issues”, which are formatting errors. Mine came back with several issues, even though I used the template and didn’t muck with the margins.

More on what went wrong in the next post…

My CreateSpace Experience

I just put out The System – A Detroit Story – on Amazon.com via CreateSpace. Writers- I’ve kept a journal of what I went through to get it out for sale. I’ll have Part I up by the weekend.