I realized that I didn’t have a central place for my various walkthroughs on using Createspace 🙂 So here it is:
What the heck is Createspace anyway?
Createspace is a publishing service for physical books, CDs, and DVDs – the coolest part is that it is all on demand! Authors that were self-publishing used to have to purchase a large quantity (often 500+) to get a physical book that they could sell to a bookstore or individual copies on their website. With Createspace, an author can upload their manuscript and the books will be made on-demand! Some people still like physical books instead of ebook versions – so it’s an easy way to make a physical version of your ebook.
Createspace is owned by Amazon, and after uploading your book, you’re given the option of having the book made available on Amazon for no extra cost to you. If you already have your ebook in the Amazon store, it will even “connect” the two editions.
Price: FREE. It doesn’t cost you anything extra to use Createspace and make a physical book available to readers. You still get to set the price and still make a royalty for every book you sell! I do recommend buying one “proof” when you’re done uploading just to make sure everything looks good, but you only pay the cost to make the book and shipping (which in total is usually less than $10). If you’d also like your physical book available in the Barnes and Noble store and Ingrams (the catalog that book stores can order from), they charge $25.
Sounds great! So what’s the catch?
The number one complaint is…getting the formatting correct. Unlike an ebook, every page must be correctly formatted. If page numbers are messed up or spacing isn’t lining up correctly – they are permanent problems in print. Even worse, if the margins are incorrect, you may have words that are cut off. I should also note that mistakes often lead to extra pages which means the book will cost more.
To make things a little easier, I made a series of videos to walk you through the process of taking a manuscript and making a complete physical book for sale on Amazon!
They are intended to be watched in this order (especially parts 3 through 5) but feel free to skip around if you’re having trouble with a given area. I should also note that some pages are just the video while others
Part 1: CreateSpace: White or Cream Colored Pages
Part 2: Picking the Right Trim Size in CreateSpace
Part 3: Createspace: Setting Page Size and Margins
Part 4: CreateSpace: Continuous Page Breaks, Page Alignment and Centering in Word
Part 5: Createspace Headers, Footers and Page Numbers – Oh My!
Part 6: CreateSpace: Saving as a PDF from Word
Part 7: CreateSpace File Upload, ISBNs, and the Interior Reviewer
Part 8: Working with Createspace Cover Images
Did I miss anything? Any questions or anything else I should include?