Monday, January 7, 2013

Working with CreateSpace

In a previous post I talked about the fact that Amazon does not always play nicely with others in the publishing sandbox. Take my book Who's Been Sleeping in My Bed(room)? Researching a St. Louis County, Missouri Home as an example. I published this book in 2009, using a local printer in St. Louis. While Amazon.com is aware that the book exists, it shows up as follows:

Who's Been Sleeping in My Bed(room)? Amazon page
The page indicates that two copies of the book are available from third-party sellers for $99.35 each! And they are used copies at that!

If you want to sell books on Amazon, there are ways to get around this issue. You can set up your own store on Amazon to sell the books, or you can go through their Advantage program and have them sell and ship the books for you. There are pros and cons to both of these options, which you can read about here. Since I don't want to get involved in shipping books, either directly to the buyer or to Amazon itself, I elected to go through their CreateSpace option to get Who's Been Sleeping in My Bed(room)? available on Amazon. In this scenario you set up a CreateSpace account, upload your book and its cover, and the books are printed and shipped by Amazon as they are ordered. There are no fees involved for creating an account or setting up your title unless you opt to use any of their services.

Because I had already printed my book in the past, I had PDFs of both the cover design and the interior of the book readily available. It was extremely easy to walk through the steps provided on the CreateSpace website to upload the book and the cover. Their system advised me of two possible problems with my book's interior (both involving low photo resolution) and gave me the option to fix those before continuing. At this point the ball is in their court as I await their review. Following approval, they will send me a printed copy of the book for my review. Assuming it looks good, the book will go live on their website. I am not anticipating huge sales due to the narrow scope of the book, but it is nice to have an alternative place for people to be able to buy the book.

The most interesting thing about the whole process this morning? When I completed the uploading I was immediately taken to a page to set the book up on Kindle Direct Publishing as an ebook. Another great marketing strategy by Amazon! Because I have already published the ebook Keys to Unlocking House History, I probably will not set Who's Been Sleeping in My Bed(room)? up as an ebook as well. But it certainly seems like it would be simple to accomplish.

For now I wait to see what the folks at CreateSpace come back with - hopefully I won't be eating my words about how easy this has been!

3 comments:

Linda Austin said...

I found it pretty easy to upload correctly to CreateSpace, too. Kindle Direct was a little different story, but got it done - without illustrations, though. Good luck!

Kim Wolterman said...

Well, I got a couple of error messages. Stay tuned for my next blog post.

Mrs. Wryly said...

Hope this works out for you. Only $99.95 for a used copy? Why, that's a bargain!