To CreateSpace or Not to CreateSpace - That is the Question

Just as a frame of reference, my first book Who's Been Sleeping in My Bed(room)? Researching a St. Louis County, Missouri Home was printed here in St. Louis and is available on my website and in local bookstores and gift shops. From Buckeye to G.I. LeRoy C. Kubler The War Years, 1942-1945 was uploaded to Lightning Source, which then prints the books as they are ordered and also distributes the books through Ingram. My ebook Keys to Unlocking House History was produced through Smashwords, but because Amazon does not play well with others I also uploaded it through Kindle Direct Publishing to make sure that it could be sold on the Amazon website. While Amazon does show all three of my books if you enter my name in their search engine, my house research book is essentially unavailable and my WWII book says that it will ship in one to three weeks. In this age of instant gratification, a delay in shipping equates to a lack of sales.

I have been thinking about how to resolve these issues. In doing research on the Lightning Source versus CreateSpace issue, it appears that I can go ahead and upload the PDF of From Buckeye to G.I. to CreateSpace and have it sell from there in addition to Lightning Source. There are trade offs with both companies, but it seems prudent to have the book in both locations. I guess the biggest issue will be whether the original PDF, which was formatted by the designer for Lightning Source, is also acceptable to CreateSpace. I won't know until I upload it. I am keeping my fingers crossed on that one as I do not wish to go back to the designer I used.

I have never been overly concerned that Who's Been Sleeping in My Bed(room)? is not for sale on Amazon. Because my audience is limited to the St. Louis area, it didn't seem to be that big of a deal. But I am rethinking that stance. For now I think I will start with From Buckeye to G.I on CreateSpace and see where that takes me.

Perfect by Design?

The interior of the book is finished! I received my virtual copy from the designer on Thursday, ready to be shipped off to a printer. So, next on the hit list is the exterior design. Katie has created the front cover for me, and it needs a little tweaking. But the spine and back cover still need to be done. Obviously it would make sense to have her do those as well. Unfortunately she is down to her last 19 days of college, so no way can she look at it before the end of the semester. And then she will have exactly 4 days in St. Louis before she heads off to Prague for a 5 week marketing session for school. I need to decide if I want to wait until July to have her complete the cover, or just turn it over to a different designer at this point.

In the meantime I have been working on my e-book. I decided to take my house history research book and strip out all references to St. Louis County, and then turn the remainder into an e-book. I think there is a market for the book as no other e-books exist yet on this topic. Plus I am very curious to see how all this e-book stuff works. I am going to go with Smashwords to produce the book. First of all I heard Mark Coker, the founder of Smashwords, speak at Publishing University last year and I was impressed with him and what he is doing. Second, he will format the book for all of the different reading devices, and will put the book into distribution. There is no charge to have him set up the book, and he just gets a percentage (I believe 15%) of each sale. That beats the heck out of the 40% or more that bookstores get on a printed book.

I have downloaded the Smashwords instructions (of course it is an e-book!) on how to properly set up your book in Microsoft Word prior to uploading it to Smashwords. I think I will be able to handle this myself, but if not Mark offers a list of reasonable contractors who will get your Word document into the proper format. I also contacted one of the e-book cover designers that Mark has worked with to see if she is interested in doing a cover for Keys to Unlocking House History. I just sent an email on Friday, so I haven't received a reply yet. I really did not expect to with it being Easter weekend.

The times, they are a changing!

The Solution

Yesterday afternoon was spent researching a way to send the massive file of all the photos and illustrations for the book back to the book designer, once I finally finished making revisions to all of them. Originally I loaded the book including all the images on a thumb drive and mailed it up to him. Obviously from a time and money standpoint I would prefer not to use that method again if I can avoid it. I thought the free answer was going to be to upload all the photos and illustrations to my Mobile Me account, which I have had since last year and never used. Any uploaded data is stored in the "cloud" and you can give others permission to access your account. Sounds perfect, right? Unfortunately, Mobile Me does not support tiffs, which is the format the designer asked me to reformat all the illustrations into. Bummer!

My daughter suggested uploading my file to the ftp on my website, myhousehistory.net. That would be great if I even had a clue what that was all about. I did a google search on it and realized that once again I was in over my head. My husband also suggested that I bring the file to his office and upload it to their ftp on their server. But that would mean giving the designer access to their server, which I wasn't 100% comfortable with.

So here is what ending up working. There is a website called yousendit.com. I first zipped my file folder (super easy in Windows - just right click the file, click on zip and you're done!) and then went to the yousendit website. Because my file was in excess of 100mb (which is the "free" threshold), I incurred a charge of $9.99 to send the file. But that is less than a new thumb drive plus the postage to mail it, not to mention the mailing time delay. It took about an hour for the file to upload and be sent, and I got an email confirmation that it went to my recipient. I haven't heard back from the designer yet, so hopefully everything transferred okay. If it did, this will be my preferred method of sharing information, especially since I think most items that I will ever need to send will be under the 100mb threshold.

Designing Men

On Monday a hard copy of From Buckeye to G.I. and a thumb drive containing the book with and without images was mailed to the book designer in Iowa. I also included a separate file with all the images in it. Yesterday I received my Library of Congress number for the book (they actually sent me a password to get into my account on Monday), so I emailed the designer a revised copyright page containing this number. Today the designer sent me an email stating that he thinks the book would be better in an 8 1/2" x 11" format as opposed to the 5 1/2" x 8 1/2" size I had requested. He is concerned that the documents will not be legible in the smaller format. My reasons for the smaller book were as follows: it is a more accepted size by readers, bookstores and libraries and the number of pages in the larger size format will be too small (probably around 50 pages).

Clark also wanted to know if I was printing the book in color as he said a lot of my photos are in color. Actually, only the later photos that I took of the forts and monuments were in color, or so I thought. Wrong... Apparently all the newsletters I scanned were interpreted as color by the computer because of the yellowed paper. Ack! Now I have to edit all the "colored" photos in PhotoShop! And there are a lot of them. I thought I was going to be able to take a break from this book while the designer was doing his thing, but apparently not.

Picture This!

This weekend I buckled down to revise some of the low DPI pictures for the book. The only problem is now Windows won't let me open the ones I have worked on. It keeps telling me that I don't have permission to view the photos. Hello!!! It's my computer! My computer guy came over tonight and the best that he could work out was to install Picasa on my computer and have it be the default for opening any pictures from now on. The only problem is that it won't open the corrupt ones either, so I have to re-scan those documents and images. In looking at the forums online it appears this may be a Windows 7 issue. Grrrr... It's always something.

I also cleaned up the book and printed out three copies this weekend: one for Jay from the Hump Pilots organization, one for Harry from the USS General Anderson organization, and one for the book designer. I mailed Harry's and Jay's copies today; I won't send a copy to the designer until I get the photo issues resolved so I can send him everything at once. Harry has already alerted me to the fact that he will have his red pen ready as he is a bit of a writer himself. Go for it Harry!

You Can Take the Girl Out of Iowa...

After reviewing 30 proposals, I have selected the designer of the book about my dad's war service. I chose Camp Pope Publishing because they have worked on a vast number of nonfiction, historical books. Quite a few of their books contain numerous photographs. Since my book has 160 photos and other images, it was important to me to hire someone that can arrange the photos to their best advantage. The fact that Camp Pope happens to be located in Iowa is just a happy coincidence, as is the fact that my designer also graduated from Iowa State!

I had a lengthy phone conversation with Clark yesterday, specifically about my images. As it turns out, many of them are not at the correct DPI for reproduction in print. Ugggghhhh!!!! I now have to rework them in Photoshop, and perhaps even re-scan original documents. There may be nothing I can do to improve the photos I downloaded, with permission, from the Internet however. We'll see how this all turns out. More delays...

Since I have some time I may send an email to the CBI Hump Pilots Association I found online and ask if they have a veteran who would be willing to read my book (draft copy) and make a comment for the back cover. Clark made that suggestion, and I think it is a good one. I also may see if my friend "Swede" from the Andy E. Anderson Association would give me a quote for the cover while I am at it. It is not like I am trying to make a deadline for distribution, so I might as well make the back cover the best that it can be.

By the Book

Knowing that I need a professional to design the interior of my book, I turned to the website elance.com. This is an interesting site where you post the work you need done, and people then submit proposals to do the work for you. So far I have received 30 responses to the job posting, with bids ranging from $50 to $810. Wow! It was easy to wean out some of them: throwing out the high and the low came first, and because I prefer to deal with someone in the United States I eliminated all the foreign proposals. I also don't want to be someones first elance job, so if they had no jobs posted they came off the list. If the proposal did not contain a portfolio and have good reviews from previous clients, then I threw those out as well.

The next thing I did was look at all the portfolios of those who remained on the list. If the designer had not done projects similar to mine, them they were removed from consideration as well. This might not be the best way to narrow things down, but my book has 160 images (photos and documents) in it. I need to know that the designer can treat those with care and some style.

I now have the list down to 3 possibilities. Of those, one guy is using Creative Suite 4 (CS4) and the others are still working with CS3. The only time this would be an issue is if I (meaning Katie) would want to make any modifications. We have CS5 on our Macs, and the software only allows you to go back one generation in terms of being able to open older documents. I'm not sure that this is a huge deal, but I have emailed Katie for her input. Of course the guy using CS4 is quite a bit more expensive than the other two, so that just adds to my sense of wanting to make the right choice here. I'm willing to pay for his expertise in this matter if it will make a difference down the road.