Thinking about Writing a Book?

Most people have writing a book on their bucket list. For those who live in the St. Louis area, the St. Louis Publishers Association (SLPA) has an upcoming event to help turn that dream into a reality. On Wednesday, August 14th the SLPA is hosting a Vendor Service Provider Showcase at the Lodge Des Peres. Free and open to the public, the night will feature 17 vendors who offer services ranging from editing, book coaching, printing, design, publishing services, illustration and videography. For more information, visit the SLPA website. Hope to see you there!

CreateSpace Part Three

From Buckeye to G.I. cover

On Saturday I received the proof of From Buckeye to G.I. from CreateSpace. The first thing I noticed was the color and trim of the cover. The color was a little lighter than the original book, but I actually like it better. And they managed to trim the cover so that the border is equal around all four sides - something that Lightning Source seemed unable to accomplish. So far, so good. Then I opened up the book and found the pictures, illustrations and even the text of the book to be considerably lighter than they appear in the original book. I already have a challenge with the photos and illustrations due to the fact that the scanned documents were over 50 years old. I don't need the printing to add to the problem.

I contacted CreateSpace on Sunday to inquire about the issue. Today I received a response that basically said there is nothing they can change, and perhaps I need to rescan all my documents to a higher resolution and resubmit the book. Since there are 144 of them in the book, there is no way I am doing what they suggest. They were all originally scanned at 300 dpi, which is acceptable for printing. Funny how Lightning Source didn't seem to have any problems with them.

So the question is, am I being too picky about this? Is it sort of like the television sets at Best Buy, where you can definitely tell the difference in resolution when you see them all side by side but when you get yours home it looks perfectly fine? I think I will have some other people take a look at the book to get some impartial feedback.

CreateSpace Part Two

After I wrote the last post I received an email from CreateSpace indicating that there was a problem with my book cover. Here is what they said:

The cover contains transparency which is flattened during our processing and may result in a slight change in appearance.
The cover contains images that are less than 200 DPI which may appear blurry or pixelated when printed. For more information on image resolution, please visit: https://www.createspace.com/Help/Index.jsp?orgId=00D300000001Sh9&id=50170000000Irmr
The cover contained spine text that has been removed as we cannot accommodate the inclusion of spine text for books with less than 101 pages as the text will likely wrap to the front or back cover. We recommend you review a physical proof of your book to ensure you are satisfied with the adjustments made. Otherwise, you may remove the spine text on your original file and resubmit it for publishing.

Because I had worked with a professional book designer on both the interior and cover designs for my book, I was pretty surprised that they said an image on the cover was less than 200 DPI. And I was a bit concerned that they had removed the text from the book spine, mostly because I was worried about what it would look like. Did they leave the graphic (for lack of a better word) that was under the text? Or did they replace the spine with a solid color? I shot off an email to CreateSpace regarding the spine, and I had a response in less than 24 hours. Essentially they leave the spine just like you sent it to them; they simply remove the text. With that reassurance, I ordered a proof yesterday. (You can view on online proof at no charge right away, but that doesn't give you any idea about the actual printing quality.) Last evening I received an email that the proof had been mailed to me. The cost of seeing a print proof was $2.15 plus $3.59 for shipping. The local printer who did my first run of books charged me $35 for set-up and a proof, and the unit price per book was higher as well.

From Buckeye to G.I. book cover

While I was on a roll with CreateSpace I decided to go ahead and submit From Buckeye to G.I. LeRoy C. Kubler The War Years, 1942-1945. Originally I went through Lightning Source for this book because they could print the books out as they were ordered, and I wouldn't need to keep a bunch of books at my house. Also they have an expanded distribution system and can supply books to Amazon, among other places. However Amazon doesn't work that well with Lightning Source (or other competitors), and in my case the book always shows a 1 to 2 week shipping date. In this day and age of immediate gratification, most people will just move on to the next book rather than wait.

I received a couple of minor error messages on formatting (shame on you, my original book designer who set it up this way), but with Adobe Acrobat Pro I was able to correct them myself. Then I resubmitted the PDF and got an approval back from CreateSpace. I ordered a proof copy, which was the same price as my other book, and it was put in the mail to me today. In summary, I would say that my experience with CreateSpace has been quite favorable so far. But let's see what the proofs look like - as they say, the proof is in the pudding. Or perhaps I should say the pudding is in the proof?

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!

Not So Lightning Fast

Approval of my account with Lightning Source (LSI) finally arrived today. This was after emails going back and forth on completion of online forms, downloading of multiple documents requiring signatures, and faxing forms back to LSI. In talking with more established LSI clients, apparently this is all new as they never had to complete all the paperwork or experienced any delays. My word to the wise is to apply for an account with LSI well before you are ready to send a book to them for printing.

Having just downloaded the six page document on uploading my book, the next step is to see if I can make that happen. I am hoping there is something in there about uploading large files, because I had problems sending the book back and forth to my designer.

On the ebook front, I was informed by Smashwords yesterday that there are two problems with "Key to Unlocking House History", preventing it from getting into their premium catalog. One has to do with Heading formatting and the other to do with NCX for the e-pub format. Googling these two items resulted in me understanding that I have absolutely no idea have to fix the first problem, and no idea what the second problem actually is. So I have emailed one of the ebook conversion specialists recommended by Mark Coker to see if she will take this on, and how much it will cost me. I am definitely learning something new every day!

My Dad's Book

Even before I was finished with "Who's Been Sleeping..." I had begun to put together a book about my dad's service in WWII. Because I have all of my dad's papers (as well as photographs, record albums, sheet music, etc.), I have an interesting assortment of items from his years in the military. It seemed like a shame to keep the memories in a box. I had talked with dad a bit about his service and fortunately I wrote a bit of it down. Building on my notes and his photos, I researched his army air corp unit (not much there0, the ship he was transported on, and all the cities and bases he had mentioned. It's all together now in a tidy little book.

I was debating whether to just run off a few copies for my family, which would be the easiest way to go about this, or actually publish the book through my publishing company so that I could possible sell a few copies to the libraries and historical societies in Cincinnati. If I go with the second approach, I would have some copyright issues. I have used some photographs of the ship, planes and military bases which I found on the Internet. I would need to secure permission to reproduce the photos if I do anything beyond making a few copies for my siblings.

In the meantime I have been looking at options for laying out the book. I obviously can't afford to hire a book designer for this particular book, and I just don't know how to use Indesign. As I was looking at options on the Internet, I came across a site called blurb.com. They offer a free book template which is fairly customizable. I downloaded the program last night and have begun looking at it. Of course they would like for you to print the books through them, and I certainly would be willing to check out their pricing. We'll see how user friendly the program is first. I'll keep you posted.