I just completed the CreateSpace process for creating and publishing a book. Radioactive is just over 130,000 words. It is a crime thriller about nuclear terrorism. It has murder, some romance, and tragedy.

Now, I have to pull up my socks and promote it. So here I am. I figure that the first thing I should do is tell you about CreateSpace. The people there are attentive and professional. They have every service a new author could ask for, and the website is pretty easy to understand. I am about 90% satisfied with the service I purchased. The one and only bump in the road between submission and publishing was the edit process...

I spent the money for two rounds of editing and learned a great deal from each one. That's the plus side. The down side is that both of my two, kind, editors were too kind. Both of them missed a glaring timeline error, I did too until I proofread the book. Why its it that you see errors more readily when the thing is a real book than when you have all of the computer tools under your fingers? When I had finished the second round, stumbled through formatting (Ms Word) and cover creation (Pixelmator and CreateSpace cover generator, I had a book. I ordered two proofs and pushed on. I had learned quite a bit about writing, editing, interior book design, covers, and MsWord. I don't like that program for a lot of reasons, but I have to admit it does do the job; often inside out and bassackwards, but it can be coerced into getting it done. For initial creation I use Scrivener. It is really designed for authors. I wish I could use it directly for everything. It does a wonderful job of building ebooks. Unfortunately, this means that my writing loop is draft creation, edit in Scrivener, export to MsWord, formatting hell, and submission to CreateSpace. Formatting hell involves twiddling bits in MsWord, submitting your work and then cleaning the blood from the walls after the helpful robots at CreateSpace point out that you solved one problem, but created six more. Fortunately, I learned enough by doing this several times that my next trip though will be a trip through purgatory. Once I have published to Amazon I have to re-import from MsWord, back to Scrivener and create ebooks for nook and kobo. Fun!

If you have purchased editing from CreateSpace you will get to spend some time in Editing Limbo where your wait is directly proportionate to the length of your work. That seems apropos. My time in limbo was two weeks on each pass. When I got the manuscript back, the cover letter induced euphoric bubbles of confidence that powered me through the rewrites in less than two days. I was on top of the world. Even another trip though formatting hell didn't dampen my enthusiasm. I'm up in the air about recommending the editing service from CreateSpace. On one hand I learned a lot in the process. On the other, I really feel they were too kind. I thought I paid for in-depth service and I don't feel I received it.

I ordered 2 proof copies from CreateSpace. Author's proofs arrive very quickly. I cannot fault that part of their service in any way. When I got my proofs back, I sat down with a pad of sticky notes and a pen and went though page by page, cover to cover. It was at this point that I discovered a hole in my timeline that you could drive a truck through. I was displeased. My wife, always supportive, pulled me off the ceiling, applied liberal doses of sumatra and encouragement, and sat me back down in front of my computer. I went back over the timeline diagrams and the manuscript and fixed what was bent. I resubmitted the manuscript and ordered two more proofs.

Yesterday afternoon I set the robots at CreateSpace loose on the final steps in publishing. It took only a few hours to go from submission to an actual spot on the Amazon website. Radioactive It only took a few more hours to get it up as a kindle book. Radioactive on Kindle.

Now, I have to tell -everyone- about it... Lloyd Vancil