Editio Self-Publishing discussion

Once I made the decision to self-publish in the fall of 2011, I spent a considerable amount of time looking for the right publisher. If you Google ‘self-publishers,’ you’ll find numerous lists of vendors to help you with the process. The ones I ran across repeatedly were AuthorHouse, Lightning Source, Book Surge, Lulu, CreateSpace, Tate Publishing, Dog Ear, Smashwords, Infinity, Writersworld, iUniverse, and Xulon Press.

I visited all their websites and based on my needs, pricing and their terms, I narrowed it down to CreateSpace and iUniverse. I can’t stress enough how important it is to fully understand their terms. The last thing you want are surprises after you’re well into your project.

After discussing my book with each of the finalist’s sales reps, I chose CreateSpace.

CreateSpace Packages (effective November 2011)

Marketing Pro – $4,999
Basic copyediting, comprehensive copyediting, custom book cover, custom book interior, press release with extensive distribution, LCCN assignment, ISBN assignment, promotional text creation, and video book trailer.

Advanced – $2,534
Basic copyediting, comprehensive copyediting, unique book cover, custom book interior, press release with extensive distribution, LCCN assignment, ISBN assignment, and promotional text creation.

Essentials – $1,798
Comprehensive copyediting, unique book cover, custom book interior, LCCN assignment, ISBN assignment, limited sales distribution.

Standard – $728
Unique book cover, custom book interior, ISBN assignment, limited sales distribution.

Author’s Advantage – $398
Standard book cover, standard book interior, ISBN assignment, limited sales distribution.

Author's Express – $248
For authors who have created their own PDF file and just require someone to review their file and provide phone support for getting published on their own.

I chose the Advanced option, but later paid an additional $600 to take advantage of their custom book cover service.

Steps Taken During the Process

Editing

• I submitted my manuscript according to their guidelines.
• Their editor edited the manuscript using Microsoft Office Word’s Track Changes feature so I could accept or reject his recommendations. Changes included grammar, punctuation, spelling, and consistency. Along with the edited manuscript, I received a five-page letter that included the editor’s thoughts on what I did well and where he thought the narrative could be improved. Comments included character development, plot flow, organization, structure, tone and style.
• I submitted a revised manuscript taking the editor’s recommendations into consideration.
• They sent the manuscript back for my review and approval. At this point, I was allowed to make up to 80 more changes without incurring additional costs.
• I submitted a few more changes to the manuscript.
• They sent me a revised manuscript for review and approval.

Formatting

• I was offered various options for the formatting of the interior of the book (font style and size, left and right-hand page headers, page number placement, and paper color), and once I made these choices, they provided a dozen or so mocked-up pages for review and approval.

Promotion

• They provided several promotional text drafts for my review and approval. Included were a press release, a one-sentence story synopsis (maximum 200 characters), a short story synopsis (2,000 character maximum), an extended story synopsis (4,000 character maximum), back cover text (250 word maximum) and three versions of my bio (140 – 1,000 characters).
• I sent back the promotional text with some revisions.
• They sent back the revised promotional text for review and approval.

Cover Design & Layout

• I was allowed to choose the graphic designer for the front cover design from a list of six different artists. The graphic designer I selected provided a pencil sketch of the front cover based on how I completed their questionnaire in addition to some photographs I had sent her. I gave her my comments on the initial sketch, and she sent a second sketch incorporating my comments and including more detail. We went back and forth a couple more times before she submitted a full-color version of the cover. After I approved the illustration, she created two cover concepts that incorporated the title of the book and author name along with back cover and spine layouts.
• I chose the layout I liked best.
• She sent me final proofs for review and approval.

Final Approval

• The entire manuscript in a PDF book format was created for my review and approval. At this point, I was allowed to make 80 more changes to it without any additional charge.
• I submitted a few changes.
• After incorporating my changes, they sent the manuscript back for my review and approval.
• After I approved it, they printed one copy of the book and sent it to me for final approval at which time I was again allowed to make up to 80 changes without being charged.
• I submitted a few changes.
• They sent a revised PDF file for my review and approval.
• After I approved it, they printed another copy of the book and sent it to me for final approval. After I approved it, the book was ready to be released. The Kindle version was available two weeks later.

Marketing

• Once the book was ready for distribution, CreateSpace sent out the press release to 3,258 local and national media contacts they chose based on demographics for the book’s genre. Within 48 hours of the press release, I was invited to be interviewed by a local TV station and submit a copy of my book for review by Midwest Book Review.

What I Liked About Working With CreateSpace

1. They assigned my project to a team (mine was Team Apollo) so that the same people worked on it from beginning to end.
2. They managed the project in short methodical steps, each of which required my approval before they continued with the next one.
3. I could contact the team’s coordinator by phone or by sending a message from my CreateSpace project page. Their response time was excellent. Their staff was pleasant and very accommodating.
4. They offered a phone consultation before each major phase of the project so that I fully understood what was going to take place. There were no surprises along the way.

A Couple of Things I Wish They Would Have Done Differently

1. I preferred my bio to be printed on the inside back cover but was told they were unable to do that given their printing equipment. So my bio ended up as the second to the last page of the book, the last page being a blank one. That was disappointing. I suppose I could have revised the synopsis on the back cover so that the bio could fit there as well, but at that point, it would have cost extra because I had already approved the back cover. Lesson learned for next time.
2. The other disappointment was in the first-in first-out method they used for completing jobs in their work queue. This worked out well in the beginning when the work they did for me was in big chunks, but toward the end, when I had only very minor changes, my work had to wait in line behind other authors in front of me who were in the beginning phases of their projects. For example, the graphic artist who created my book cover (who was fantastic I might add) took a reasonable amount of time each step of the way. But at one point I asked for a minor change, something that couldn’t have taken more than a few minutes to make, and I had to wait eight business days for her to do it because she had other jobs in her queue. That held up releasing my book – everything else was done at that point. If it were me, I would take care of the small jobs first just to get them out of the way.

Royalties

The way CreateSpace calculates royalties is as follows:

If bought through CreateSpace’s eStore – Retail price X 80% less the cost to print

If bought through amazon.com – Retail price X 60% less the cost to print

If bought through any other source – Retail price X 40% less the cost to print

My book is 9X6 with 355 pages and retails for $14.95. The cost to print it is $5.24. If everyone buys my book through amazon.com, my breakeven point is 840 books.

Conclusion

The entire process took five months, and I can say it went quite smoothly. Based on my experience, I can recommend CreateSpace for self-publishing.

Thank you for such a detailed breakdown of your experience with Createspace. I've found it useful, even though I'm not currently planning to use them. I've heard that outside of the US, they don't offer value for printing and shipping.

Tolulope, I don't have any experience outside the US as yet, so I can't comment on that. When I do, I'll update my post.

I use CreateSpace in Switzerland and also have shipping made to New Zealand.
I have never found it to be a problem and the pricing works out better for me than with Lightning Source.

As an aside, you can use CreateSpace for free too - and not buy one of the packages listed above.

The free option is best for books like I write which are directed at very small niches. I need to have a break even point of less than $25, and that's easy to accomplish with Createspace. Using Createspace, Kindle, Lulu (for workbooks and iBooks), and PubIt for Nook, I can get pretty good distribution for books with a total niche size of a few thousand books and total potential sales of 300-600 copies.

I have considered adding something like "This is a small niche book, so paid editors and the like are not possible. Please let me know about typos so I can update the copy."

Thanks for the post OP! I publish using create space but I do it for free and the most I have paid for was expanded distribution option for 30 something bucks. They have since changed it and reduced the price to 25 dollars but I don't think it is the same as before. although I would never pay that much for some of my books that I know will be read by a very small audience. I am in the process of writing an action fantasy and would most likely select one of their publishing options (perhaps the one you picked).

I am interested in contacting create space for their professional editing service for my already released novels and release them as second editions so the editing process you described really helps me get a feel of how it works.

I've used the free CreateSpace for all of my books, and I've always been very happy. I love the ease and convenience they offer, not to mention the quality of the products I receive.

I have published four books on CreateSpace using the free options and I'm working on two more. If I thought my books had the potential for large sales I would use paid editors and book designers, but my books are niche titles. I enjoy designing my books and I think I do a tolerably good job at it. I also think I do a pretty good job formatting e-books for the Kindle and Nook.

I've been happy with the printed books I get from CreateSpace. Now that CS offers free distribution to Amazon sites in Europe I probably won't bother with Expanded Distribution any more. It isn't the upfront cost that bothers me, it's that to get any royalties at all for sales in Expanded Distribution channels I have to greatly increase my prices everywhere.

OK, I'm just jumping on to the POD track after ten months of e-pub only. One of the reasons; tell me if it makes sense.
I'm on another thread and someone offered the idea/tactic to sell the e-book for say $3.99 by having a POD offering at a price say $12.99. The concept being, if you have a print copy thats thirteen bucks, the four dollar e-book looks like a real bargain. Any thoughts?

Now, a couple questions. I uploaded my e-book at work because I can save as a pdf. Unfortunately, I don't have flash at work so I can't review until I get home. Got a version done and successfully uploaded at CS. Then I'm thinking I don't need the hyperlinked table of contents so I just dropped it.
?? Should I have a T of C for a fiction. I would have to wait till I got it in final format, then plug in the page numbers. I'm thinking to just leave the T of C out. That's what bookmarkers are for.

Then I realized I hadn't put page numbers in so I fixed that and put in the footer on the outside margin. Put Title in the header left and tabbed over to put in author name. Is that pretty conventional?

Lastly, the 1.5 line spacing I had for the e-book eats up a lot of paper. What is a good line spacing choice?

Lastly, font. My e-book was in arial (I hate seriphs). Any other suggestions. Arial is an easy read but it looks a little casual.

Lastly, my editor wanted me to change the spacing at end of sentence to single. All mine is two spaces after a period and it doesn't make any difference in an e-book as kindle seems to space it as the program likes. Is two spaces at the end of a sentence now antiquated?

I've downloaded some CS community guide stuff but they must think people enjoy 6 point type. Just getting my feet wet so I came begging for some quick answers so I can try some things out before pushing the final submit button.

Ken
If u use Word you can have the TOC automatically generated using Sections and Heading 1 style. This is especially useful if you do revisions that may alter the previous pagination.

I've uploaded several versions and they look good in pdf. Upon review CS is telling me my fonts aren't embedded (arial and Times NR). I don't think this will be an issue as I'm not using any specia characters beyond a double dash compressed to single long dash and some italics. The cover might be a different story when I get that far.

I need to adjust the margins. The gutter appears OK but the header and footer box runs to the top of the page.
I will have to wait till Tuesday to get back to work so I can convert to pdf with Word 2007. The converter I downloaded wants to stick with 8.5 x 11.
The problem at work is I don't have flash so I can't do the review till I get home. Just inconvenient.
The sample page I printed from pdf looks great.

TOC?

I talked to a representative from Create space about their comprehensive editing service. I was disappointed when I was told that it was a one time edit. I was expecting to be able to make the changes then resubmit for any new adjustments like the OP but then maybe its because the Op ordered the Advance service which included two different forms of editing. I'll still give them a shot as I'm looking for any way to improve my writing. If I make any new changes myself I'll just run it through Auto Crit. lol!

Ken, I don't much like serif fonts either, but I would use one for the body copy of your book. It will make your work look more professional. If you don't like Times New Roman, try changing a page or two to another serif font and see if you like the effect. As for line spacing, I made my book single-spaced.

I had the same problem with pdf size refusing to budge from 8.5x11. As long as you set your page margins in Word to fit a 6x9 page size (or whatever page size you're sending to CreateSpace), they can work with it. I got a message back from them saying my pages were too big but they were able to trim them to fit -- and the finished books look fine.

TOC = Table of Contents. You may not need one for a novel, especially if you're using just numbers to for your chapter headers; it's kind of up to you. But you definitely don't need a hyperlinked TOC in your hard-copy book -- and if you've got hyperlinks in your "about the author" info in the back, you can take those out, too. ;)

I have used Open Office to create most of my PDFs for CreateSpace. It has a built in PDF converter, can generate TOCs and indexes, runs on Windows, Linux, or Mac, and can work with CreateSpaces Word templates just fine if you delete the supplied TOC page and replace it with an OO version. OO is just as good as Word and it is free.

For covers I use The Palm cover layout which takes a front cover image and a back cover image and creates a spine from your title and author in your choice of colors and fonts. I use The GIMP, another free program, to create the front and back images.

The site Font Squirrel has free fonts you can use for your book cover. I like Liberation Serif for interior pages and have used both Liberation Serif and ChunkFive for covers.

Ken,


"Lastly, the 1.5 line spacing I had for the e-book eats up a lot of paper. What is a good line spacing choice?"

>A good place to start for line spacing in a 6 x 9 book is 130% of the type size

"My e-book was in arial (I hate seriphs). Any other suggestions. Arial is an easy read but it looks a little casual."

>You probably mean "serifs." Regardless of whether or not you like them, readers generally expect books in oldstyle typefaces. Avoid Times Roman and try Garamond, Minion, or Caslon

"Is two spaces at the end of a sentence now antiquated?"

>Yes, it's antiquated because it's how people were taught on typewriters. Remember those? Professionally typeset books only use one space after a period.

Hope that helps.

Joel

I beieve Virginia is referring to the article I posted on my website about my recent experience with CreateSpace. http://www.florenceosmund.com

Hi Ken,

Joel's comments are good but let me add a little more.

Line spacing (called leading, like the metal) and the rest are a concern, but the real concern is what are you publishing to which ereaders?

Except for the Kindle Fire and iBook ePUBs the choices are really grim. The basic Kindles and Nook have no font choices available. So, it doesn't matter what you choose.

For the Kindle Fire (KF8 format) and ePUBs for iBooks, there are many choices, but you either need to learn to code HTML and CSS or learn to use InDesign.

Word books always look like Word books because of the limitations of the software.

So the first question is: do I need professional formatting? If you are writing non-fiction that answer is probably yes. If you are writing fiction, probably not.

Basic advice: ebooks use 12-point type as the assumed standard for body copy. Fonts will be changed by the reader. Bold and italic will work. Basic heading styles work. Lists, either bulleted or numbered, do not work well, if at all.

I hope this helps.

For e-books you can use a free program called Sigil:

http://code.google.com/p/sigil/

I like to make a web page for the book using Mozilla Seamonkey (also free) and then import that into Sigil and divide the file into chapters, etc. Seamonkey will generate a linked Table Of Contents for you based on your use of H1, H2, etc. Use The GIMP (also free) to make a cover image.

These tools are not only free, they are among the best available. They are not hard to learn. If you can figure out how to write a book you can learn to use these programs.

You don't need to know a lot of CSS and HTML to make a good e-book. Kindles and Nooks are very limited in what they can render, so knowing more than the basics is pointless.

Bhakta: The only problem with your comment on Kindles and Nooks is that the Kindle Fire can do excellent typography because it supports most of what is available to CSS including embeddable fonts. ePUBs on the iPad also have a lot to work with. In fact, iBooks now supports ePUB3. Both of these options enable you to make books a much better reading experience for your readers, but they require advanced coding skills unless you use InDesign.

The free options always look like they were done by a non-professional. Word ebooks always look like they were done in Word (because of Word's limitations).

If Word is all you have, you are stuck with its limitations. To move on you have decisions to make. Unless you love coding, I suggest you move up to InDesign.

Well, everyone. Thanks for the prompt and helpful responses. I'm down to tweaking for acceptability to CS.
As for the fonts, I like Caslon but one of the two issues from CS was the 'embedded font'. I thought all the Word fonts were 'embedded' but apparently I don't know exactly what that is. The other was insufficient guttering, no biggie.

As for the serifs, I don't like the little cherubs either.

Line spacing. I will play with the spacing using the points after a line instead of a single or 1.5. I'll print a page or so and see how it appears.

Being antiquated myself, I guess I'm stuck with the two spaces after sentences. My editor chastised me for this but the double tap is so automatic after decades, I just can't stop. For an e-book, it doesn't seem to matter because the kindle 'adjusts' spaces by itself.

CAAARAAAP!! I'm actually looking forward to going to work tomorrow so I can fiddle with the formatting.

David wrote: "Bhakta: The only problem with your comment on Kindles and Nooks is that the Kindle Fire can do excellent typography because it supports most of what is available to CSS including embeddable fonts. ..."

I program computers for a living so I could make full use of CSS if I wanted to. I am also aware of what is possible on devices other than the basic Nook and Kindle. As a reader, though, I prefer the basic Nook and Kindle because they have great battery life and the other devices don't. I target my e-books to those devices knowing that they will look OK on the fancier ones.

Even with print on demand books, which I also do myself, I find that I can make a decent looking book with free software. My page designs are not fancy, but they look nice to me. I think I do a decent job on the covers too.

I enjoy laying out my books, designing covers, etc. If I thought my books had a potential for a large readership I'd get all the help I could, but realistically I'm writing for a very small niche as a hobby and even with free tools I'll be lucky to break even. Florence talks about a breakeven point of 840 books. There is no way any of my books will do 840 copies!

Under my real name I write computer books. There is a definite audience for those, but I'll never do 840 of any of those either. The software I write about isn't that widely used and my target audience doesn't have a lot of money to spend on books. I make my books downloadable as PDFs for free, and even as a free download I have not gone over 300 copies on any of them.

So let’s talk about the why of going POD.
Currently my e-book is with KDP Select so its not available on any other venues.
However, the exclusive part is only for e-book, other formats can be with other stores.
Has anyone seen results from the POD side? I can see using the CS free program but spending several thousand seems like a leap of faith to me.

In another discussion we were talking about the POSSIBLE benefit of having a POD version on the Amazon storefront. It appears there are, at least when using the KDP select program, a lot of bargain hunters. Actually, when I run one of the promo days, I think a lot of people download my books but they go in a queue of books that might be read later. I’ll say that my royalties have doubled so no complaints. Back to my bargain shopper point.

If, when someone is looking at my books for sale, if they see a paperback POD version for $14 and right under that is the e-version for $4, it looks like a bargain. Hence, having a paperback version available if only for the purpose of having a price comparison may be a sales tool in itself.

Thoughts?

I don't know that POD works as a sales tool for promoting e-books. I think people who buy e-books from unknown authors expect that an e-book will cost much less than a printed book. A printed book needs to be manufactured, stored, shipped, and when you're done with it there may be some resale value.

Publishers of popular authors charge as much for an e-book as they do for a printed book. If I don't like that I'll go for the printed book or pick up a used copy. Some will pay full price for the e-book.

If I'm buying something from a new author though I expect the following:

1). E-book is cheaper than printed book. Probably much cheaper.

2). No DRM. A new author should be sophisticated enough to understand that if people think his book is worth stealing that's a good thing.

3). Unlimited sharing.

So my feeling is that I only want a POD option for my books if the customer is likely to buy it, not to make my e-book look like a bargain.

Vanity is a factor. As an author, I wanted there to be a printed version of my memoir. It has not sold well in that format. However, I didn't spend a lot getting it made up either. Really just my time. Even if I never break even on it, for something to feed my vanity it was cheap.

Your only options are not 1.0 or 1.5 for spacing in Createspace. You can put your cursor between the period and the five, then type in a one. I'm using a space of 1.15 and it gives more breathing room between the lines in my book.

Ken wrote: "So let’s talk about the why of going POD.
Currently my e-book is with KDP Select so its not available on any other venues.
However, the exclusive part is only for e-book, other formats can be wit..."

The only thing I've heard is that the free download bumps up your popularity position at Amazon. Supposedly, it can give it a real boost in have many places your book comes up during a search. I've tried KDP for my recent book (Writing In InDesign 2nd Ed) and I've been impressed with the sales and I haven't even tried the free option yet.

I would say the select program doubled my royalties. This is my second cycle through. What I found was if I did the free day option for more than a single day, I hit gold on the first day and gravel on the second.

My best success has been doing a one day about every three weeks. I usually hit the top 40 in free books.
However, I am in several categories and it varies which one I 'chart' in. How Amazon decides where to tag it seems to be up to them. I have done well in historical, historical fiction, and historical romance.
Keep in mind that borrows do not translate to sales in any equivalent ratio. My freebie is the first four chapters of a two volume series. I get about 20-25% sales per number of downloads and they are hardly instant. I didn't see any pick up in sales for at least three weeks and it has remained steady but not staggering ever since. I do no other marketing. I've found mentioning the freebies on Twitter or FB just seems to irritate the natives.

Good advice: I've got a new fiction release coming up and I'll follow your lead. For non-fiction (my main output) I got good results with the announcement of a free customized PDF preview in a couple of relevant linked-in groups. For that group the tweets seemed to help. FB is a waste so far for me (but then I'm an asocial recluse ;-)

Thanks for breaking down all the options and costs, Florence. Just a thought though, $600 is a lot to pay for cover. A designer can be hired for a lot less. I think we need a separate category just on cover design. You CAN judge a book by its cover!

Florence,

Thank you so much for this breakdown. I too have gone with CreateSpace for Ruins of the Mind and so far my experience has been very good. However, I hired my own editor and my own cover illustrator.

So... I'm working on a novel that will be considerably longer than Ruins of the Mind. I'm considering using their editing and illustration services. My question is, Your book has been on the market since May... have you hit the break even point on your book yet?

Cover - I thought $600 was a lot to pay for the cover as well, until I started checking around. Maybe I didn't check in the right places.

Jason - I have not hit the breakeven point on my book yet, but am confident I will...some day.

Florence,

If that $600 includes the cost of buying a stock image or having an illustration done, then it's about right. But just for graphic design it's high.

Cover - The $600 covered the cost to create a unique cover from scratch that was ready for printing.

Florence, Sounds like you had an original illustration done, so in that case the price was OK.

I echo a lot of what Ken has already said. I've got an e-book (thriller) currently available through Amazon, Kobo, Nook and Smashwords Premium. I'd paid (not a lot) for a cover design and formatter and have been pleased to the extent that I've got the same person working on my next book. Sales have been embarrassing so far, so I'm also going to venture into the CreateSpace realm (free version), though after exploring its site yesterday, I've got the willies. So many decisions. The above comments are helpful, but the process is still daunting. Baby steps, I keep telling myself. A friend said she thought CreateSpace's covers were a tad thin and not able to lie flat. Anyone agree?
And cream paper or white? I read on-line that someone thought the cream was too yellow.
I'm likely going to charge $14.99 for the print version (6x9, 375 pages) and bump up the cost of my e-book from $3.99 to $5.99. Because I'm in the Smashwords Premium catalog, I'm probably not going to bother with the CS expanded distribution either.
I'd like to put reviews on the back cover and hope that's possible. And like Ken, I double-space after the periods,too. When I hear words like "embedded," I go cross-eyed.

It is cheap to get a review copy of your book from Create Space, so do that and decide for yourself if you like how it looks. You can do this until you are happy. As for cover thickness, I am quite happy with it.

Expanded Distribution is probably something to avoid. I've done it and got exactly one sale from B&N .com, at a much lower royalty than I would have gotten from Amazon, and it makes the book more expensive for all customers.

Reviews on back cover are possible. You just need to design front and back covers using The GIMP or Photoshop and use The Palm to create your cover. If you use The Palm your front and back covers can look like anything you like and the title and author go vertically on the spine in your choice of colors.

But buy review copies of your book before selling it and you and your customers should be happy.

I would suggest waiting until you have some reviews to put on the back cover. This means getting reviews from the e-versions. OTW, you just have ad copy to put there.

Its nice to have access to physical copies for yourself and gifts. Nothing like leaving one around where a guest picks it up. Makes you feel like a 'real' author.

I don't even look at my CS sales because they are so paltry. The advantage to me is having both the e-version and the print copies available on Amazon. Just looks more professional in my opinion.

Thanks, Bhakta and Ken. I'll let you know how things go. Plan to jump into the process next week. I'm sure it'll take me forever to figure things out, but hopefully things will go smoothly the second time around. Great info, Bhakta, about expanded distribution, too.