Thursday, 10 February 2011

Publish Your Book For Free With CreateSpace


If you want to publish a book to sell on the internet, then CreateSpace is an excellent option. A part of Amazon, CreateSpace will let you publish your book with them for free.

We have just brought out our recipe book with them - Authentic Greek Recipes - and it has already started selling. However, I have to say that if you are doing it for the first time, then perhaps you're going to spend more time getting it together than perhaps should be necessary.

The procedure itself is pretty smooth, but you don't fully know what the procedure is until you actually go through each stage. For that reason I'll give you a brief summary of what you have to do until your book is available for sale - I only wish that CreateSpace gave this summary to new users.

- Obviously you need to have the material you want to publish.
- Choose the size you want your book to be and you can download a formatted template from their Resources section. Use this template to put the material for your book. I find this an excellent resource as you don't need to worry about formatting it with margin sizes etc.
- Once this is ready, convert it into a pdf file. If you have photos, then they need to be at least 300 dpi.
- If you can't or don't want to create your own cover, then there is a selection of cover templates to choose from.
- You have to choose whether you want colour or black and white. Obviously, black and white is going to allow you to set a lower price.
- Once you have your pdf file and cover ready, you submit them for approval. They say that this takes up to 48 hours, but I found that they responded within 12 hours. You will be told if it is acceptable or what problems need to be fixed.
- If you stay with the free option, then your book will only be available from CreateSpace - in other words just direct selling from you. There is a ProPlan, however, which is just under $40 a year, with which you can make it available on Amazon plus they promote it to other sellers and libraries and institutions. You also get a higher royalty with ProPlan.
- However, even if you don't use ProPlan you still have to pay the cost price of the book plus shipping for them to send it to you to approve before it's made available.
- You can electronically approve it once you've seen it. Then you have to choose the price. They give you a minimum to sell on CreateSpace and a higher minimum for it to be available on Amazon.
- On CreateSpace you have the option to create discounts if you want.

That is a brief summary of publishing your own book with them and so far I have been happy with the results. Is there anyone else who has used them? Or anyone thinking about it?

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