Support for Indie Authors discussion

I think I've finally decided to go into paperback (I'm currently only in eBook format).

So, CreateSpace has been suggested, as it's print on demand, and I'm already on KDP.
But I've also seen lots of scary things about them.

So, if I want a print-on-demand (i.e. I have no cash to fork out up-front), and I want to reach a good number of people, retain my indie status, and want a user-friendly service...
who's the best printers to go with, please?

(eek!)

(apologies if this has been covered already)

Cool, thanks Robert.
Am I OK as a UK person?
I know for Audible I need the dreaded ITIN (which I've unsuccessfully applied for FOUR times now).
I think I can just say 'oh keep the damn money' on the tax declaration as I did on KDP.

I have a Word file for my book; can I just upload that?
It's formatted for KDP. I'm just hoping I won't have to spend hours reformatting.

And then there's the paper size/colour...
:-/
I think a standard small b&w (cream paper) with a colour cover should be OK for my ickle romance novels.

I believe that CS requires that you upload PDFs with imbedded fonts. All images are supposed to be at least 300 dpi, but I have submitted 200 dpi and the print quality seems ok. Bad thing about word us it likes to reduce the resolution of your images automatically, so you have to get info on your particular version of word as to where to turn that feature off.

Ooh, I have pdfs too. Not sure on the dpi; I'll have to check. Ta muchly.

TL wrote: "I think I've finally decided to go into paperback (I'm currently only in eBook format).

So, CreateSpace has been suggested, as it's print on demand, and I'm already on KDP.
But I've also seen lots..."

I've personally used Createspace. I find their platform super easy to use, and the setup/process was simple, and quick. Added my doc, it gave me a preview, I did some changes, and in 24hrs they gave me a "proof" to approve. Then voila, book is up for sale :)

One thing though... For royalties? Your book will be posted on amazon as a print on demand, but you get very very veryyyyy little reviews from a sale of a print book on amazon. However if you promote your link on createspace, you get more sales... Not sure if that makes sense?

Example: if my print book is priced at $14.99 and someone buys off amazon, I get $0.06 royalty. If someone buys off the createspace store, I get $3.06 royalty. But that depends on what price you set for it and whatnot.

Hope that helps!

OMG Alexa; thank you! What a difference in royalties between outlets!! :-O

I'll have to think about that a bit.
If I have reviews on my ebook, will they copy across on Amazon??

Glad to hear that it is super easy to use, at least.

If you have an ebook and a print book the books should automatically become linked on Amazon, especially if you use createspace and kindle direct. The reviews will be on the linked version, and readers can select ebook or print book to buy.
It doesn't always work, but if it doesn't link up you can just tell customer support about it and it is fixed.

I use createspace and haven't had too many problems. The worst problem? Shipping. It is ghastly if you are in Canada, but then again, so is everything.

Otherwise the quality is pretty good. I have only seen one book fall apart out of 80+, but my sister read it, and she is a book killer. (spines never survive her wrath unmarked, dog-eared page folding, dropped in the bath, all of it). I found that the laminated gloss ever so slightly started to peel up of my review copies, but those get used pretty hard. I don't know if that would happen just reading the book normally.

Thank you C.B. for your comments about how CS print books hold up. I read a paperback so that it still looks brand new when I'm finished. Your sister scares the hell out of me! 8-O

Alexa, You only earn SIX CENTS in royalties from Amazon for a CS paperback selling at $14.99? I think I'm going to be sick. I'm working on a 30 page children's book. It's already written. It's drawing the colorful pictures that is taking so much time and effort. I plan to set the selling price under $10. Sounds like I won't make anything. Thanks for the heads up. : (

When you create a paperback on Createspace, it automatically shows up in their store. I never sell anything there, since Amazon discounts it a little and its cheaper, but Createspace does have a store. On their website, to the right where you'll find the search box, you have a choice of searching "site" or "store."
https://www.createspace.com/

Better yet: https://www.createspace.com/5268550

Is that bookwhacking?

I use Lulu for print, but then again I manage my own inventory and sales on my paperback and hardback.

Sue (Dog Mom) wrote: "Thank you C.B. for your comments about how CS print books hold up. I read a paperback so that it still looks brand new when I'm finished. Your sister scares the hell out of me! 8-O

Alexa, You only..."

Royalty depends on a lot of things. CS charge per page. The more pages you have, the higher the cost. That's why many people choose a bigger format such as 6X9 so the book is condensed in lesser pages. Now if you add colors to it, it will up the price too.

CS also gives you a minimum price you can sell it according to the cost. The royalty is based on the difference between what you ask for and the cost (they keep a cut in there.)

For example, if I buy my own book on CS, they cost about 5$ each (no royalty of course). I set the price to sell my book at 9.99$ and get about 0.80$ per book sold on Amazon US. They have between 350-360 pages (no color pictures inside though), but that should still give you an idea. I didn't take the extended distribution because it would have upped the price too much. I wanted to keep it reasonable and still get a bit of $ in my pockets.

G.G. - Thank you for this very helpful information, and for relieving my worries. A while ago Missy Sheldrake was kind enough to send me a link to the CS cost calculator so I could estimate my cost. So now I know I can price my book less than $10 and earn a little something. Very relieved. Thank you again.

K.R. wrote: "I use Lulu for print, but then again I manage my own inventory and sales on my paperback and hardback."

Lulu is another good one, and I use them as well. For hardcovers I go for expanded distribution, including Amazon, which automatically associates the hardcovers with my Amazon ebooks and Createspace paperbacks. The quality is excellent on the copies I've seen.

Help me out here... .06 per copy for a book I spent almost 4 years on? What am I missing? The CS calculator is waaaay off then. Please explain... I'm going live soon... maybe Lulu or Ingram are better royalty wise.. thanks

What you get paid for your book, with either Createspace or Lulu, depends on the price you choose to sell it for. Both have a minimum price you can charge, but you choose the actual price. You can set it high enough to make two, three, or four dollars per book, depending on how high you want to go. Since I sell very few paperbacks, I created the best-looking paperback I could manage (within reason), and then priced it high enough to make a decent profit. Even at that, I still sell a few from time to time. But the overwhelming majority of my readers buy ebooks.

The majority of my books that have sold have been ebooks as well. I've only sold 4 or 5 paperback since release in June.

Yeah, these royalties are a bit scary, especialy as I can't get the magical ITIN, so Amazon keep back an extra 10% I think it is (might be more). I could end up owing them!? ;-p

But, I have had a few people exclaim at no paperbacks, and I'm hoping this will get me into libraries, and I'd have something to sell at local fairs etc.

Thanks for all this gang.

and I'd have something to sell at local fairs etc

For this sort of thing, why not go with something like epubli print on demand:

http://www.epubli.co.uk/publish

where you can set your own "royalties" (actually, profit)?

I'm thinking of them for an academic book I have planned and through their price calculator discovered that I could make 100% profit by selling the book for about half the average price of comparable books.

Thanks John.
Anyone used epubli? Thoughts please.

I don't want to have to make my book a silly price that people won't want to pay. :-/

It's a good idea to get your own ISBN, right? Then it gets used everywhere (and libraries are happier)?

Sorry; I think I'm going to have a few questions as I get into this process... :-/

TL wrote: "OMG Alexa; thank you! What a difference in royalties between outlets!! :-O

I'll have to think about that a bit.
If I have reviews on my ebook, will they copy across on Amazon??

Glad to hear th..."

Yeah it shocked me too lol that's why for anyone asking me for a print, I promote the createspace link. And ummm that's a VERY question... and I have no idea if the reviews copy :/

Robert wrote: "Ooh, I didn't know about the createspace store, so you can do Amazon and the store at the same time?

'Example: if my print book is priced at $14.99 and someone buys off amazon, I get $0.06 royalty..."

No problem, Robert. I was using my own as example, I couldn't think of a better way to explain it. I personally find it's worth it to with createspace.

Sue (Dog Mom) wrote: "G.G. - Thank you for this very helpful information, and for relieving my worries. A while ago Missy Sheldrake was kind enough to send me a link to the CS cost calculator so I could estimate my cost..."

Sorry if my earlier post scared you :( It wasn't intended to! I should have mentioned CS automatically priced my book at $14 something because it's 676 pages printed lol. Hence my low royalty because I didn't want to price it too high.

But I'm glad someone shared the calculator and you found how you'd be getting :)

Also, if you're looking to do ebook for your book, you might want to look into Smashwords as well; they have high royalties, in some instances higher than Amazon, and they send it off to iBooks, Barnes & Nobles, Kobo, libraries, etc.

Sorry, I know this thread is intended for print books, but I just thought I'd throw that out there.

Ken wrote: "What you get paid for your book, with either Createspace or Lulu, depends on the price you choose to sell it for. Both have a minimum price you can charge, but you choose the actual price. You can ..."

You explained that way better than I did :)

Alexa, Thank you for that helpful explanation and advice about Smashwords. My YA PNR will be around 350 pages on 5" x 8" so I know I can also price that under $10.

Sue (Dog Mom) wrote: "Alexa, Thank you for that helpful explanation and advice about Smashwords. My YA PNR will be around 350 pages on 5" x 8" so I know I can also price that under $10."

Glad to help :)

Thanks for the comment on pricing, Sue. My book is listed as $9.99 through CreateSpace, dependent on the number of pages. I recently sent them a request that I would like to push it down to $3.99 for a month. Surprisingly, they gave me directions of how to do that. Has anyone else lowered their price to get more sales? What was your experience?

Gippy wrote: "Thanks for the comment on pricing, Sue. My book is listed as $9.99 through CreateSpace, dependent on the number of pages. I recently sent them a request that I would like to push it down to $3.99 f..."

I was not even aware they let us do that! That's awesome, thanks for sharing!

I’m new to this group, I realize that—but I REALLY want to help here.

I have a little over 12 years experience doing this and making a full time living at it too, using the systems mentioned thus far (specifically Lulu and Createspace). PLUS I have clients (32 years as book illustrator) who are having tragic results, which would benefit us as well.

I’d prefer not to respond directly to anyone in the thread by name. Don’t want my comments to be considered negative. I just want to set the raw data/experiences at your feet and hopefully empower everyone.

First off, whenever you do a print book, get your own ISBN# or you will not be the publisher of your own book.

I buy 1000 of them at a time, and though they’ve gone up in cost by 50% since I bought mine ( myidentifiers ), $1.50 per number beats $125 per number when you buy ‘em one ata time.

EBooks don’t need the ISBN’s (IMO) because Amazon and B&N will reassign you a number from their own system ANYway…which means, essentially, you could have saved money. So I don’t bother with putting ISBN’s on ebooks anymore, just on printed versions.

HISTORY: I started Indie Publishing and making a full time living in 2005, selling digital comic book for $0.97/issue in PDF form through my website. That’s two years before kindle even existed. At the end of 2006 I started releasing my graphic novel compilations through Lulu (205 pages), black and white paperbacks.

I had fair success with those books and up until a week ago, I’ve been selling them through Lulu. Truth be told, I didn’t take down the books because I was lazy and wasn’t focused on comics anymore.

As soon as Createspace came onto the scene, I switched and never looked back. I’ve never had a single problem with the system or the quality of books (except the gloss covers: see below) and the pricing for paperbacks allows me to be more competitive with New York (important to me).

The biggest benefit though is both the validity of having books in print and having my books connected to the eBooks on Amazon. Sales increased both ways when I would connect the titles, allowing for a reader who buys the paperback to get the eBook at a discount.

Gloss vs Matte finish covers: I don’t know if it’s the glue used in the process or something else, but over time, the gloss covers tend to cur up from the edges of ‘seriously loved’ books. The matte finish shows no sign of this problem and I have 12 children, each of them hungry readers and my built in test group for books/products.

QUALITY vs PRICING: Unless you’re writing a non-fiction book or a rare/fan supported item you can charge a substantial amount for, I would never, ever, ever, E-V-E-R go with Lulu.

Their quality of books is lovely. They are, but their pricing is much too high and the focus is on their own profit, not your success. One of my clients has been seriously abused and IMO, literally robbed by Lulu and their staff, to the sum of over $5K at this point.

She has little hope of earning her money back, the product is not what she wanted and now it’s just a focus on stopping the bleeding, as they will not consider giving her money back.

For people who want to do hardback books and are willing to invest even a small amount of $$, I send them to check out “PrintNinja.com” (which I use for my book inspired games and special Fan Club extras) OR use Createspace.

CREATESPACE HARDBACKS: This info is a couple years old, but here is my personal email conversation with Shea Hester at Amazon (thought it might be useful to you guys)…BTW, I never…ever…buy a marketing package from anyone. Has never done anything buy put nasty holes in my wallet. I do this myself, over time…(so you know).
-----------------
Hello Jaime,

My name is Shea Hester, Publishing Associate with CreateSpace.

I understand that you may have an interest in making your book available in hardcover. Although not currently listed on our website, we recently began offering a hardcover upgrade service.

For a one-time fee of $99.00, we will convert your book’s paperback files to hardcover. The hardcover book will be setup as a separate title in your account, and will have a separate ISBN assigned. The conversion is typically completed within 10 business days of purchase.

The hardcover will not be eligible for any of our distribution channels. It will only be available for you to order copies directly through your CreateSpace account, and resell or distribute as you see fit.

The following table outlines the costs per unit of a hardcover book:

Cost per book $6.50
B&W per page $0.015
Color per page $0.15
Dust Jacket (optional) $2.00

Keep in mind that if your book’s interior pages have color images or text, the entire book is subject to color printing rates per page. We also have a variety of marketing services that you can review by clicking here:

https://www.createspace.com/pub/servi...

Please let me know if you have an interest! You may contact me by replying to this e-mail message or by calling me directly. I am available Monday through Friday between the hours of 9:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m. Eastern time.

Kind regards,

Shea



(Go through the regular channels and ask your questions at Createspace...)
--------------

Hope this helps =)
I read the rules and didn’t violate any of them in this post that I can see (took the link off the ISBN note, but we ALL have to buy them from the same place, so not sure if that counts or not...and the email info is so you can contact CS directly for more information personally). Correct me if I need to be, MODS, I’m humble and will stand in a corner if I need to (smile).

If anyone has questions, feel free to ask. I’d love to help in any way I can…I’ve been around for a while.

Cheers!

Jaime Buckley

Robert wrote: "Hi Jaime, great info. is it a major problem if I have my ISBNs via cs? If I leave cs can't I just assign a new ISBN? I mean I still have copyright don't I? Or am I missing some very simple point?"

Robert, you do have the copyright. I use CS and Lulu ISBNs and although technically I might not be listed as the publisher I still get the proceeds. The books are published, I get the royalties, and at this point, for a little-known author, I'm satisfied.

Lulu's retail prices are actually cheaper than CS on their own website, since you can offer a vast discount on their site even if you go for expanded distribution. I advertise my hardcover and paperbacks on Lulu as "always discounted on Lulu." I have copies of my hardcovers, and the quality is excellent, and the setup is free. For CS or Lulu hardcovers, it all depends on whether you want to pay an up-front fee, and then offer the books for lower cost, or pay nothing and have to charge more. An unknown author is not likely to sell many, if any, hardcovers, so I go with the freebie and have no regrets.

Ken wrote: "Robert wrote: "Hi Jaime, great info. is it a major problem if I have my ISBNs via cs? If I leave cs can't I just assign a new ISBN? I mean I still have copyright don't I? Or am I missing some very ..."

@Robert, Ken is correct that you own the Copyright--which we automatically own once we start writing a work, but there are issues with owning/not owning the ISBN--you simply have to weigh and consider what's important to you, the author.

Keep in mind that Copyright is administered by the Library of Congress as an extension of intellectual property law, whereas ISBN's are administered by a private company (a monopoly to be completely accurate) for the purpose of international book trade. All this is is a stock-keeping identifier, which became the standard in 1970.

As for myself, I started this journey trying to look as far down the road as I could. ISBN's perform many functions for Indie-Authors. The biggest one for me, was that Bowker is actually registering your publishing company when they issue you your numbers, not your individual books. Why is that important? Well, when I started (and even now) it would help combat the stigma of 'self-publishing' and validated my presence on the publishing scene.

There were two issues I had to address:

1) What am I doing this for?

This is a business for me, not a hobby. I am manufacturing a product for retail sales. That means I have to understand the policies of ANYone who will be selling my books.

2) How important WAS an ISBN that everyone talked about it so much??

There are at least 3 main uses for an ISBN when being sold over platforms like Amazon, B&N, Smashwords and Draft2Digital: A) stock keeping for inventory; B) item identification (to keep similar editions sorted), and; C) Metadata.

It's the Metadata I was concerned about.

Each ISBN contains a "publisher identifier", which means anyone can look up the publisher. If you use the FREE options through a platform, they are the ones found in the bibliographic database as the publisher. I wanted people to find ME, not Amazon.

By owning the ISBN, I get to control the bibliographic record of my book and key to being discovered by online retailers. In layman terms, this allows me to attract search engine traffic to my title.

The landscape of publishing is constantly changing and evolving and as this happens, distribution options change with them. More options are requiring the author/imprint to be the registered owner of the ISBN.

You will ALWAYS own the copyright to your works, Robert, unless you sell them...but consider controlling your ISBN's if you plan on writing more than one book or if your project is anything other than a strictly private project/hobby.

Just my 2.3 cents.

Hope that helped.

Oh, and Robert--almost forgot to mention:

You can print your book anywhere using the same ISBN, they have nothing to do with Amazon or CreateSpace.

In Canada, ISBN's are free:

http://selfpublishingadventure.com/ho...

Jaime wrote: "I’m new to this group, I realize that—but I REALLY want to help here.

I have a little over 12 years experience doing this and making a full time living at it too, using the systems mentioned thus..."

Hi Jaime,
The only request I have as a mod is to please take the name and address info off your post. If a bunch if people start trying to contact this one CS employee for help instead of going through the proper channels, we do not want them to come back and find this thread as the source.
Thanks.

ISBN is unique to the publisher, If you Continue to use the publisher and it is the same edition, that ISBN can be used. CS assigned ISBN makes them the publisher of the book. If you use another company or yourself as the publisher, you surely have to get another ISBN,
Hope that explains it.

Hey, thanks everyone. You're all super helpful.

Sorry; I've spent the last x hrs formatting (all afternoon yesterday, and all day so far today; now 19:45 in the UK!). All work and no play??

Anyway, so I've decided like most of you, Createspace's pros outweigh their cons. I think it offers the widest distribution opportunities.

So I can use the one ISBN everywhere I've purchased one (well, a block of 10 as I have 5 books in eformat already).

I've got my cover designer on the case to convert into a paperback version.

Yes, I'm printing paperback only btw. It's a romance novel, I don't think hardback is needed for that. ;-)

Actually reformatting and re-re-re-re-re-editing an awful lot in the process, so it's a good job jobbed.

I'm not sure people read romances over and over and over, and really like a glossy cover, so am leaning that way. Dunno. I hear what youg guys say about them peeling. But shiny pretty!

Cream paper, and a cute 5x8" = 281 pages for this particular book.

Excitied yet exhausted!
TL sleep now! zzzzzzz.......

TL wrote: "Yes, I'm printing paperback only btw. It's a romance novel, I don't think hardback is needed for that. ;-)"

Pfft! We're just as legit as the other genres!!

Eh, you're right ^_~

I did try Blurb just to prove to myself I could do it haha! Their dimensions are veeery limited but I've heard great things about the quality... *shrugs*

Hugs,
Ann

TL wrote: "Hey, thanks everyone. You're all super helpful.

Sorry; I've spent the last x hrs formatting (all afternoon yesterday, and all day so far today; now 19:45 in the UK!). All work and no play??..."

TL - Congratulations and ((((( Huge Hugs ))))) to you and best wishes on your success.

I'm on the fence about a matte or glossy cover. I'm writing a YA PNR series and to publish with KPD and CS. I know the covers I see out there are glossy. I also intend to publish a children's book and planned to use a glossy cover, but have changed my mind due to the opinions here.

Thank you, EVERYONE for your comments and advice. I wish you ALL great success. : )

Christina wrote: "Hi Jaime,
The only request I have as a mod is to please take the name and address info off your post. If a bunch if people start trying to contact this one CS employee for help instead of going through the proper channels, we do not want them to come back and find this thread as the source.
Thanks. "

Totally understand and agree. Sorry for that! Post edited and reposted =D

...a bit excited about helping, that's all.

Robert wrote: "Brilliant, thank you Ken and Jaime.
Just that one final clarification, sorry if I missed the answer if you have already supplied it - If I already have a cs assigned ISBN for a title can I go ahead..."

That...I don't know. Never done it. I would google the process of ISBN's and maybe even ask on The Book Designer website. He'd know.

...unless someone on this thread has the answer?

Tee hee; I'm very English, and a pint sounds good. Let's go now! ;-p

TL wrote: "I think I've finally decided to go into paperback (I'm currently only in eBook format).

So, CreateSpace has been suggested, as it's print on demand, and I'm already on KDP.
But I've also seen lots..."


I'm going live with my book in October, so I signed up with both Create Space and Ingram Spark to print up proofs and see which one was better in quality and price. Here are the results: the books were almost identical in quality, save for a few key details. One, the print in CS was lighter than Ingram. Two, the cover for CS was richer than Ingram. And three, Ingram had these weird marks on the interior of the book, near the spine just inside the first page. Almost like color correction marks for cameras, but obviously not that. I'm not sure what they were.

As for price, to print up a proof copy, both companies will charge you. But I paid double for Ingram's proof.

In the end, I went with CS because it was slightly cheaper to print, and because of the synergy (allegedly. I'm not there yet!) with the KDP (ebook) version listed on the Amazon page.

I think you'll be very happy with CS now that you've chosen them!

I suspect the coloured marks were a calibration mark; colour testing during print runs.

Yeah, the Amazon ownership was the final thing that swayed me in the direction of CS tbh. It doesn't mean Amazon will help promote the book, but hopefully it means there won't be any difficulties either.

I'm super excited. Just eagerly awaiting my cover design then it'll be proof ordering time :)

Physical books in your hands that you wrote... there is no other feeling!
It feels like... well... like other books, but emotionally - wow!

TL wrote: "Yeah, these royalties are a bit scary, especialy as I can't get the magical ITIN, so Amazon keep back an extra 10% I think it is (might be more). I could end up owing them!? ;-p

But, I have had a..."

I am in Georgia. I have just gone right up to libraries in Georgia and Alabama and asked that my book be in them. They run it through a review board. Voila! It's in. Only one library rejected. A university library and they were going through a remodel. Just ask and you ( they) will receive. LOL.

P.S. The good news in Georgia is that they are affiliated in the PINES distribution network. When it's in ONE county library, it's in all the counties participating in PINES network throughout the state. And out of 159 counties, I think 150 are in it.

Wow; thanks Lee. I'm not quite sure how it works here in the UK yet. I need to look into that. Sounds encouraging though.

Oh I can't wait to hold my book in my hands. It's just not the same on Kindle somehow.
I suppose because suddenly it will look like what my mind calls a book, and is actually tangible.

:)

TL wrote: "Wow; thanks Lee. I'm not quite sure how it works here in the UK yet. I need to look into that. Sounds encouraging though.

Oh I can't wait to hold my book in my hands. It's just not the same on Kin..."

OH, I should have read your profile first. Well, maybe it will help others should they want to get their book in library in the U.S. - especially Georgia or the South. Yes, nothing like HOLDING it in your hands. Good luck!

Annie wrote: I did try Blurb just to prove to myself I could do it haha! Their dimensions are veeery limited but I've heard great things about the quality...

So how has Blurb worked out for you? Their fees for printing, storing and even shipping look attractive relative to CS.

I know, ya gotta pay up front, but ya gotta pay for editing/proofing/cover anyway, an' your writing time's even worth a couple of bucks...

Lee wrote: "TL wrote: "Wow; thanks Lee. I'm not quite sure how it works here in the UK yet. I need to look into that. Sounds encouraging though.

Oh I can't wait to hold my book in my hands. It's just not the ..."

Just to chime in here--I've had some friends come tell me they found my books in their local library (I did nothing to make that happen) and when I checked my Createspace account, yup--some decent sales were there.

A librarian then contacted me through my website and said they had requested two complete sets of my books due to youth requests. So apparently libraries, once they have the requests from enough patrons, will order the books IF they can be located on Amazon!

Thought you might like to know.

Since then, my books have been popping up all over the place. Wonder if this has to do with the PINES info you shared, Lee?

Who knows.

CS has been quite the platform for me. Nothing perfect, but thus far, they're pretty close in my book. =)

Annoyingly, I bought my own ISBN, thinking that would mean a wider distribution.
However, having gone through the process, I now can't check the 'libraries and educational institutions' box as I should have used a CS only ISBN!! :-( Why didn't they tell me that first??
It would have been free that way too. :-(

But maybe if I at least go into my local libraries armed with books they'll stock me? And I've read somewhere about ebooks going into libraries too, so will look that up properly later.