Self-publishing using CreateSpace may not be an exercise in futility. Amazon KDP now offers publishing “Print-to-Order” paperbacks right on their website along with the ebooks. Now we all know that CreateSpace is owned by Amazon and they send the paperback books information to sell on Amazon and it may be easier to have both editions of your books in one place.
****updated 01/15/2019 —- Amazon CreateSpace has been consolidated with KDP Publishing****
What was important to me was that CreateSpace offered free Expanded Distribution of my paperback. “Expanded Distribution – Broaden your distribution, with no set-up fees, to online retailers, bookstores, libraries, academic institutions, and distributors within the United States. The Expanded Distribution option is available with your membership at no additional cost.” Most of these places only buy books if they are available on their known book selling networks. As of today, KDP Amazon doesn’t offer that options as their Paperback Print-On-Demand Services is still in Beta.
For now, though, I find that CreateSpace is a great service to offer your books in paperback editions. The set-up process is very similiar to KDP Amazon for the eBooks and they have templates you can download to make sure that your books conform to their guidelines to print properly and you can still order author priced copies to sell on your own at fairly reasonable rates. These are based on the size dimensions of the book, the number of pages and the number of photos within the book. Yes, you have to pay more if the book has pictures in it. Because you are doing all of the set-up work the royalties are about 70% after printing costs for most books sold. I really like their pricing calculator to see how much I can get paid https://www.createspace.com/Products/Book/ Check it out. It gives you a rough idea what kind of money you are going to make from each copy based on a number of factors. And it’s kind of fun to play with.
Once you have your book accepted on CreateSpace and have ordered at least 1 or 2 copies for yourself you should go to your Author Profile page on Amazon through Author Central and link your paperback version of your book to your profile. If you have any problems just contact Customer Service they are usually pretty good correcting any problems or just linking them for you. And if you are self-publishing with Smashwords you can link your paperback address from CreateSpace to your eBook version of your book on your Dashboard. They will, in turn, send that information to all the distributors on their network for you. All of this usually takes a couple of days to a week to filter down to the various distribution networks so be patient.
