Last Summer, when we published Broken Toys: China's Song for the Kindle, a number of people asked when we'd make the book available in print form. I told them we couldn't do it because we were concerned there would be set-up costs that would prevent us from offering the print version. However, my wife did some investigating and Amazon also offers a Print on Demand service at CreateSpace.com. CreateSpace also allows creative people to publish music and video "on demand".
Here's the process we went through to make our book available on CreateSpace.
All in all, the process was relatively painless.
Here are the split-out topics:
Choosing an interior for your book.
Amazon suggested the 6X9 format as their best selling format. They even have Word Templates you can download. I was able to easily convert our original Word Document by opening the template and copying the appropriate section from the book into the template. The important part is to paste into the document using the Merge Formatting Paste Option. However, this did necessitate re-proofreading the entire book, which was time consuming.
Choosing a cover for your book.
Despite conventional wisdom, your book will be judged by its cover. Amazon provides several different pre-formatted templates and pictures you can use. They also allow you to completely design your own cover. You may want to consider waiting to design your cover until you've settled on the interior. Some changes to the interior of the book can wipe out your cover entirely.
Here's the process we went through to make our book available on CreateSpace.
- We created a CreateSpace account at www.createSpace.com.
Actually, we did this some time ago because it's what I thought we needed for the Kindle. - CreateSpace has a forum where you can give other members "previews" of your work to elicite their feedback. (We didn't do this, but it looks like a good idea.)
- CreateSpace also has editorial and illustration services and I'm sure they are great. However, you have to pay for those and we're trying to make the book available with no up-front costs.
- We created a book title, short description and entered our author information
- Amazon generated free 10 and 13 digit ISBNs for the book
- We chose an interior for the book. That was the biggest step. The instructions for that are below.
- The next step was to create a cover for the book. The instructions for that are below as well.
- We submitted our files for review.
- After that we submitted additional marketing information for our books such as the authors' biography and category for the book.
- Before proceeding, we had to enter our tax information.
- Then we needed to set the price and distribution channels for our book. We set the price at $10.99 because that gives us roughly the same profit per book as our 2.99 Kindle eBook. We chose the Amazon and eStore options because the additonal options had a fee associated with them.
All in all, the process was relatively painless.
Here are the split-out topics:
Choosing an interior for your book.
Amazon suggested the 6X9 format as their best selling format. They even have Word Templates you can download. I was able to easily convert our original Word Document by opening the template and copying the appropriate section from the book into the template. The important part is to paste into the document using the Merge Formatting Paste Option. However, this did necessitate re-proofreading the entire book, which was time consuming.
Choosing a cover for your book.
Despite conventional wisdom, your book will be judged by its cover. Amazon provides several different pre-formatted templates and pictures you can use. They also allow you to completely design your own cover. You may want to consider waiting to design your cover until you've settled on the interior. Some changes to the interior of the book can wipe out your cover entirely.
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