Adventures in (Create)Space!

Posted on 22 June 2009

Disclaimer: Let it be known that I work for Audible.com which is owned by Amazon.com which in turn owns Createspace.com . So you are free to take all my glowing praise as more kissing up to my Amazon overlords. It’s not, but I understand why you would feel that way.

So you want to be a writer? No? Not interested? Well, ok, then I want to be a writer. No, not as a full time job, I have one of those, and it keeps me plenty busy. This would be just for fun on the weekends and the nights when there is nothing good on the telly. Over the last year or so, I’ve tried to take it up a notch and really practice my (other) craft. Of course to be a real writer you need to be published. This is a tricky thing. It takes time, money, contacts, and talent. Sadly I have none of those things. That’s where the site www.createspace.com comes in.

CreateSpace is a self publishing company. You can use the site to create your own music, movies, and books, and then sell them on www.amazon.com (you may have heard of them). Now I can only vouch for the book creation aspect, but that is pretty impressive. The tools are free; you need only to be able to provide your book in a PDF format. They give you a cover creation application, but you can also upload your own cover as a separate PDF file. For books they will provide you with your own ISBN as well as review your PDFs and let you know if they will actually print correctly. For actually printing size, they cover the basics pretty well, and let you have a choice of seven sizes. You can apparently do others, but they are not supported by the cover creator.

The actual printing process for me actually took a few tries to get right. This was mostly due to my own massive incompetence. However with the review process in place I didn’t waste any trees (or money) printing out books with one word per page or upside down covers. As you can see from the pictures, the end result is a book, just like you would find at your book store of choice.

Money wise you can expect to bring home about 40% of the price of your book (before taxes). Pretty fair I think for a free site. You are also welcome to just print your book out though the service without sharing it with the rest of the world.

So far my experience with the site has been great. My own book, Ancient Awakening, goes on sale in September. I think at that point I will have to give a part two of this review and let you know how that side of the experience goes. But for folks looking to get their work out there, www.createspace.com looks like a great place to start.