I’m a big fan of Createspace publishing (over other choices like Lulu or IngramSpark). They make it easy, and cheap. But the design capabilities aren’t great.
You’d think for all their billions of dollars they could make a decent book cover creator or interior formatting tool. But they haven’t. Instead they make money on book design and formatting. And they are OK, but not great.
A few years ago I compared my level of cover design to their highest level – a level they stopped offering because book design is hard work and they didn’t have good enough quality design to justify their high prices.
The main problem with formatting through Createspace is that they aren’t working with your cover designer; if left unguided, they will just choose random fonts that probably don’t look too bad, but also don’t match your cover design, leading to a very rough and fragmented reader experience.
They will use the fonts you tell them to use; but you have to know what they are (check out the resources on this site to find best fonts per genre).
However once they are done, they are going to charge extra ($99 I think) for design changes, on top of what you paid… which right now is $199 for simple, templated book formatting, and $349 for something more professional.
If you want to save a few hundred bucks, download my free package of templates, pick out a font that matches your genre (and book cover!) and do it yourself. Or, if you’re finding it too hard to fix everything and make it look perfect, you can hire someone on fiverr.com to do it for under $50.
1 Comment
caroline wilson
November 12, 2016Dear Sir
I’ve tried to put my book onto create space but its beyond me. I’ve published and sold it before successfully but wanted to do it via amazon and not have to distribute it myself. Would you be able to charge me a fixed fee to set it up on there – I’m nearly there but the DPI of the pictures and layout of cover has me stumped. The book is in word format.
Best wishes
Caroline
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