At first glance, CreateSpace has a lot of similarities to Lulu: it’s pretty user friendly, the author uploads his/her own files, and so on. They don’t offer extra services like Lulu does, however: if you need those (file formatting, etc.) they direct you to Amazon’s BookSurge. Why? Because CreateSpace is an Amazon company, as well! In fact, they share the same printer facilities.
So, what does CreateSpace do for you? In short, if you go through them you can – theoretically – get your book onto Amazon at a lower price point than you probably could otherwise. Let’s take a look:
CreateSpace has two plans, basic (no up front fee) and Pro, which is currently $39. If you’re at all serious about marketing your book, for heaven’s sake pay the fee and go Pro! For one thing, if you’re being smart about your publishing efforts you’re doing it as a business entity so you can write the costs off on your taxes. For another, you don’t have to sell tons of copies to recoup that cost. But the difference it makes in the royalty you earn is huge.
Using the same price model for my book – 678 pages at a retail price of $21.95 – that we used for the Lulu marketplace example, under the standard CreateSpace plan (free) I’d make $2.50 on a CreateSpace “E-store” sale, but couldn’t put it on Amazon (I’d lose $1.89!). [Note: If you've got MS Excel, they've got a nifty little price calculator.]
But with the pro plan, my royalties shoot up to $7.90 for the E-store and $3.51 on Amazon. Do the math, my friends, and spend the $39 up front if you’re going to use CreateSpace!
The other positive angle of CreateSpace is that if you want to buy books yourself to sell on your web site, give away for reviews, etc., the cost under the pro plan is a lot less: for my book, the price I’d pay under the pro plan would be $9.66, and under the “free” standard plan would be $15.06 (compared to $18.09 at Lulu).
As for the ISBN, you can use your own or they’ll assign one – for free. That’s a nice touch, but PLEASE READ the fine print in their FAQ:
A: Yes. Please note, however, that if CreateSpace assigns an ISBN to your book, this ISBN belongs to CreateSpace and may not be used to publish your book with another publisher.
You may or may not care about this, but it’s something to keep in mind.
Finally, all books published through CreateSpace are eligible for Amazon’s “Search Inside The Book” program, which is nice (but not exclusive to CreateSpace, so don’t let that sway you).
Now, the major downside is that CreateSpace follows the same distribution model as BookSurge: your book will find its way to a number of on-line stores (the various Amazon stores, Target, and some others), but won’t appear in Barnes & Noble. The main distribution channel is Baker & Taylor (which typically – but not exclusively – distributes to libraries and educational institutions), but not Ingram, which is where most bookstores get their books from.
So, the bottom line for CreateSpace to me is that it’s a viable alternative to get your book onto Amazon without bleeding to death from overhead costs to your publisher, or paying the higher fees necessary to get into Lightning Source (which we’ll get to later). But you’ll need to decide if you want them to control your ISBN, or just spring for the extra $125 and buy one direct from Bowker.
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Tags: Baker & Taylor, BookSurge, Bowker, CreateSpace, Ingram, ISBN, Lulu, Print On Demand
Thank you for the review. I recently had a couple of books published through CreateSpace and I thought the whole experience was very good.
That is a good point about the royalties. It is better to just pay the extra amount for the greater share of the sale otherwise you could end up with nothing.
Thanks again.
BookSurge has now been merged into Create Space and a few authors are going through the trauma of no longer having the support services they had before. Although it appears that CS has begun to add services for a fee, that should help bring the BookSurge crowd along. The Create Space experience for me has been a good one. It only took me two months from the time I decided to self-publish to the time I received my first proof. I received prompt email replies from CS customer service. The CS Community Forum is one of the most helpful forums I’ve ever been associated with and will tirelessly answer the same questions over and over (but please read all the FAQs and Guides first!). And finally, the CS experience of having to learn how to convert my book interior and cover from Word and Photoshop to the CS standards has been good preparation for the next step, LSI.
It’s also worth noting that cs now has what they call their Expanded Distribution Channel (EDC) as an option for pro-plan publications, which are then listed through Ingram and seemingly printed by LSI. The main reason I previously considered LSI was the ability to get books listed through Ingram and thus available through places like bookdepository – but with a whole lot of cs stuff now available at bookdepository there are now a whole lot less reasons for me to consider LSI over cs. There are of course a whole lot of things that LSI can do for you that cs can’t – returnable sales as an option, for starters – but they’re not important to me just yet.
Mark – quite true! However, the biggest advantage (depending on one’s individual needs and priorities) that LSI still retains is your ability to set the discount rate. While CS can now distribute books through Ingram, they’ve added yet another cost element to the pricing of the books using the EDC. So you either have to raise the price of your book to retain the same royalty, reduce your royalty amount, or both. With LSI, while it’s more expensive up front, you can set the discount rate to whatever you want, down to 25%. Considering that very, very few brick and mortar stores will carry self-published titles – not least because it’s difficult to offer a full (up to 55%) discount rate and still have a book’s price be at all competitive – this can be a big consideration. Again, it just depends on what you need: LSI is certainly not for everyone!