Time to break out of that cocoon. Been in a funk. Been distracted. Been elsewhere. Been on twitter, but have thoughts sometimes that exceed 140 characters.
Compiled a poetry book to give CreateSpace a look-see. Been curious about print-on-demand for a while now. For a long while; years ago when the first outfits were popping up. XLibris is one of the earliest ones I can remember, because Piers Anthony was an investor and he used it to get some of his older books back in print. But he’s Piers Anthony, so I’m not at all likely to read them anyway.
CreateSpace seemed to offer a great package: for no money at all you can set up a book, get an ISBN, perfect-binding, full-color cover, the works. It doesn’t get any better than that! Other joints have set-up fees or ISBN fees or whatever. With CreateSpace you upload your print-ready files and you’re ready to rock with $0 investment.
This assumes, of course, that you are capable of producing print-ready files. I used QuarkXPress 8 to do my poetry book, and they provide templates to use for designing the cover, which I did in Photoshop. Apple’s Pages is capable of some pretty heavy-duty layout tasks, too, and it could have worked. Really, Quark was the fastest and easiest tool for the job. I was amazed how intuitive the workflow was, and how useful my wife’s InDesign books were in filling in the gaps.
My only complaint is that when ordering a proof copy they charge you a ridiculous shipping fee. And if you make any corrections, that requires another proof order and another ridiculous fee. Once the book gets populated in the Amazon store, though, it’s eligible for their shipping programs like Super Saver or Prime. Unfortunately they take a larger commission when they sell your book through Amazon versus when they sell your book through the ugly CreateSpace e-store.
The proof copies I got were a little munched up, and I’m still waiting for the “real” copies I ordered to show up. Hopefully they won’t be as beat up.