The Ease of Createspace

Books go out of print.

It's one of the horrible truths of the publishing industry. That novel you spent years on, that was the epicentre of your blood, sweat and spiritual tears was released into the world. It was available. Then gradually (or far too quickly) it went out of print. And it's gone. Poof! All you hear about are occasional sightings in second-hand stores.

Cue the horror scream. 

This is, of course, the digital age. And one of the great gifts of this age is that old, out-of-print books can be resurrected in digital form (and sold into markets you didn't have access to before). It is relatively easy to put the ebooks out there with services like Draft2Digital and Reedsy. And, of course, it's also easy to put the paper versions of your books back on the shelves.

There are several options including Ingram Spark & Createspace. I have only used Createspace, so far. And it took me less than two hours to publish a paperback.

Yep, a book made of paper on the presses and ready to be printed in less than two hours. I had tested Createspace two years ago with Megiddo's Shadow, and found it just a little too labour intensive in terms of setting up your manuscript.

Recently I decided to revamp my back list and added both Dust and Tribes to Createspace. These books have been out of print in the US and UK for several years (but available as ebooks). There are two advantages to putting them up as "real" books. One: I might sell a few copies. Two: when people look at the books on Amazon, the ebook looks like a great bargain compared to the paperback, so people might buy more copies of the ebook.

This is what you need to publish on Createspace. A clean copy of the novel and a cover. Thankfully, I had both already. I took a Microsoft Word copy and imported it into Reedsy's online word processing program. It's a clever free online tool that will export your books into handy ePubs or Mobi files (for digital books) but also PDF's for printing on Createspace (or other publishing systems). The only time consuming part is that you have to copy and paste a chapter at a time (you can't import the full book, yet--apparently that option is coming soon). But this saves so much time in formatting. I just had to hit SAVE to get a PDF that was perfect for Createspace.

I already had excellent covers created by the one and only Christopher Steininger. So I uploaded the cover and the PDF to Createspace. And, with another hour of noodling around using their cover creator tool, was able to put it all into place (You can, of course, click the covers below and see for yourself).

The whole experience was relatively painless. In fact I intend to revamp Megiddo's Shadow now that I understand the system better and add several other books. The cost to me was 0$ (other than having to pay for my own copies, of course, which the author gets at a discount).

All in all a relatively easy experience.

Art

P.S. I do have a contest to win signed copies of each book. Just enter here. Hurry now. It ends soon. Etc., : )