In case you haven’t heard, my debut novel is now available in paperback and on sale at Amazon. With the self-publishing community growing so feverishly, I thought I’d share the experience of printing my first book.
I released Train Wreck as an ebook in September of last year, and the question I got more than any was: “When will it be available in paperback?” I told people that it might happen someday, but at that point I was convinced that the money and time required for paperback self-publishing was outside of my budget.
While I was promoting the Kindle and Nook versions of the novel, I kept hearing good things about CreateSpace. CreateSpace uses a publishing method called on-demand printing, which means they don’t print a copy of Train Wreck until you order one on Amazon. Then when a purchase goes through, CreateSpace takes a cut for printing costs, Amazon takes a cut for vendor costs, and I get to keep the rest as royalties.
And the best part is that I paid NOTHING up front to get my book into the CreateSpace system. Don’t listen to self-published authors who try to tell you it takes thousands of dollars to print a book on your own.
I set out to create a paperback edition of Train Wreck when the calendar flipped to 2012, and now it’s just three weeks later, and my book is already on sale. Here’s a summary of the process:
Step 1 - I set up an account on createspace.com and created a new entry for my book with the same description and genre settings that I used for the Kindle edition.
Step 2 - I requested and received a free ISBN (this takes only a few seconds).
Step 3 – I took the final draft of my manuscript and converted it from a word processing document into a professional book layout PDF. This was the most time-consuming part of the process by far, but I really enjoyed having complete control over the look of every page and messing with stuff like line spacing, chapter headings and page numbering.
Step 4 - I downloaded a cover template from CreateSpace and used the cover image from the ebook edition of Train Wreck to start building the print cover. Having that graphic already available made things a lot easier for me, as I basically just had to add a spine and back cover to my design.
Step 5 - I set the list price for my book and submitted the cover and layout files. Then the CreateSpace folks did a quick human review (this took less than 48 hours) and my proof copy was en route to my doorstep.
Step 6 - I closely examined the proof copy (which CreateSpace does charge you for) and then submitted my final approval online. A couple days later, the paperback edition of Train Wreck appeared on Amazon and magically synced up with the Kindle version.
As I announced last week, Train Wreck has advanced to the quarterfinal round of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel contest.
