The Independent Publishing Magazine: CreateSpace Launch Self-Publishing Packages

Saturday 26 September 2009

CreateSpace Launch Self-Publishing Packages

It seems CreateSpace have decided to go down the same avenue of marketing their services as Lulu. Although CreateSpace offered many individual services to authors - their focus has shifted to the familiar self-publisher packages. While CreateSpace say the packages offer significant savings to authors when compared to their individual prices for each service - they are on the higher expense end when you compare them to their competitors. For example, their 'Total Design Freedom Essentials' has the following at $1658.

Total Design Freedom Essentials Includes

Basic Copyediting (1 Round)** – Let a professional editor review your manuscript and provide suggested corrections for grammar, spelling, punctuation, and consistency.
Unique Book Cover – Collaborate with our design team to create an eye-catching cover with a single image, plus cover text, fonts, and your author photo.
Custom Interior – We'll incorporate your ideas on typography, text layout, decorative accents and chapter style into a professional, custom-designed book interior.
ISBN assignment (if you don't have your own) and barcode placement.
Online distribution through sales channels you select, including Amazon.com and your own eStore.

A basic copy edit for the average book of 60 - 80 k words should hit the $500 - $600 tops mark, so that is a lot of bucks for what remains on offer, custom cover and interior and ISBN, and online distribution.

You can check out the full details of the packages here.

Comments

8 Comments

8 C O M M E N T S:

Christy Pinheiro, EA ABA said...: I ordered their media/publicity package for my book earler this year-- it was over $1,500.

And I doubt it was worth it, but we shall see-- my book was actually about publishing non-fiction with CreateSpace, so if the publicity package I purchased ends up being a waste o money, I'll update the manuscript to reflect that.

Most of the "publicty kit" was stuff I ended up writing myself and then CreateSpace used a canned template to create postcards, bookmarks, and businesscards, etc. Not exactly what I expected.; 27 September 2009 03:09
Coral Press said...: This comment has been removed by the author.; 27 September 2009 16:09
Coral Press said...: It seems there are so many options out there now for self-publishing. Did you see the article in the NYTimes about Steve Jordan? His website is here and he was featured in this article.; 27 September 2009 16:10
Mick Rooney said...: This comment has been removed by the author.; 27 September 2009 19:36
Mick Rooney said...: Coral Press

Yes, I did read the article and it makes for a fascinating read. Certainly we need one defined format for ebooks whatever mode readers choose to view the books on, and without it, the development of ebooks is going to remain a small percentage of sales. Despite the popularity of Amazon's Kindle with ebook buyers, I still believe the epub format holds the lead.; 27 September 2009 19:36
JFBookman said...: I think Amazon's also shooting themselves in the foot by making the Kindle conversion somewhat onerous. A current client, printing through Book Surge, had to pony up over $200 to get his novel converted. Odd.; 28 September 2009 02:50
Anonymous said...: CreateSpace/Amazon YUK !
Visualize a bar-room hump between a Vanity Publisher and a Monopoly wanna be.

First, they demand your personal info so they can flog you with promotion via e-mail just to get " in the door" to view thier
products and prices.

Second, their sites and products are a poor and obvious copy of Outskirts, without any straight forward functionality.

Third thier website is so graphic intensive that if you are on dial-up ISP like 40% of USA.. and many other parts of the world.. you can't down load a page in less than a half hour.

29 items remaining my arse.

It is all so distasteful, I have to pass before I even learn what they are selling. It's not cheap I got that much out of thier spooge.

L. in California; 24 November 2009 20:35
Mick Rooney said...: L. From California,

I hope you didn't get out of bed on the wrong side this morning!

I do agree the publishing packages are not necessarily a good sign, and I hope CreateSpace don't start moving more in the direction of Lulu.

They remain a better option for many authors who have the ability to put together a completed PDF book file and are happy with online distribution on Createspace's site and Amazon.

Unless, of course, you know of an even better author solutions service?; 24 November 2009 20:52