Self-publish your Book with Amazon

Why self-publish with Amazon?

Self-publish your Book with Amazon: CreateSpace is a member of Amazon group of companies and provides the fastest easiest and most economical way of publishing your books without the hassle of signing up with a publisher. With the highest royalties rates in the industry and the lowest book production cost on the market.

What are the benefits?

Amazon is the biggest online retailer. Self publishing with Amazon’s CreateSpace will get your book published and listed on Amazon.com and the Amazon partner channels faster than through any other self publishing company.
CreateSpace offers one of the best economic models for self publishers in the industry. Compare CreateSpace with other online self publishing companies and you will find that in most cases you’ll earn more on your online retail sales and pay less when you order copies for yourself.

No Upfront Investment

When you publish with CreateSpace you don’t have to make an upfront investment for a number of copies because books are printed as customer orders come in. In this way your books will never be out of stock or in overstock.

Amazon Discounts

Sometimes Amazon offers discounts, these discount rates are solely borne by Amazon while your royalties remain the same. You can expect a lot of orders to come in as your book is listed with so many distribution channels.

Worry-Free Sales

When you self publish with Amazon’s CreateSpace the complete process of publishing, printing and managing sales is done by Amazon. This gives you a lot of time to focus on marketing your book.

Supersaver Shipping & Look Inside

Your book being on Amazon automatically becomes eligible for supersaver shipping and look inside feature. This is an added bonus for the authors apart from other factors which make Amazon the best choice your new best selling title.
Free ISBN CreateSpace will assign you a free ISBN if you don’t already have one. Or you may purchase your own ISBN and publish your book under any name you want.

Higher Royalties

The royalties you get directly depend upon sales channel generating sales. If your book was purchased through the CreateSpace eStore, CreateSpace gets 20% of the listed price on Amazon 40% and on EDC 60%.

EDC (Expanded Distribution Chanel)

Apart from you book being sold on Amazon and the eStore you can get your book listed on EDC. This option would make your book available to hundreds of sales channels across the world. The profit
percentage you get on the EDC sales might be lower than other channels but the idea of getting your book listed with international sellers like B&N, Abebooks, book a million etc has the potential for a huge number of sales.

Non-exclusive Agreement

You might be thinking what if my book hits all time best sellers and I want to actually sign up with another publisher? CreateSpace does not bind you to any such agreement and allows you to take advantage of any promotional or third party publishing efforts.

There are examples like CreateSpace author Jill Keto, she wrote a book for women about financial survival amidst the global economic crisis. Her self-published title was a great success. She had great reviews on Amazon.com so she signed up a mainstream publishing contract with Simon and Schuster.

What are the requirements?

You must be wondering about the requirements you have to fulfill in order to publish with Amazon’s CreateSpace. These requirements are pretty simple and include two key requirements:

Content Guidelines and Copyright

Just like any other publisher, CreateSpace will not publish any copied content. You must adhere to the standard copyright practices. You are not allowed to copy someone’s work or to use any copyright images and so on. If you don’t know much about copyrighting and are yet to obtain one, you may visit the United States Copyright
Office at http://www.copyright.gov, or research online.

Submission requirements

In order to self publish your book with Amazon you have to follow the submission requirements. The most important requirements are listed below. You can also find the list with all of the submission requirements on the CreateSpace website.

Fonts must be embedded in the PDF version of the file you submit; all books are printed on as-it-is basis, meaning the book is printed exactly in the order the way you submit it.
Embedded images must be 300 DPI.
Trim Sizes and Maximum Page Counts must be according to CreateSpace requirements.
Minimum requirement is 24 pages.
Margins may include inside or outside type of margins.
Inside margins are according to the books binding guidelines. See the chart
Outside margins are the page edges opposite of the binding, and the top and bottom margins. All of the included text and images must confirm to the outside margin of .25” at the least but CreateSpace recommends an outside margin of .5”
Bleed : If you want the images to extend to the corners of your book, make sure that they extend at least .125” to the trim size from all sides (bottom, top, all edges) then you must submit your PDF .25” higher and .125” wider than the base trim size you selected.
Any images may be tagged with your choice of Grayscale,CMYK or RGB profiles or left untagged in a generic color space. All images should be sized at 100%, flattened to one layer and placed in your native document at a resolution of300 DPI.
Embed all fonts and images in your PDF file.

The requirements will not say much at this time, if you never published a book before but don’t worry because I will explain each of them in detail in the coming articles.

How much does cost?

Self publishing with CreateSpace is completely free; the only thing you have to pay for is the first copy and its shipping cost. However you can upgrade to Pro-Plan which costs 39$ onetime fee and a 5$ renewal fee every year for each book. If you have ten books you’ll have to pay 50$ for renewals. If you sign up for the Pro-Plan, you get the EDC option and your royalties are significantly increased.

1 Comment

Isabel Vandervelde

02.14.2012

I had another self-publishing company and got really tired of their ineptitude, so I switched to create.space, and I like them very, very much. Fast work, prompt answers, a blog to look at, and all very very good.

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