Purchasing Design Products from CreateSpace - A Review

The author of the former self-publishing blog The Publishing Maven, Christy Pinheiro, once pointed out to me my best selling books had professionally done covers. She was also kind enough to steer me to a product authors can use to create reasonably nice covers themselves, BookCoverPro. I have released a series of short books that cover a single topic that are inexpensive and also serve to promote a larger and more profitable book covering the broad range of the single topic of the "short." I have used BookCoverPro to do these covers and the software has proven to be more than adequate for these specific books.

However, my latest effort, which should be available from Amazon no later than the second week of April, has the potential to be a really good seller! (proud author, can you tell?) I write mainly non-fiction for basketball coaches. The soon to be available from Amazon book is Fine Tuning Your Three-Point Attack. The fine people at ebook Architects are at work as I type converting my files for Kindle and Nook editions of the book.

Given the potential for sales, I wanted this book to have a good cover that was professionally done. Given my limited finances (due to my air conditioning unit dying and having to be replaced) I opted to purchase the $349 Unique Book Cover option offered by CreateSpace. 

While taste is in the eyes of the beholder, I really like the finished cover as shown below. It is far better than anything I could have come up with on my own using BookCoverPro.

The process starts by going to the Layout and Design Page on the CreateSpace website.  Click on the Unique Book Cover tab.

If you have questions I suggest you call the people at CreateSpace. They have always been helpful, and if the individual who answers the phone does not know the answer, they will find out while you wait. You can e-mail your question but I suggest call using the Talk to Us feature. You enter your phone number and click on You Call Me and the phone rings within seconds.

Once you decide to purchase a cover, you must call and request the cover option be placed in your Cart so you can make the purchase. You will be assigned a design team with a project manager.  You will need to check your Member Dashboard for an Attention Required notice for the book the cover is being designed for.

You will be asked to fill out a detailed survey as CreateSpace likes to call it. You will be given options to upload a variety of items such as an author photo, cover design, etc. I uploaded a file with images of covers I liked and disliked with explanations of why with each cover. 

After a few days you will receive a phone call from the leader of your cover design team. You will be asked to provide input in what you want in the cover design. In about five days you will receive notification that two cover designs are ready for you to choose from.

Once you have made your choice and there are no changes to be made, you will receive an electronic form through your Member Dashboard requesting you provide the copy for the back and any other suggestions or requirements for the back cover design that you might have.

After another five working days, you will receive the final design for the cover complete with front, back and spine. Once approved, CreateSpace will load it for you on your books set-up page.

The process was pretty easy and I am quite happy with the final cover design. While the readers of this blog might not like the design, it captured the elements I believed to be essential. There is a sense of movement in the cover as well as a sense of urgency. The design is simple yet lets the potential buyer know what the book is about. 

The cover is for an 8.5 x 11 book that is 204 pages in length. The price is the same regardless of the size of the trim of the book the cover is being created for.

I have purchased a second Unique Book Cover for another book in my Fine Tuning Series. As part of my requests for my design I asked for a similar style of design to indicate the book is part of a series yet I want the cover to have a stand alone feel to it as well. It will be interesting to see what the designers at CreateSpace come up with.

When I get my second Unique Book Cover, I will share the results and allow the readers of this blog to have a side-by-side comparison of the covers.

This service and the designs CreateSpace comes up with might not be for everyone, but I am happy with the cover design I received for the amount of money I was able to afford to invest.

Cover Design, CreateSpace and crowdSpring

I have several manuscripts that are nearing the completion stage. It will be a couple of months before each is ready to be uploaded in its final form to CreateSpace for publication and sale via Amazon. It is time to start thinking about cover design for each book a well as the specific title.

It is much more important to me for the cover design for these projects to be significantly better than the cover design of most of my books. Many of my books are not intended to be sold to the public at large via Amazon. These books are given away at clinics and presentations and are part of the price of tuition to attend. They are for sale on Amazon simply because a few extra sales here and there never hurts.

Having said that, these next projects need to have excellent cover designs because they are specifically intended to be sold on Amazon. When it comes to visual creativity and design, I have no hint of talent.

Planning ahead is always a positive activity, especially if it involves money. A quick search of the CreateSpace website to re-read the information about the cover design services offered by CreateSpace as well as the prices led me to discover a new service offered by CreateSpace, if you want to call it a new service.

Evidently CreateSpace has reached an agreement of sorts with a company called crowdSPRING. crowdSPRING is a brokering service for creative people, matching people who need creative work done with people who make their living being creative.

crowdSPRING makes the following claims on its website:

• 110 entries per project, on average
• 100% satisfaction guaranteed on every single project
• 96% of buyers would recommend crowdSPRING
• 80,882 designers and writers ready to create for your project
• 97% of customer questions are answered within an hour

crowdSPRING describes the process as simple. The author names a price for a cover design and provides information about the book. Designers who belong to the crowdSPRING network submit sample covers. The author picks the design that best suits the book. 

I like the idea of competition. Paying for one company to provide you with something is not going to produce a lot of choices. Putting the cover design up to bid in an open contest environment will generate a wide selection of choices.

Further investigation of this company is warranted and I plan to look into using their services for at least one of my upcoming books. As I learn more I will be sure to share what I learn with the readers of this blog.

To Use An Author Services Company Or Not?

The following is an excerpt from 301 Frequently Asked Questions About Self-Publishing.

42. What is an author services company?

An author services company is a business that accepts payment from an author to help the author publish a book. Author services companies are also known as self-publishing companies, a misnomer, or sometimes as a vanity press, a derogatory term for self-publishing.

The services offered by an author services company include editing, proofreading, interior design, cover design, and typesetting. Marketing services are also a common offering now as well. Some author services, for a fee, will also apply for a copyright for the author and obtain a Library of Congress Number as well, all services an author can do without the help of an author services company, thereby avoiding extra fees for services rendered.

43. Are there advantages to using an author services company?

For a first time author, an author services company can offer several advantages, if the author takes the time to find a reputable, quality author services company. These advantages include providing editing, interior design, cover design services for a fee instead of the author having to search for and contract with freelancers to provide these same services.

44. Are there disadvantages to using an author services company?

The two biggest disadvantages are cost and the time involved in getting a book to press. The charge for the services involved may be higher than if an author hired freelancers to do the work and the cost per copy could be inflated as many author services companies sell copies to the author at an inflated price per copy.

Author services companies have many clients and work on a first-come, first-serve basis. Author services companies usually want to produce work in a reasonably timely manner, but due to the number of titles the company is working on at a given time, this is often not possible. Author services companies (and vanity presses) commonly tack on a surcharge per copy sold, decreasing the amount of profit per copy of the author.

45. How can I determine if a self-publishing author services company is reputable or not?

It takes careful research to find a reputable author services company. There are several steps an author can take to determine if a company is reputable. A good starting point is Mark Levine’s book The Fine Print of Self-Publishing. This book does not review a wide range of author services companies, but provides a considerable amount of information about contracts and the obligations of all parties involved in the contracts.
The Better Business Bureau has records and ratings for many author services companies. This information is all available via the internet and the information included in the ratings can be telling about a company.
 

Word-of-mouth recommendations, or reviews, are also an excellent source of information but be sure to obtain more than one review or opinion about a company. Post a request for opinions on a message board site for self-publishers and considerable feedback will be made available by the members of the group using the message board. Don’t rely on the customer references provided by the company. These may be perfectly legitimate but companies with a bad reputation want to control the feedback given about the company and the quality of its service and work and will select the few authors who are happy with the company’s services to act as references.

 

CreateSpace and Kindle Conversion Update - Part II

Several weeks ago I received my converted file from CreateSpace for upload to Amazon's DTP to sell this particular book in a Kindle conversion, for which I paid the grand sum of $69. All went well and the Kindle version has sold some copies, though I have yet to recoup my $69 though I am sure I will in a fairly short time frame.

I have both horrible news and good news to report. Just to test things out and see how the reporting of sales works, I purchased the first copy of my book in Kindle format, downloaded it onto my Mac laptop, opened up my Kindle reader software, selected my book and began "flipping" the pages. Everything looked great! Then to my horror, the Kindle app simply shut down and I received one of those annoying error messages asking me to send an e-mail to Apple.

Knowing the poison pen is often poised in the hands of Kindle book readers and not wanting the book destroyed before it could even get started as a Kindle book, I fired off an e-mail to CreateSpace informing them of my horror, dismay and concern.

The good news is CreateSpace promptly CALLED me by phone and the individual "assigned" to resolve the problem gave me her name (can you imagine that!) so I could stay in contact with her. She informed me CreateSpace was horrified as well! The next day she informed me they could not crash a Kindle reader with my book and I told them what page it crashed on and that it crashed on the Mac app. A short time later another call - she had crashed the Mac app! Turns out the problem is with the software for the Mac. Now really concerned.

This morning I received an e-mail informing me I would be sent a reformatted file to replace the other file on the DTP. My Kindle programmer had found the glitch in the software and while she could not fix the app, she had figured out how to make my book read just fine on every Kindle app.

Am I happy this happened? No! Am I pleased with the response to my problem? An unqualified yes! CreateSpace resolved my issue to my satisfaction and showed initiative in doing so. My Kindle programmer kept me up to speed on what was going on and resolved the problem in a reasonable period of time. 

Will I use the CreateSpace Kindle conversion service again? Probably, particularly the  more I read how you prepare a file for upload to the DTP. I just keep getting more and more confused the more I read and have almost come to the conclusion $69 is cheap compared to the time it would take me to learn how to do it correctly myself.

Amazon's CreateSpace adds author services!

When I entered the field of self-publishing, I used the services of a self-publishing company to publish my book Game Strategy and Tactics for Basketball. I self-published an additional thirteen books doing all the work of creating the book myself and then publishing them with CreateSpace.

Most of the books I published using this method were not really meant to be sold directly to customers, either via my website or Amazon.com, but rather were meant to be items that I gave away as part of the price of admission at coaching clinics I speak at. Given the purposed for which they were published, POD and CreateSpace were perfect.

I also self-published a book about using CreateSpace and to my surprise, Self-publishing with Amazon's CreateSpace: A Resource Guide for the Author Considering Self-publishing, has sold a reasonable number of copies.

Since the publication of Self-publishing with Amazon's CreateSpace, Amazon has added author services to the services provided by CreateSpace. The services offered range from a variety of levels of editing, book layout and design and marketing services. The prices were in line with the first self-publishing company I used and in some instances were slightly lower.

Within the author services CreateSpace offers there are different levels of service provided with corresponding levels of pricing. CreateSpace also offers a variety of packages of services bundled together with discounts in pricing if the author purchases the services as a package rather than separately.

While I have not used any of these services yet, my next book is nearly finished. This book is intended to be sold on Amazon.com and I want it to look as professional as my first book, Game Strategy and Tactics for Basketball. I have been so pleased with my experience with CreateSpace in the past that I intend to use some of the author services now offered to publish my next book. Once it is in print, I will discuss my experiences using these new author services.

If you are interested in learning about using CreateSpace or my experiences as a self-published author who used CreateSpace to publish, you may want to take a look at my book Self-publishing with Amazon's CreateSpace: A Resource Guide for the Author Considering Self-publishing.