Total Design Freedom Essentials Includes
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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
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?