hello! I’m nearly done with my first ever novel, and I’m interested in self publishing it. I know createspace is a popular platform to use (I’ve already dinked around with it), but they don’t offer ebook. I saw amazing has another company called KDP that does both, but doesn’t have the distribution and the quality of work of the paperbacks are not good. Any idea how to publish both paperbacks and ebooks as seemlessly as possible? Thanks!
One thing to consider is going with a small printing operation for your paperbacks. I was briefly part of a small, start-up publishing company. It was very niche and we only had a few authors we wanted to take on. We looked into many different options, including createspace and others that seem popular. However, we got such a better deal going through the printers. Plus, the printers sent us sample books so we could see page colors and weight, fonts and print size, and that sort of thing. We had to call up bookstores ourselves, but quite a few started carrying our stuff. The books came out so professional looking. We didn't have an ebook component, but I imagine it wouldn't be all that difficult to go through a separate venue for that. Check the rates at printers around you. You might find a better deal, and if you find one you would like to work with, maybe they also handle ebooks or could probably give you a recommendation or a few that you might not have been aware of otherwise.
Excellent! Thank you for the response. When I think of traditionally publishing, I typically think of the big ones and the fact I’d need an agent to secure any publishing deal. I never thought about a small publisher.
Createspace and KDP are both parts of Amazon. Createspace lets you upload a book .PDF and will also create an Amazon ebook from it if you want, while KDP lets you upload ebooks to Amazon and now supports print-on-demand paperbacks, too (probably by sending them to Createspace). I use KDP and Smashwords for ebooks, and Createspace for paperbacks, but I'm thinking of switching to KDP paperbacks for Amazon and Ingram for distribution everywhere else. Ingram also support hardbacks, which Createspace don't.
That is interesting! If I went with KDP for ebooks, and createspace for print on demand, would I need two ISBNs?
Amazon ebooks don't need an ISBN, though you can supply one. About all it does is let you search for the book by ISBN in the store. Createspace will give you a free ISBN, but it links your book to Createspace, and some book stores won't order Createspace books. But most bookstores won't order self-published books unless a customer asks for them, so it's not really a big deal.
Print book on createspace. Its fairly simple as they have a template. Then do your eBook separately on Amazon. I wouldn't recommend using kdp for print as they're still having quite a few issues apparently. Once both books are uploaded they'll link together on the books sales page.
What @rincewind31 said. I and @K McIntyre have published four books via CreateSpace linked to KDP and it is just about flawless. Going from double-spaced ragged right manuscript to properly laid out paperback interior ready to upload takes just a few hours using CS templates. You simply select the template for your book size (we have used 5x8 for three and one 6x9 for my big 550 pager), select all your text, copy and paste into the text section. The rest of the time is spent getting the front end of the book done, and headers/footers/unique chapter page layouts done, your personal preferences. Then upload the cover, do some admin stuff (pricing, channels) and publish, job done. It then asks if you want to publish on Kindle, and generates for you a Kindle interior (looks identical to the paperback interior, in MS Word) and a Kindle cover from your paperback cover front page, and you go into KDP and finish the administrative job. Nothing to do with the Kindle interior, the upload takes a while but when KDP is finished with the text, the headers and footers are gone, the margins are equally spaced narrow margins, nothing for you to do but approve and go to the next step. There is a lag from paperback completion of about 24 hours due to CS approval, and we always order a paper proof copy to verify that it looks like we thought it would on the screen (they don't always!) then you can generate the KDP. It is fast, painless, and CS has telephone tech support that KDP does not - their tech support is by email only, 24 hour turnaround time, and they often don't understand the problem on the first query. We did Karen's new book Ruby this weekend. We uploaded final cover to CS on Friday @ noon, received CS approval on Saturday @10AM, our own final approval and finnagling of cost and channels, launched @ noon. Moved into KDP, published e-book about 1pm, Both versions showed up on Amazon at 2pm, listed as unavailable. Both went available @5pm. Sold 5 Kindles and 3 paperbacks that evening. KDP advertises their paperback conversion as beta version only, and due to lack of KDP tech support noted above, I don't recommend going the opposite direction, from KDP e-book to paperback... perhaps others have done so and they can comment on the results Good luck!
I know this thread is a little old now, but it's still relevant. I've just published with KDP as eBook and paperback, but did not select KDP Select as quite a lot of people advised me against it. I'm curious about other outlets for eBooks such as Smashwords and Draft2Digital. From what I can gather, an eBook doesn't need an ISBN and mine doesn't have one at KDP. Is it advisable to acquire one? I've also read that whatever price I choose anywhere else should not undercut the Amazon KDP price, so if the price is $5, it has to be that, across the board. I'm a bit confused about publishing elsewhere really. I mean, if it's published at KDP without an ISBN, why publish at Smashwords with an ISBN? Surely it doesn't become two separate books? Have many members here published at Smashwords and other places to maximise their exposure, as it were?
both of those are aggregators not outlets ... apart from amazon the main ebook outlets for a wide author (ie those not in KDP select) are kobo, apple books (ibooks as was), Barnes and Noble (Nook), and Googleplay .. there are also lots of more minor ones like scribd, 24 symbols and dang dang. I would go direct with amazon and kobo in order to access their ads/promos and use an aggregator like D2d or publish drive to access the rest (aggregators take about 10% of the sales you make through them) For print you can use ingram spark for extended distribution which gets you in to the book catalogues so your books can be bought from book shops. ISBN wise you don't need them for ebooks - you need them for print and if you have your own it can be the same on both kdp print and IS, if you used the KDP one you need to buy your own for spark.... I don't know who the argentine distributor is - in the UK its Nielsen, and Bowker in the US Price wise - if you price lower than amazon they tend to price match
Karen and I had a terrible experience with Ingram Spark over the past several months. We were required to have our books on IS at 55% discount with return, to have them available at a B&N bookstore at the Historical Novel Society in June for book signing. I succeeded with E&D, Karen has been in an endless loop with IS and did not succeed (at the last minute, the bookstore allowed consignments, so she got in anyway) Some lessons learned: Extended Distro on KDP does not get you into the catalogue for IS. Just exactly what it gives is not clear. If you want your book in IS to be available to indie bookstores and B&N you must transfer your paperback from KDP to IS. 1. If you got a free Amazon ISBN, you can't transfer that book. You must purchase an ISBN, from Bowker or IS, publish a second edition under that ISBN and transfer that one. I had originally purchased an ISBN for E&D in 2017, so that transfer went fairly smoothly. I started on April 26, and it finally showed up in IS on 1 June. Interestingly, I am still selling paperbacks through KDP, showing up on sales dashboard. Haven't asked why. Haven't seen any sales on IS, though I sold several at the HNS conference 2. We purcha$ed 10 ISBNs for my other book and Karen's two, plus some others up and coming. We republished her second book as second edition and there began an endless loop of conflicting directions for IS: Turn Extended distro on, turn it off, oh what the hey, when the title shows up on IS just upload your cover and interior (they will now, so they say, take standard .PDF from Word export). I have well over a hundred e-mails between us and IS tech support, including some scathing critiques. In short, we found the whole experience of dealing with IS to be as pleasant as sliding down a mile-long razor blade into a vat of alcohol. Conflicting or incomplete directions, for a process of transferring a book that should just be listed step by step on their web site. On the plus side, the quality of the E&D transfer product was good, but not significantly different from KDP. The one plus is the ability to get the book into book stores, but it remains to be seen if I see any significant difference in sales.
its not entirely true that you have to transfer the book - you can have it on both so long as you don't have extended distro selected on kdp (a good reason to have both is that amazon sometimes shows books only supplied by IS as 'out of stock')
I initially attempted to simply manually transfer my book to IS (back in April) but the IS Setup would not accept the ISBN, saying "ISBN was in use." IS said I had to transfer it by requesting KDP to transfer it, by turning extended distro OFF which I eventually did, (took them three weeks to tell me to do this), got an e-mail from KDP that it had been transferred, and they did all the setup for me. They said that it could not be resident on both, but apparently that is not true. Did not work on Karen's book. We set up second edition with ED off, they said it had to be turned on, waited several weeks, then IS said oh, no, it has to be off for the transfer to take place. A few more weeks they said it had to be turned on again, then off again. Depended on which tech support person you got. Hence the reason Karen's book did not make the deadline
The reason ive not encountered that was because i used the KDP ISBN on KDP print but a new ISBN on IS... with different ISBNs there was no problem at all with just setting the book up from scratch on IS
