Thursday, June 24, 2010

An unexpected advantage of publishing with CreateSpace, and an unexpected disadvantage

CreateSpace is Amazon's own pay-to-publish company, recently merged with Amazon's BookSurge pay-to-publish company.

It's easy to use CreateSpace, their prices are reasonable, book quality is good, their books have guaranteed availability on, and they automatically get Amazon's "Look Inside The Book" preview feature, with no work done by the author/publisher and no additional expense.

There is an additional advantage, too. Since Amazon makes money printing CreateSpace books, Amazon can afford to give readers a bigger discount (i.e., sell for less money) than with books that Amazon buys from other suppliers, such as LightningSource.

Up above is my new Stories I'd Tell My Children (but maybe not until they're adults). It has a $15.95 cover price, and Amazon sells it for $14.35 -- a  common 10% discount.

Below it is my Stupid, Sloppy, Sleazy: The Strange Story of Vanity Publisher Outskirts Press. How Do They Stay in Business? It has a $10.95 cover price, and Amazon sells it for just $7.88 -- a huge 28% discount.

  • This is particularly good news for a $10.95 book. Amazon often does not discount inexpensive books and sometimes ADDS ON a "sourcing fee," selling the book for MORE THAN the cover price!
  • A more-affordable price usually means greater sales to readers, and authors and publishers receive the same revenue per book sold at a discount, as with books sold at full price.

A word of warning: CreateSpace is a tough nanny, extremely paranoid about potential copyright violation. They demanded that I show proof that I had permission to use every photograph in the book. I’ve never encountered this, or heard of this, with other publishers or printers. They delayed publication of the book and I had to delete and substitute some images. Maybe I should feel safer now -- less likely to be sued for copyright violation -- but I wasn't worried before.

1 comment:

  1. Good for Amazon. I think they did they right thing. I expect when my book is done to have a thorough and probably a bit agonizing ordeal getting permissions for the many images I plan to put in the book.