I have been locked in battle with computer stuff, and the machines have been winning. Several people recommended CreateSpace as a way to get books onto Amazon and it was only my natural indolence that made it take this long.
Damn, but CreateSpace is fussy! Their program found a problem. I fixed it. They found another...
Anyway, I now have three books in the process. When they eventually reach availability I'll put up links and change those I currently have elsewhere to the Lulu.com print copies. Then I'll remove the print copies from Lulu because they price in UK pounds and Amazon bases everything on dollars, so having both will cause confusion.
Lulu do a good job, I have to be honest here. There are only two problems. First, their postage charges are far too high. If you buy one book you could end up paying more for postage than for the book. If I buy a batch of ten for signed copies it's not so bad but buying one, well the postage is insane.
Second, Lulu.com is well known among writers but people who want a book to read have never heard of it. Their first port of call is Amazon. The same goes for Smashwords - full of writers but few readers. With Smashwords, it's the distribution to the likes of Kobo, Sony, Apple etc that is of interest. Direct sales on Smashwords are tiny.
Getting onto Amazon for free means fighting the CreateSpace interface. I think I won but I won't know for sure until the books get through the system. For the moment the machines have the upper hand.
Getting decent distribution means forking out a little money, but not very much. I'll look at that once I have the books in the listings.
Between this and the tax form, expect little activity here for the next week or so.
5 comments:
I don't quite understand why you're having such problems. I found it really easy publishing something on Amazon kindle.
So will your new blockbuster 'The Tax Form' be available on Lulu or Amazon?
Bloody thing wasted us all Wednesday afternoon because if you make the explanatory text too long (and there is no warning what's too long) in the text box the form refuses to save and update giving a misleading error that someone else is using the form!
"Bloody thing" - meaning the online tax form
Kindle was a doddle. CreateSpace gets the print version onto Amazon and it has different specs to Lulu.
My mistake was to start with the Romulus Crowe book. It has photos inside and they were all at the wrong resolution. I had to dig out the originals and some of those are way back in backup disks.
It's worked at last. The good part is, having done the hard one first, plain text books are now easy.
I doubt anyone would print that story. Far too much swearing.
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