Publishing a Print Book with CreateSpace

While the primary medium for publishing Grounds for Death is planned to be electronic (that is, e-books), I also had the cover designer provide a complete book cover file - front, spine and back. At the time I made the decision I didn't really expect to create a print book, I just thought it would save time and money in the long run if the two files were created at the same time. Now I'm glad I took that approach.

I've known for months that if I were to publish a print book, I would print it through CreateSpace. I hadn't realized how easy this is until just a couple of days ago when I set up a user ID in CreateSpace on a lark just to see how it would work. It looks like they've thought of everything. The process is easy to follow, you can always go back to a former screen, and links providing additional information open in a separate window so you never lose your spot in the process. Not to say it's fast - it took quite some time for me to work my way through all the screens. At one point, CreateSpace electronically assesses the correctness of your book's format and lets you know what major issues stand in the way of finalizing the book. I had two, which I figured was pretty good. The first was that I had too many blank pages between my title page and the next page, which I fixed in minutes. The second was that the fonts used in the book had to be embedded in the file. I had no idea how to do this, but CreateSpace provided screen-by-screen instructions, so I was able to address this also within minutes. (And my PC is using Word 2003, so I was pleased to see instructions still available for that version of Word.)

So far, so good. I'm now at the stage where I've ordered a printed proof to see how it will look, which will be here by Dec 13th (I paid extra for fast shipping, to keep to my timelines).

I hope to be able to let you know within days that both my e-book and print book are available.