CreateSpace – Impressions After Publishing Four Paperbacks

I was a keen advocate of FeedARead. They published beautiful copies of Seesaw and Pompomberry House. However, FeedARead charge £88 for extended distribution, which means you can only sell your books in shops such as Amazon is you stump up the best part of £100 per title. Whilst I've sold tens of thousands of books, ninety-nine percent of my sales are eBooks, meaning that paperback sales barely cover their setup costs. For this reason and this reason alone, I published my two children's books using CreateSpace.

My initial experiences were positive. Books are available on Amazon almost as soon as you approve them. Even though author copies have to come from the US, they are still very affordable. You can update your cover and interior for free (FeedARead charge for this).

However, by book 2, I have lost confidence in CreateSpace. Here's a summary of the problems I've experienced:

- They think that 0.125 inches is an acceptable printing error margin. Anybody can see that 3mm is enough to seriously mess up the design of a book, especially a short book with a narrow spine.

- I had to wait 2-3 days while they consulted their IT department to determine whether a problem that could be detected by the human eye was classed as a problem (it wasn't!)

- I paid for a proof and approved it, only to find that the copy my mum bought was noticeably different.

- They shrunk the spinal text to half its height but didn't change its width, making the words unreadable.

- When I complained about the above, they told me that changing my spine text was a courtesy to prevent it from being positioned in the wrong place (not much use if it's unreadable).

- Their website was down when I needed to order a proof.

I'm glad I used CreateSpace for The Troll Trap because I needed a large number of author copies - they were cheap and this first title was well-produced. And I will probably use them for Smelly Trolls Book 3 for consistency with books 1 and 2. However, I am far from convinced that they are a professional alternative to FeedARead. The finish of the book can be great but it feels like a lottery. CreateSpace are cheaper, but it really is a case of you get what you pay for, particularly when it comes to customer service.

If you're publishing a small number of titles and you have £88 to invest on each, then I strongly advise using FeedARead rather than CreateSpace.

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