Today was an exciting day… I logged into my CreateSpace account and found that there was $11.28 in royalties waiting for me! Yep, after about three weeks of nothing I finally made my first two Amazon book sales.
It was a great birthday present 🙂
Because it took a while to make those first two sales, I had wondered if it was worth the effort in getting my ebook ready for sale as a physical product on CreateSpace. For those of you that don’t know what I’m talking about; CreateSpace is Amazon’s service for getting your content prepared to be published as a physical book on their online store.
Getting your content published on the Kindle store is not too hard. The text formatting and ecover requirements are not as stringent as for getting it approved on CreateSpace.
When preparing your book for approval on CreateSpace you have to make sure that your first page of content is numbered correctly so that the odd numbers are on the right-hand page.
You also have to make sure your images are at least 300 dpi.
CreateSpace will even do a spell check for you!
If anything is out of place you have to resolve it before you can move to the next step.
The hardest part about getting my book ready for publication was the cover. For Kindle ebooks it’s very easy. as long as your ecover is roughly 1:1.6 in dimensions and of decent quality, it will pass.
With CreateSpace it’s a whole new ball game!
Your size of your cover will vary from book to book, depending on the dimensions you have picked for your physical book (I recommend that you select a standard size like 6″ x 9″) and also how many pages your book is.
Once you’ve entered this information into the system, you’ll be given the dimensions for your book cover.
But you need to be careful because there is a ‘bleed’ area that you need to allow for. This is the area that may get cut into when your physical book is created.
Fortunately, CreateSpace will give you a cover template that you can base design on, so you know exactly where the spine will be, and also the white box on the bottom of the back cover, where they will print the ISBN and barcode.
Make sure that you keep the dpi quality of your cover high enough to pass their printing quality standards.
In creating my book cover, I didn’t outsource it because I wanted to know what was involved first-hand. It was a good experience though it took a long time to prepare it. If you’re not good with graphics programs (I used GIMP), I recommend that you find someone on Upwork or maybe even Fiverr to create it for you.
The questions is, was it worth the effort to publish my book with CreateSpace?
The answer is an emphatic, YES! There’s nothing better than seeing those passive royalties and knowing that there will be more to come in the future 🙂
Found this article helpful or have something you want to say? Leave a comment below!
Congratulations – How long you have to work for this success?
Hi Aloisia, it really doesn’t take that long. The most important ingredient for this, and any, success I’ve found is ‘persistence’. I focus on a project for at least 15 minutes a day. Just doing a little every day keeps it on your mind and little by little it gets done 🙂