Creating a book on Createspace – Lynne Garner

A collection of 16 short stories

If you’ve read some of my previous blog posts you’ll know some time ago I decided to turn my two Anansi the Trickster Spider eBooks into a POD (print on demand) book. At last Anansi the Trickster Spider (volumes one and two) is available via Amazon plus a few other outlets.

Now we (my other-half was drafted in to help) decided to create the book using Creatspace. Although it was easy to use we were totally unprepared. We naively set up an account and went in thinking we’d upload a file, choose the font style and size and off we’d go. Then came the surprise (yes I know, you don’t need to tell me, we should have realised it's not that simple) we had to answer quite a few questions. Questions such as:

•  Do you require page numbers?
• Would you like the numbering to start with the introduction or with the first story?    
• Have you considered an index?
• How about something in the page header e.g. the books title or story title

A little surprised by what idiots we’d were we grabbed some books to research what others had done. Slowly we started to make decisions. However as we made each decision we realised there were others we had to make. For example: We decided we wanted something in the page header and this would be the book’s title on every left hand page and the story title of every right hand page. But we then had to decide if we wanted to use a mixture of upper and lower case letters or all upper case. In the end we opted for all upper case.

So a number of hours after we set up our account (more than I'd like to admit) we were finally able to press ‘send proof.’

So you may be wondering why I'm telling you this. Well it's my round-about way of saying if you decide to set up a POD book then please learn from our mistake, make all those small but important decisions before you start. It'll hopefully save you time and make the process even easier.

Regards

Lynne