Moving from CreateSpace to KDP Print

by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig

Always leery of more work, I’d put off moving my print books from CreateSpace to KDP Print.  With about 20 titles to transfer (the rest were trad-pubbed), I was concerned that it would be a long, problem-riddled process.

There were originally other concerns, too.  I was used to buying cheap author copies on CreateSpace and for a while, there was not an avenue to buy those copies on KDP Print.  That changed as of November 2017.

A full list of differences between CreateSpace and KDP Print can be found on Amazon here. 

But I changed my mind about not making the move when I received an email Tuesday from Amazon, stating:

In a few weeks, we’ll start automatically moving your CreateSpace books to KDP. Your books will remain available for sale throughout the move and you’ll continue to earn royalties. Once we begin this process you’ll be unable to edit existing titles or create new titles on CreateSpace.

If you have a release planned soon or you would like to start the move yourself, we are making updates that will allow you to move your entire catalog in just a few steps. During this transition, you can contact KDP customer support by email and access phone support in English.

I decided to stop putting it off and make the move myself.  If there were going to be issues, better to go on and address them now and before we all started having issues at once.  And I have a fair number of titles.

Here’s what I found: 

First off, Amazon has a handy list of things you should do before your transfer.  This is a good time to make sure that you don’t have any books awaiting your proofing or approval, for instance.  You also lose your CreateSpace reports, so go ahead and download those if you want to keep your historical sales figures.

Although several sites recommended migrating from the KDP side and not the CreateSpace side, this did not work for me.  The dashboard wanted me to completely upload the files, etc.  I definitely didn’t have time for that.

Fortunately, I found this video from KDP that walked me through the process (if you have problems seeing it, the YouTube link is here.)

According to Amazon’s email, they’re staggering the start of the move, so it’s possible that you may not yet see the prompt/popup on the CreateSpace site that helps you start the process:

To ensure a quality experience, we will add links to the CreateSpace member dashboard in phases so authors may see it at different times. 

The linking was easy.  And the transfer took only 2 minutes.

After the transfer, CreateSpace sends you to your KDP dashboard to check and see if everything migrated (all your projects are now removed from the CreateSpace dashboard).

Everything had switched over.  I only had a few issues.  Two of them were easy to resolve.   You can immediately tell the ones that have issues because they have ‘continue setup’ highlighted.  Two examples below.

How a problem migration looks: 

A successful title migration: 

First, my most recent release didn’t have the ebook and print versions linked on my KDP dashboard  (they were linked on the Amazon product page).  I clicked ‘link to the print edition’ from the Kindle edition and they matched right up.

Next, one of my titles had somehow transferred twice.  I deleted one of the print editions and then linked the other print edition to the digital (again, on my KDP dashboard) since they weren’t linked.

The only other issue was one I had to call KDP about: an ISBN issue.  There was an error message saying that my imprint (which is my name) didn’t match the ISBN.  Support actually wrote a ticket up for this issue and are keeping in touch as they resolve it.

I checked to make sure that author copies were similar to the CreateSpace prices.  They definitely appeared to be:

 

I’ve read on forums about writers having issues with covers, interiors, etc…but this wasn’t my experience, thankfully.  Aside from the one problem I took to support, this was a painless process.

Here is a link to Amazon’s KDP Print FAQ. 

Have you made the move yet?  How did it go?

Transferring Books from CreateSpace to KDP Print:
Click To Tweet

Photo on Visualhunt

The post Moving from CreateSpace to KDP Print appeared first on Elizabeth Spann Craig.