Indie Pub Nikki – 13

The birthday of my new novel is coming closer, let’s see whether it’ll be up and running during the Olympics or not . Here’s the latest update on the progress.

I guess due to (bad) experience CreateSpace suddenly insists on sending you two physical proofs of your novel. Once at pretty much the beginning = once you have approved your cover and have uploaded your “interior”, the second time, after both, interior changes and cover changes have been approved.

I was a bit confused about this at first, since last time around, for Dome Child, I received only one physical proof and that was after all the back and forth with the interior was finished.

Now they send you the interior as a pdf, (as last time around) and I checked the file and made my change requests and wanted to upload those but couldn’t. That’s when I first noticed they want you to check the physical proof before they allow you to upload the change requests. I argued a bit back and forth with them that I don’t need a physical proof at this stage when there are such obvious mistakes already as a wrong page break, etc.

Customer team said though that it’s “better” to look at the first physical proof, since many people notice mistakes only when they hold the paper in hand. I don’t think I am one of those “many people”. I am so used to doing everything at the screen that it seems like a waste of time, paper and money to ship a physical proof that will most certainly have various mistakes in it half around the globe.

Nevertheless, customer is not king and I had to wait for my first physical proof. Once I received it, I had to write them an email that I got the thing before they finally “activated my site” for uploading of change requests.

As expected, I found nothing additionally wrong with the paper interior in comparison to the interior pdf file. It was good to have a physical proof though for the cover, which didn’t look like it should. The cover art was in need of shrinking and brightening.

After uploading my change requests for the interior as well as the cover art, the latter was taken care of within 4 business days or so and looks now acceptable in pdf form. The interior however, which took some 5 business days to get back to me in pdf form, is screwed up. All my changes were implemented correctly (an upgrade from last time, where some of the requests I had made were wrongly implemented) but a new problem has come up – a weird formatting issue where suddenly, in the latter half of the book, the text looks squeezed and there is too much empty space between the page numbers at the bottom and the text. What is that? Where did that come from? That was not the case in the good for nothing physical proof. I, of course, immediately requested revision and it took another 4 business days for CreateSpace now to correct their own mistakes… A bit annoying. It throws me back in schedule and I hope the Kindle version will be ready in time for the SF worldcon in Chicago where I plan on going at the end of August to promote my new novel (and the Dome Child of course as well).

Well, let’s hope for the best.

I still think there is no real alternative to CreateSpace though, since it gives you the easiest access to the world’s biggest retail platform = Amazon, but they still need to improve their indie publishing process in my opinion.