How to use Createspace for your Novel.

I used Createspace for Disconnect and the sequels for the major reasons of ease of use and not having to pay someone to do it for me. Below, I will detail the steps I used, and I hope that you’ll find them useful too.

Further details about the process of getting your book ready before you consider Self-Publishing are here as are marketing.

Create an account with Createspace - and provide your IBAN and BIC codes to ensure you get paid into your bank account. You may need to contact your bank to get hold of these. I won’t be providing a step-by-step for this.

Click Add New Title

Add a Title for the Book, no need to add subheading or Book 1 of this Series.

Select the option for Paperback, and then click on the Get Started option in the Guided

 

Now add more details about you as an author, subheading, release date, etc.

The publication date only allows you to pick a date 7 days in the future, but you can overwrite and add your own date in.

Save yourself the cost of an ISBN and get a Createspace provided one.

Add this ISBN to your novel – that is if you are going to mention it – usually on Page 2

Select your interior. To make the book marketable against traditionally published books, I go for: 5″ x 8″ with B+W Interior on Cream Paper.

Now, pick the Formatted Template option under the part where you select your page size – this will send a template to your computer/download.

 

Adding your novel to the Template. The document is big and contains sections for Title (not the Cover), copyright info, dedication, contents, and the chapters.

There are a several blank pages, but they are needed. Remember, you are creating a book and some pages don’t have text on both sides.

Unless you’re writing a Non-Fiction, I would scrap the Contents page. And make sure you add your ISBN Number in the section provided on Page 2.

If you want to add some funky image for the title page (remember this is not the cover), or some special font, you can do.

Before you add your text to the document remove the example text per chapter, but only do it in the centre of each chapter. Maintain the original starting paragraphs and the closing paragraph of each chapter – see image:

To leave…

 

Now within each Chapter, highlight the bulk of it, except the first few lines and the end lines, and then paste your manuscript’s text. If you paste over all of the text, you will lose the formatting of the page. It might be a good idea to apply the ‘Show all NonPrinting’ option on your word document to show why the final lines are important. The End of Section break is massively important.

Yes – this takes time, but it’s all worth it. ”Patience” – quote Yoda.

Once that is pasted, now delete the opening and closing sentences. You should end up with…

Repeat this for all chapters.

How you format the actual text in terms of font size is up to you, but do compare to other novels in terms of lines per page. I don’t keep the headers at the top of each page that detail the author name and book name.

For Disconnect I applied: Garamond Font at size 11 with:

Yes  - I was meant to leave those all blank.

Double check every page, and when complete with your text, acknowledgements, etc, save as PDF.

If you save as a word document you will lose any special image/font applied to the title page. This is important if you have images in your document.

So – save as PDF.

If you get this message, just click Yes… each time you are asked. Trust me.

Now you can upload to the PDF to Createspace

After you hit Save it will upload and run some checks against the file. This will highlight any issues and lets you see them in an Interior Reviewer.

You can work on your cover in the meantime, but I recommend that you wait.

Launch the Interior Reviewer when the upload is complete.

 

Although I am told there is a size issue – that you will 99% of the time, the pages all look fine to me – so I click the Save and Continue option.

Also, make a note of the number of pages. You will need this for the cover.

 

Now, move onto the Cover option.

Rather than build a cover online – I upload one created earlier with Photoshop. I can’t stress enough how important it is to get a good cover designed.

Click the Submission Requirements link under Upload a Print Ready Cover option – you will be taken to a page that contains a template.

 

Enter your book details, especially the bit about page numbers. You can now download a Cover template.

The template will give you the front cover, spine and back cover (wraparound) layout you must use. A video on how I did mine is here.

Save your cover as a PDF, and then upload.

This could take some time to upload – approx 30mins to 1hour.

Again check that you are happy with the look in the Online Reviewer that you’re happy with it. Spin it around to check the spine looks good.

 

Now, decide on Distribution. I only select Standard Distribution rather than Expanded to a) save on the $25 charge, and b) prevent my prices from being inflated due to the expanded route. It’s up to you what you do here.

 

 

Pricing – Whatever makes you happy. I price mine at the price of traditionally published books. The result is low royalties, but be honest, would you pay £10 for a book that’s 250 pages when other books are £6.99 ? Pricing is important when marketing and getting readers to invest in you.

Now add the full descriptions for your novel in terms of what will be seen on Amazon.

Also select your BISAC Category. You can either make it really niche, or put it in a general grouping. I go for general, because to say that you are the Number 1 book in a list that only contains 3 books isn’t as dramatic as a list with 1,000,000 books.

You are allowed to list 5 key words/phrases about your novel. These will help with how it is found on search engines.

 

Okay – you’re done.

You have the option to Upload to Kindle – but don’t! It’s better to pay someone to format your original word file to the correct Kindle format and then to upload to Kindle. I will do a How to Use Kindle soon…

I hope that you found this useful.

Any questions – corrections, let me know

 

My debut novel Disconnect is available for free, and sequels are due July 29. Please do read and review them.