Publishing Pains – but “To Mix and To Stir” is out now!

So, finally it is done and I pressed the „publish“ button for „To Mix and To Stir“ – the second part of my Hagen Patterson, Alchemist, trilogy.

It was/is my third book with Createspace, Amazon’s self-publishing service, and it has been the worst of the three experiences as far as the publishing process was concerned.

The essence is that Createspace’s service has dropped significantly in quality and speed compared to two years ago, when I first put out my “Dome Child” novel via this channel.

The process has slowed from two months to over three months and there have been many frustrating faults and errors along the way.

I don’t know why the response times of Createspace has become so bad – do they have so many jobs now that they can’t keep up with demand anymore?

Anyway, it took weeks and weeks for them to produce a first sample of the Interior and that looked crappy as hell. It was like no human had ever thrown a glance at it, but someone had just pushed a Word document to “whatever they use” format conversion button and then on the print button of the print-on-demand machine. Nevertheless it took weeks for someone to press those two buttons.

Then they got confused about my request for interior design changes. One round of up to 200 changes “for free” is part of the package I purchased and they forgot that, wanted to charge me another 55,- USD for implementing the changes and when I protested, they said something like sorry, was a mistake and reimbursed the stuff to my credit card after having deducting it.

The implementation of the change request round took then again some three weeks instead of “7 business days” as stated in the member dashboard. It was more than double that time and if I had not asked what the hell was going on, they might have let me wait even longer. Then conflicting messages about the release of the documents got on my nerves too, another 7 business days (for what??) vs. 3 days, etc…

Another annoying issue is the cover design. In my case it is ridiculously overpriced. You pay the same for them designing you a cover from scratch as when you hand in a cover design as in my case and only want them to put the title on it. I told them so in a message but got no reply. So I am paying double for the cover – I’m paying my cover artist as well as for putting the title and my name onto it. Since “To Mix and to Stir” is a second in a series I wanted the same font and even told them the font name. Nevertheless, a work that takes in my opinion half an hour, took them again weeks to fulfill. Since the Interior wasn’t ready either, it was not critical, but…

The worst thing about Amazon is that there is no real alternative – that’s the dangers of having a monopoly. Since we are dependent on Amazon, they now think they can do whatever they want… very frustrating and sad and annoying for those who depend on their service. I wish I had an alternative, but there is none. I met some new people recently and told them about my books and the very first question was: can you order them via Amazon? = no alternative.

You could speed up the process by doing it all yourself, I suppose, but I neither have the time nor the nerve to learn “interior formatting”, or Kindle conversion, or how to get the title onto the cover art.

So… the struggle will stay the same… at least I am now prepared for a lousy, time consuming, not-enough-value-for-money-process for next time and I’ll calculate at least three months instead of two…

That was the publishing rant… In another “five to seven business days” (reason for this long time period unknown) the title will hopefully be available in print form (no clue yet how long they’ll let me wait until the Kindle version is ready). “To Mix and To Stir” is already available via the CreateSpace store, but I guess you need yet another ID for that one.

Once the title has shown up on Amazon I can make a happier blog entry about more important things = the contents, the story, the exciting further adventures of my weird dark hero Mr. Hagen Patterson, Alchemist