Continued Frustrations in Publishing are an Integral Part of My Life Now

I would very much like to learn how to format and publish my own manuscripts.  I would take a class on how to do this effectively if I thought I could learn it, because depending on someone else to get things right is a terrible frustration for a writer.

As many of you know, I enlisted the services of CreateSpace to accomplish the design of my paperback.  When I sent my manuscript off to my independent publisher for the eversion, he had it published in three days. The only problem that we encountered was that the TOC did not function.  This, we determined, was due to a translation error.  He works on a Mac and I work on a PC.  We removed the apostrophes from the chapter headings and, voila! The problem was solved.

I have been working with CreateSpace since June 6th on this paperback.  Again, I sent in the manuscript from my PC and it was no different from the MS I had sent to my independent publisher.  I had some final edits and a revision that needed to be accomplished, so I made those and sent them the changes on the service file that they required.

I paid extra to have them help design the paperback. There have been ongoing problems with font, front matter, images, handwritten letter size, paragraph spacing, page headers, chapter headers, page numbering, semi colons added to the TOC and other things I DID NOT ask for….I could continue the list, but I fail to see a point.  Suffice it to say, things have not gone well.

Finally, after four or five rounds of proofs, all of which have taken seven to fourteen days to accomplish, I thought we finally had everything good to go and was looking forward to seeing the (hopefully) final proof.

Yesterday, I received this.  For some reason unknown to mankind (or womankind), CreateSpace personnel decided to use lowercase letters in my TOC.  Why would they do that?

Also, there were four places where there was a gaping space between paragraphs.  Again, why?

I know that these things may sound trivial to you, but they are not understandable to me.  I have had to pay them an additional $135.00 to correct errors which should not have been errors in the first place.  I could have ignored them and said, “Whatever, just publish the damned thing!”, and pressed the approve button.  But why should I?  Why should I expect less than perfect satisfaction on a product purchased.  And when these are corrected , are new problems going to appear again?

You would think that they would want to have the best reputation possible with as much competition as is building in the market.  I truly appreciate that they provide a service for something that I don’t feel I could have accomplished alone.  I would just like for it to be the premium service that I paid for.

I hope my readers know that I am genuinely thinking of them as I go about insisting on a quality product.  I am proud to be an Indie author.  I am proud to be able to be in control of producing a quality product.  CreateSpace, of all people, should understand that.  Don’t they want to make Amazon proud?

Am I just being overly sensitive and expecting too much?

Filed under: Publishing Tagged: createspace, publishing