Dana’s Comments (group member since Oct 22, 2012)

Dana’s comments from the CreateSpace, Lulu and Lightning Source authors group.

Sara wrote: "Thank you so much for the help, Dana. I will surely read out the step by step document of yours and will let you know if I need help from you."

I hope it helps! :)

I highly recommend CreateSpace. It's inexpensive and easy, and if you can't do the formatting yourself, there are plenty of folks who can do it for you (I'm one of them) for a reasonable fee. The manufacturing costs differ wildly between the two. For example, if you take the same specs and plug them into the calculators on CreateSpace and Lulu to determine the manufacturing cost, the Lulu version costs about two times more--plus Lulu takes another $2 on top of that! This means that the same book produced through Lulu will have to be priced $8-$10 higher to give the author the same profit.

If you're interested in doing your book through CreateSpace, I've got a step-by-step document on my blog. If you have a good understanding of headers, footers, section breaks, and styles in Word, you can definitely do it yourself. Or as I mentioned above, you can find someone to do it for you.

Smashwords is small for me too, but it definitely has its uses. The coupons are great, and I prefer to go through them to Apple, and if you want to go perma-free with a title, Smashwords is the way to do it.

Amazon has the best store experience, hands-down. And that's why it's the top dog for most people, though I know some who sell tons through B&N and Apple. Kobo is picking up for me, but they desperately need to fix search on their store.

From what I've heard from other writers, if you're writing YA or nonfiction, you should go for Expanded Distribution, since print will make up a bigger percentage of your sales anyway. I'm not doing either right now, so that played into my reasoning with not selecting Expanded Distribution.

An update: by the end of 2012, print was over 6% of my revenue but only 3% of units sold. So even though ebook sales dwarfed my print sales, I made quite a bit more money on the print books I did sell. I only did two book signings in 2012, so if I do more in 2013, that may help boost print sales.

CreateSpace (through Amazon and occasional book fair and hand sales) is about 7.5% of my revenue and about 4% of my units, though I predict this will have a sharp spike this month to at least 10% of my revenue once I calculate all the numbers (I'm appearing at a big book fair this weekend). On a per-unit basis, my POD books are my most profitable right now, since otherwise I'm selling mostly .99 ebooks, which are great for expanding my readership but don't net a lot of revenue.

So that I could keep my sales price lower, I didn't select Expanded Distribution, and I believe that decision has paid off in more sales. But I could be wrong about that. I may eventually decide to distribute further, but would have to raise the price by at least $2-3 dollars, so not sure it's worth it. I would love to hear if other folks think Expanded Distribution with CS is worth it.

Hi everybody! Thanks for the invitation. I've published two of my own books on CreateSpace and formatted two others CS books for a friend as well, and I'm really pleased with how they came out. I put together a blog post with tips for working with CS. Several folks have told me they found it very helpful, but I don't claim to be an expert! It's just what I think would be useful for someone doing this for the first time. Here's the post, in case any of you would find it helpful: http://danadelamar.blogspot.com/p/cre...