Self Publishing With Amazon's CreateSpace by Kevin Sivils

Kevin Sivils is an experienced self-publishing author. He's used both CreateSpace and other print on demand companies, so he has a basis for comparison. Primarily he uses his books to promote and support his main work as a basketball coach and trainer. There are many advantages to self-publishing for authors. The amount they make per book can be higher (and they set their own prices, so they can control this, though they also have to consider the constraint of how much the market is willing to pay).

Publishing is much faster. It can take commercial and university book publishers years to take a manuscript from contract to published. CreateSpace pays every month, so authors don't have to wait for a royalty check every six months -- paid out of uncertain cash flows only after everybody else in the publishing company including the janitor has already cashed their paycheck).

And that's if and only if they actually receive royalties. Most books don't earn out their advances, so the author gets nothing after that first exciting check. Of course, with CreateSpace there are no advances. You give up that advance in exchange for a stream of cash flow that, you hope, will continue for years.

Plus, you have to do all the publishing details yourself, from designing the look of the interior of the book to writing the cover copy. And with CreateSpace the marketing of your book is totally up to you -- but that's also true with mainstream publishing. They do not promote books except by A level authors such as J K Rowling and Stephen King.

When it comes to actual production of your book, the readying a PDF file for CreateSpace, this book is extremely weak. He does give some book design etiquette which may or may not be true, such as beginning new chapters one-third of the page down (he doesn't do this himself). He does include information on marketing your book. This is a strength of the book because other books covering this focus on online marketing. He suggests ways to sell your books at very events.

I believe he could have expanded this further to including using your own CreateSpace book to leverage many other professional opportunities. Before you can sell book copies at the back of a room during a speech, you need to know how to getting speaking engagements. And having a book in print (even self-published) can help with that. After all, many people are impressed by books as physical objects and don't understand the difference. Or may understand the difference but still be impressed by the ambition and effort that self-publishing required.