My Experience Publishing on Create Space Part 1

By Gary Dorion                                                                                                                 

        First of all, let me say that I definitely recommend Create Space as an efficient and cost-effective way to construct a book, especially if you have a meager budget. In fact, I expect to use Create Space again for my next book-Jack-which is nearing completion at least in the writing phase. Like most things undertaken for the first time, there is a fairly substantial time commitment in putting together your first book from cover to cover on Create Space but it actually can be fun. The more time you put into it, the greater the investment you have and the more interesting the project becomes so it makes sense to exercise care.

              That brings me to the one of the most important things that I learned about the evolution of a novel and that is to have patience and not rush it to completion especially after you have put perhaps more than a thousand hours into it. There comes a time when you know it’s ready to put before the public. If you do not have that sense of readiness, that definite intuition, then I suggest holding onto it longer. It is very tempting to want to see it in book form before it is actually ready and this must be resisted.

               Of course it is advisable to get several soft cover proofs at different times because you will definitely see mistakes, omissions and places where you need additions that were not obvious on the computer screen. But obtaining a soft cover proof is not the same as publication. I was actually impressed with my own ability to not be hurried by the prospect of holiday sales, etc. or be pressured by other artificial deadlines. Ten years earlier I probably would have rushed it to publication and would have been sorry for it later.
                I had actually believed I was very close last summer to the actual publishing. I had begun the book in 2000. Well, in September, I decided to rewrite the beginning, add several new characters and construct new scenes-that in addition to a hundred hours or so of redesigning pages and adding more photos which inevitably, for me at least, caused other unwanted changes downstream in the book. I was several hundred hours away from finishing and hadn’t realized it back in August, 2012. The book turned out to be much better as a result of the waiting and the changes.    
               Another big bonus is that I now have a fairly good working knowledge of the Create Space program and am confident that the next go at it will take less than half of the time that I actually spent designing and formatting Comrade Anna, my historical fiction novel about the Warsaw Ghetto published on December 19, 2012. 
               There are so many little things that you learn in the process. For instance, it took me many uploads of my revised files onto the Create Space platform before I realized that uploading a PDF instead of a Word Document was going to save me a lot of time. The Word document always seemed to be changed when uploaded. Annoying things would occur such as a chapter starting in the middle of the page prior to the page that it was supposed to start on, or pictures would magically change position and would be too close to the gutter or on the wrong pages.                                    

                That all changed when I realized that I should revise my novel files in a Word file on my hard drive, then convert the file to an Adobe PDF and then upload the PDF to Create Space. I literally had uploaded my book about 50 times before I was finally satisfied with the results but, for the first 25 times or so, the uploads were via word documents and each of them was costly in terms of time. I finally realized that I needed to do all of the work practically in Word and PDF files and only when it was almost perfect did I need to upload to Create Space. I learned that I had to be  revising and editing much more on my hard drive and converting Word files to PDF files and that  this was so much more efficient. It should have been obvious in the beginning that that was the best way to proceed but it wasn’t to me. There also is the temptation to want to see your work in three-dimensional digital book form that Create Space affords but, the fact is, it is much more efficient to do 99% of the work between Word Documents and PDF files and forget about uploading to Create Space until almost all of the errors, omissions and additions have been attended to. 

                 With Create Space, you cannot revise and edit on line so it doesn’t make much sense to upload your files unless you know (by reading your PDF files in particular) that the book is pretty much done. If you uploaded to Create Space and invested 20 minutes to a half hour in the process each time and, for instance, then found out that an apostrophe was going the wrong way and you just had to change that, then you must start the process over again. It’s so much easier to catch that mistake in the PDF or maybe even in the word document and change it in those files before it ever gets uploaded to Create Space.  

                  Be sure to read my next post on the Create Space process. Happy writing.