I’ve got over 30 books in paperback. I’ve been with Createspace, KDP and Smashwords from the beginning. Now Createspace is closing down. Amazon started it and is folding it back into Amazon.
I’ve tried the Amazon paperbacks and the process is about the same as Createspace and the quality is there as well. Changing from Createspace to Amazon isn’t horrible but what to do about the 30+ novels I already have. Do I want to keep them all in paperback? Should I consider not publishing in paperback since most of my sales are ebooks? What about the journal I created? Should I keep that in paperback form? It isn’t in ebook – obviously.
It’s a lot of work to set up each book. When I’m publishing, it takes around 3-4 hours just to get them uploaded and all the settings the way I want the book to be. Do I really want to take all that effort for items which I don’t get a lot of sales on?
Also if I’m going to do this, then I want to redo some of the manuscripts. I know there are spelling / grammar errors as I’ve reread them and been annoyed by them. A lot of the newer books, I have a better routine so there are fewer but the earlier it was published the more likely I am going to want to update the manuscript. In reality, I’ve already done updates to the ebooks.
All of this ran through my head but I decided I do want to continue offering paperbacks and it’s good to have paperbacks for my own purposes. I wasn’t sure how it would work to discontinue my Createspace copies and go to the Amazon copies.
Thankfully all of this was addressed by Amazon. I went in to see how complicated it would be. It wasn’t. The paperback option is listed right with each of my books. For the latest, I was able to go in and use the same file and convert them in a under 15 minutes (roughly). The longest part is when they do the review, which is typical. Their message is slightly humorous and suggests a cup of coffee or making a sandwich.
So far I’ve converted about half of them over to Amazon. The ones I have left, I will spend a little more time reviewing the manuscript before I convert. Hopefully this review won’t take me too long.
The nice thing, my prices to the public have gotten slightly lower in most cases. This might encourage sales. I had one book at 19.99 which no one bought but I revamped a little, changed margins and so on in an effort to reduce the number of pages. To be fair, the book is long but still few people are going to invest that much in a book. I managed to get the price down $7.
Hopefully the rest of the conversions don’t take me too long and I’ll be all set. The only other thing I have to figure out is how to get the books which don’t have an ebook converted over.