CreateSpace

*Update* It took 2 months, but I did get credit for (what I believe anyway) were all of my missing royalties. It took reporting the situation to the BBB before I got past the guy that kept telling me he needed print codes. You do not, in fact, need the print codes for them to know how many copies have been sold. They blamed Amazon for the delay.

I know of several cases of purchases of my book sold through Amazon that I was not paid for. The royalties were never credited. When I contacted CreateSpace, they told me I would have to contact the purchasers, and ask them to provide a print number, as well as the date and other information. It is very embarrassing to have to harass people to give me this information because I didn't get paid, especially when they were given as Christmas presents. Who knows how many copies were sold without me getting credit. They told me if I was unwilling to get this information, there is nothing they could do to help me.

The service was relatively easy to use, despite the extremely antiquated website, but considering they don't give you the money, I'd say stay away. They are stealing money from customers!

The help desk in the USA is extraordinary at CreateSpace. As of last week I started reaching a help desk overseas. I had several well-researched, extremely complicated questions. They told me when they picked up that I would have to just keep calling. I did that many times for two days and never got the US. I wrote a very negative review, but sent an email asking for help and got it via a phone call from a supervisor. So I am changing my review. This company has the best help desk in the USA--great people, cheerful, helpful and SMART. I am deleting my negative review. I hope, however, that they will continue to make it possible to ask for help from folks in the USA who understand the very complicated questions. I think that's why they have been popular to date.

I loved CreateSpace because they were available when I needed them, which was not often. But now not only do I get a foreign help desk that cannot understand very complicated questions about publishing, if I want to talk to the desk in the USA, they will not forward the call to a supervisor who can help. I will probably give up and go to another publisher. The overseas help desk say I can just call and call and call and see if I get anywhere, and I have spent an hour doing that in 2 days. I have never felt that the folks overseas answering my emails understood the complicated questions, so this is not an option. The folks at the help desk in the USA were phenomenal.

I am not sure whether to give createspace a good or bad review as they have some great features though the quality of the book has had many problems. I believe they are owned by amazon so the good news is that it seems easy to get yourself on amazon to sell the book. Publishing on demand has been a great idea by createspace and I think it is going to really catch on in the upcoming years. Publishing on demand basically means you do not print the book until it is purchased. The setup and install process is very easy on createspace and that was simple and much better than the lulu competition. The problem with createspace is that the physical book has bad quality control and the spine of the book can often appear misprinted. I would upload an image to show but that is not a feature I see here on sitejabber. There was extra glue or something also dribbling out of the spine of the book too. I did like how easy it was to get onto amazon digital kindle and maybe that is the real future of publishing anyways.

Just like any business nowadays with their "freemium versions", and Amazon prime with their auto-charge feature that bills you if you don; t tell it not to, This is a business that needs to make money to keep their hosting. So, when you load your book up, especially if it has images, you will find that is nearly impossible to check what you have submitted. They will not let you format on the site, and also is incompatible with pdf, doc, docx, and rtf. So the work you put in to making it perfect in word or open office, you will find is nowhere close to what CreateSpace shows you. From a business standpoint, this is brilliant! Then they casually offer you very expensive support. I am not a hired goon, like many other reviews, I am seriously having a hard time understanding why this needs to be so time consuming and expensive, when CDBaby, works in a similar way for music distribution, i didn't find it to be this counter-intuitive and stressful

Depending where you are on the do-it-yourself spectrum, there's some good and some bad here. My biggest complaint is that CreateSpace did not tell me upfront that when I signed up to have them set up my manuscript per their interior template, I would not receive a file that I could manipulate myself. (Perhaps it was in the small print, somewhere.) What I received instead for both my custom cover and interior file was a PDF file that I could not alter. Thus, I am locked into CreateSpace, depending on CreateSpace to tell me what the typographic specifications are (typeface, point size, leading, and so on), being unable to make what-if changes myself (for example, what will this look like if I change the typeface or decrease the leading?), and then having to pay them to make any changes, including some (but not all) of their own mistakes. Nor are the folks who worked on my cover and interior skilled book designers. They appear to be technicians who dump text into a template and have no sense of design (say, getting the leading reasonably right) or eye for details. For each round of reviews and corrections, they fix two things and then break something else. Had I to do it over again, I would take my CreateSpace money and pay a real book designer to build my file with my specifications and then give me that file so I can experiment and make my own changes.

On 4 april Create Space charged my business account 5 separate charges totaling more then $3500. 00 in a two min time frame. I notified them of the "theft" within 20 min. The claimed they flagged orders and none were sent out. But here is where the real screwing begins, They "Create Space" are not responsible and totally refused to "Reverse" the charges. Now my business will be wiped out by tomorrow after noon. DO NOT DO BUSINESS WITH THESE PEOPLE!

I am creating a cookbook for a local non profit company, and we decided to use Create Space because of the ability to POD and distribution. I went in with a lot of hesitation, but I was willing to give them a chance.

First of all, their website is out of date both from a technical stand point and a content standpoint. No where can you find the proper information to set up a file in a program other than Word... believe me, I looked. Customer service is rude... they act as though you are bothering them and how can I not understand what the margins, bleeds and gutter need to be? Well, maybe if you actually provided that information, I wouldn't be calling!

Here's the kicker... when we received a printed proof, it had 2 blank pages at the end. Thinking I had missed an equal spread, I frantically counted my pages and realized that it was a mistake on their part. I emailed them, they responded that they would get back to me in 7 days, so I then called. Customer service proceeded to tell me that they add blank pages to the end of each book... it could be 1 or it could be 10!

WTF?

They do this so that "they" know where your book ends and so that another person's book doesn't get inserted into yours. And there is no way for them to take them out because it goes straight to binding. Customer service tried to convince me that this is ok and that people who buy my book will know it's not a mistake since they can see the number of pages in the description online.

Um... it looks like a mistake and very unprofessional! And then they have the balls to respond to my email about that will a very vanilla response, not even addressing my specific issues!

God I hate them. They are the worst. I am so surprised that they don't up their game and offer better. I would go elsewhere if I could, and I will for my next project.

I used CreateSpace when it was BookSurge in 2009, and they were great: access to Amazon, good royalties, and staff were willing to help no matter what it took to get the job done well, which is why I came back

But now, 8 years later, I can't say the same thing. CreateSpace (CS) has you use a template for your book, but you quickly find that the template has severe limitations (like pagination, headers and other kinds of formatting). CS then charged me $149 for help with formatting and even then couldn't get it right. I talked to at least 4 different people to have the problem resolved, and in the end, just asked them to stop work. It was pretty clear that the experience from 2009 didn't fit into their business model today of only providing help until the service fee is exhausted. Result: the publication formatting looks amateurish. Looking back, I would have gone to UpWork for freelance formatting help, then published through CS. You can find someone less expensive and more accommodating than CS's add-on services. I regret not having known this earlier.

The list of problems I had included:

1) The edited manuscript returned to me was filled with over 3 dozen errors. Having accepted he track changes and read the first 100+ pages, I found numerous errors and sent back the manuscript. I asked them to re-edit the manuscript and they refused to do so. But suggested it is stated in their T&Cs that errors can still remain after the manuscript is edited. AND they also suggested I should consider purchasing another round of edit. Looking at the track changes, I realised the 200,000+ words manuscript was edited over less than 2 weeks. This explains quite a lot.
2) After spending a large amount of time to redo the edits and resent the manuscript, they returned an interior proof that had a partial copyright page (which did not bear any copyright statement whatsoever).
3) I asked why they had created an interior proof without a correct copyright page text and dedication page. They suggested I should have sent this when I sent the corrected manuscript. Previously when I published with CreateSpace, they had requested the copyright page text and dedication page separately from the manuscript itself. And these pages were then added before they sent the first interior proof I received.
4) When I finally submitted the copyright page and dedication page, they sent another interior proof with the copyright page beginning HALFWAY down the page in Dec 2017. Since then, I had sent numerous emails begging them to correct the text layout so that it will begin at the top of the page.
5) They have refused to change the layout of the copyright page. All they are suggestion is the interior was created into a pdf format automatically by a software and I should purchase another interior service if I need the copyright page text to appear at the top of the page. I have never seen or heard such nonsense in my life.
6) Their representatives have no idea what they are doing. I have informed them numerous times that no reputable novel, textbook, encyclopaedia, dictionary, magazine, ect would have a copyright page text beginning HALFWAY down the page!
7) They have refused to answer my emails since early January 2018.

I have contacted The Society of Authors and they have informed me that what CreateSpace is doing is wrong. They should not be requesting a separate payment for the Copyright page to begin at the top of the page as oppose to the middle of the page. I ask to communicate with a Senior Manager upon their review of the email communications regarding my queries and they have yet to reply. Approaching CreateSpace was a great disappointment.

I have used CreateSpace since 2009 and created 3 self-published books. Really for someone who has good to excellent writing ability, it's a humiliating experience to try the commercial houses in NYC. They won't accept you unless you know an agent, and agents are usually swamped. With CreateSpace, my first book was sort of a desktop publishing experiment. Considering I didn't think I was going to survive the first year after cancer, it made me proud. The second book was actually the product of many years of writing, and it was polished, but again the commercial houses may like Maya Angelou, but she was their token. They don't like creative nonfiction bios or creative nonfiction autobiographical stories unless you are way down low like sitting in prison. With these next two books, I used Bookcover Pro to develop the covers. I also used another editor to achieve the ideal layout. I had to call the Createspace company a few times to get the cover right---my fault being a bit on the picky side one might say. And also I had a bit of an Adobe flattening issue that took some time for me to work out. It took a few extra trial orders to get things exactly right, but Createspace was great to work with, very patient, and they didn't even force you to work with just one developer. To this day, I am very grateful to CreateSpace, because someday, when I have more audacity, I hope to actually market my books more. The burden of marketing your books is on you, of course, and you should not feel shy just because you self-published! They have a lot of examples of DIY authors whose presentations and touring have helped get them established.