Self-Publishing, Two Steps Forward

 by pinstriped briefs

I’m ready to upload my manuscript to CreateSpace and make a book out of it.

First they ask for the title and information. I fill in the appropriate boxes and save.

Next comes ISBN and copyright. Now it’s time for me to do some research. They provide information and discussion on both subjects which I read. ISBN stands for International Standard Book Number. It is a number that is unique to a book’s title, that book’s binding, edition, and publisher. It is not unusual to have vastly different books with the same title, but each will have its own ISBN. Libraries use that number as the identifier for each of their books. If you’ve ever had reason to have your library request a specific book on inter-library loan, they’ve used that number to get exactly the book you want.

Now I had to do some decision making. Bowker is the official ISBN agency for the United States. Bowker also offers a self-publishing program. Hmmm. But I had already decided on CreateSpace, and since Amazon is sort of the 21st Century’s Sears Roebuck Catalog, I’m sticking with them. At least for Murder on Ceres. When I get rich and famous I might want to move on up.  

Considering cost and marketing possibilities with Amazon, I chose the free CreateSpace assigned ISBN. I guess that time I worked in the Edmond Public Library has forever warped my perception of books. All of a sudden my book having its own ISBN made it seem more real to me than all those pages of text and that beautiful cover. Kind of like seeing your baby’s official birth certificate for the first time.

Now comes the question of copyright. Okay. All the books I read have the copyright listed above the ISBN. I checked out the information and discussions CreateSpace offers, then went to copyright.gov to see for myself. For a single author, same claimant, one work, not for hire, the current online registration fee is $35. That is doable. The current processing time is, however, three to five months. And I want my book now, or at least sooner than that. The good thing is an author has up to five years to apply for the copyright certificate. And the even better thing is a work has automatic copyright beginning with the date the author can show they wrote it. The certificate itself is useful in court should the writer feel their copyright is being infringed.  

Are you glassy-eyed yet from this bureaucratic maze? Ready to pitch your book to that nice agent again? No, I’m not. Okay, we’ll move on.

Now we come to the Interior. You know, your story, the whole reason for this exercise.

CreateSpace gives you choices. What size book you want to have. They suggest that
6 x 9 is currently the preferred size. I know it will fit nicely on a library shelf. I choose that size and watch CreateSpace’s video on formatting. I follow the instructions, save my document as a pdf, and upload it.

They have a free service called Interior Reviewer. It’s great. It finds errors in the text. Errors I didn’t think about. Certain things don’t translate for them. In my case I had used a symbol, the Greek letter Sigma. If you’re more adept at this than I am, you can do what is necessary to embed your non-True Type symbol. Me, I just made a quick rewrite in those two particular locations.

Did I say “quick rewrite” limited to those two sites? I lied. While I was fixing them I noticed this and that and fixed them, too. Then I realized there were extra spaces, not extra lines denoting space-breaks between scenes, but extra spaces before a sentence or between words. You know when you turn on Word’s paragraph function and it shows all those dots. I couldn’t let it go out with all those. So several hours later with only one Frappuccino, two cookies, and a yogurt I finished. By that time I couldn’t tell if it was a dot on the document or a speck on my screen.

I uploaded it again. Ran the Interior Reviewer and was satisfied that all was well. Then came the cover. Thanks to Grace, I have the cover art. But CreateSpace wants to know if I want the cover to be matte or glossy.

Matte or Glossy? I don’t know. They do offer to send me, for a nominal price, an example of each.

Okay. Send me an example of each. It’ll be here next Thursday.

Good.

I need a break.