Working at Self-Publishing

I’ve been given lots of advice lately about self-publishing, especially once I told my friends I’m too old to work and wait through finding an agent, who then finds a publisher, who then may want me to re-write my book (yet again).  After all, Death in a Red Canvas Chair was something that started out on a bucket list!  We all come with expiration dates, but we just don’t know when, so I’m off and running.

With input from some members of my Early Birds critique group, I decided to go with CreateSpace.  And I have to say it’s been a learning experience, but the people I’ve interacted with at the company have been professional and warm.

I first decided to try to do the book on my own (free of charge). I looked at the selections of standard covers and found only one in which my cover photo would fit. It actually I thought it looked pretty nice but it got a few yucks from my friends. Then I uploaded my book into a standard format and got back something which, after two days of attempting to reformat into something professional, I decided was a little beyond my limited digital skills.  I want this first book to be as professional-looking as possible, especially since it was a two plus year labor of love.  And maybe that’s the way this is supposed to work: I signed up for editorial help with the cover and the internal formatting, both fairly reasonably priced.

So far my experience in working with one of their design teams has been great, even when I uploaded the wrong version of the book. Okay, I was tired and not paying attention to which version I picked of the many that are scattered in my documents.  All the others have now been deleted.

So I’ll let you know how the rest of the journey develops. For now, it’s going to be 6-8 weeks, and they promised that the next time would be easier……