Print on Demand?

This evening I've been looking at Amazon's CreateSpace (www.createspace.com) publishing solution. Basically, if you have a fully-formatted PDF of your bok, in the correct format you can use the self-publishing system and get them to print your book on a publish on demand basis.

If you can do all the work yourself (format the book, design the cover art) then this costs you nothing. Of course, the price of the book is based on the number of pages and whether it is colour or not.

I've been looking at a book format of about 7.5 x 9.25 inches and around 400 pages (depending on how I format it. If sold for $19.99 this would give just over $6 in revenue for every copy sold. The price CreateSpace charge being based on page number. Fewer page numbers means you can sell the book cheaper.

Being an InDesign user, this is much more familiar territory for me (I was an editor in a former life) and I know how to produce book-quality InDesign layouts. Currently I'm thinking of a layout using Times New Roman at about 11.5pt with embedded images (not that there are many).

The book I am going to start with is my Big Book of Curry recipes, which is currently by ar my biggest seller on the Kindle ebook store (you can find the Eliza Acton's Modern Cookery for Private Families on Amazon and you can also find Eliza Acton's Modern Cookery for Private Families on Amazon.co.uk).  Indeed, it's been the success of this book on the Kindle platform that has made me decide to go the print on demand route.Especially as I think a recipe book may well do better as a physical book.

Of course, I already have all the text and the links etc, but the image placements will need to be re-formated and because physical books do not re-flow like eBooks, page breaks will need to be taken care of. My current layout is A5, so I need to change that. And the links will need to go to page numbers and not be hyperlinks. But that's easy.

There is probably about a week's work in all and then the book will be ready for purchase on Amazon.

The publishing adventure continues!