Saturday, May 20, 2017

What’s Your CreateSpace Story?

I can ask this question because I now have my own CreateSpace story.

Earlier in May I was coming up short on having copies of my book on hand. Same with my publisher. The initial printing run of 200 copies of my book was very nearly gone. Nice, but it was time to reorder. Since my publisher went with CreateSpace and it’s based on the print-on-demand principle, they would be able to make smaller orders and therefore limit the odds of them having too many unsold books in storage at any given time. Anything that lowers a business’s overhead is a good deal. We’ve all heard stories and jokes about books being remaindered. Not good. Every book deserves a home.

All was cool … UNTIL the possibility of making corrections to the inside text was mentioned. 

Make no mistake, editing is hard work. All books contain typos that were missed. Most are so minor that a reader usually glosses over them and goes on. If I notice something when I’m reading I usually make a small mental shrug and go on. Mistakes must be really major in order to drop me out of the narrative. Probably on the level of content and plot points. This is why there are different types of editors: content and line are the basic ones. Content editors look at the big picture and search out the plot holes giving the author time to plug them. Line editors are what I like to call the real grammar Nazis. I picture them diagraming sentences in their dreams.

After all the levels of editing Clouds Over Bishop Hill went through before publishing—I knew of three things I wanted to change. (I did change them for the eBook version.) Having the chance to upgrade the print version was way too tempting to pass up.

So, I threw caution into the wind and meddled with a book that was doing fine. To make changes that for all intents and purposes were only important to four people, one of whom was deceased.

There was that little voice that had me wondering if it would really be worthwhile. I ignored the pesky voice of caution and all the other warning signs, and I went ahead. I clicked that last button …

And the online print edition of my book disappeared from Amazon.

That’s when panic and the question of my sanity set in.

You see, I’d finally approached Barnes & Noble two days before this and they had placed an online order. I was going to Sweden and wanted to take books with me. I had a major disaster on my hands.

Somehow, my better half came to the rescue and got things sort of fixed. The book was back online—but listed as NOT AVAILABLE RIGHT NOW!

The only thing I could do was wait for the computers to catch up with the changes I made.

The wait for Amazon only took a few hours. After one very sleepless night, expanded distribution was back early the next morning.

Right now, Amazon looks like it’s back to normal. I didn’t lose my reviews. Barnes & Noble has their books. I have my new books. The changes are nice. All is well with the world.

However, I can say for sure that I never want to see this screen again:




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