Time to upload your interior text. Yay!
Before you do, some things to consider
- Do you want a blank page before your title page?
- Do you want your LCCN printed on your title page? (last weeks post)
- Do you want reviews printed on the first page? (In next weeks post)
- Do you want your blog/website information on your author page?
- Do you want to put a teaser about your next book on the last page?
Look at a bunch of paperback books and decide how you want those first few pages and last few pages to look in your book and design them to look that way.
You are in charge, but there are definite "norms" out there. What patterns do you see? What kind of books break those patterns? You want your book to look professionally done, make sure you do your research.
After you have it designed how you want it to be, upload it on Createspace's site. After it's approved, you'll be able to send away for a proof copy. There's nothing like holding your first book in your hand. When mine arrived I was at work. My daughter called me screaming in the phone. I was so afraid she'd been hurt or in an accident or something. After telling her to calm down, I realized she was telling me my proof had arrived. I asked her if she'd opened the box. Silence...
I laughed and said, "How does it look?"
She answered,"Awesome" And then screamed again.
So much fun!
I suggest you get that proof and look it over with a fine-toothed- comb before sending your interior file to all the ebook services. There is something about a hard copy that lets you SEE mistakes more easily.
Fix any mistakes you and your editor/friends find and then upload your final version. If you were lucky and had no errors-good for you. Start soliciting reviews and get your ebook onto smashwords.
Happy proofing!
8 comments:
I received a coupon for a free copy of my nanowrimo novel from CreateSpace, and wow, you are right...there's nothing like that feeling of seeing your book printed and bound. I almost started crying!
Are we going to get to read that book?
"I asked her if she'd opened the box. Silence...
I laughed and said, "How does it look?"
She answered,"Awesome" And then screamed again. "
Oh, Cindy. That was choice.
Great stuff here once again. I couldn't get "Watched" to load in the Nook version and had to settle with the pdf that I'd also downloaded. Not as easy on my eyes because I couldn't get the page quite as large as I wanted without making it so large I had to scroll. Is the formatting going to be a pain for the various formats, or does Createspace take care of that? (i.e., does one size fit all?)
Thanks for taking every little piece of the publishing process and putting it into bite sized pieces for us.
Thanks for the advice! I especially like the advice to get one printed copy before publishing.
Donna,
I'll have to investigate.I have my Nook version from Barnes and Noble. I'll have to check the one from Smashwords. Createspace will format your books for the Kindle, but not the Nook and it costs like 80 bucks.
My Nook version comes from Smashwords because the procedure for uploading to B&N was too complicated for me. In fact, Smashwords distributes my book to all other e-services besides Amazon, which was an easy conversion. I paid a gal 25 bucks to format my createspace version for smashwords to crunch into all the different formats.
Cindy, thanks for all of this info. You are so thoughtful to share. Hopefully, I'll be able to access your old blog posts so that I can review them when I am ready to prepare one of my novels I've decided to publish myself.
Great job! Thanks, Cindy!
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