I got an e-mail the other day from someone at “America Star Books”, offering to show off my first novel at some book fair in California. All I’d need to do is sign up for some mailing list of theirs. Wow, what a great deal!
I looked the company up online. They’re a rebranded “PublishAmerica”, described at http://accrispin.blogspot.com/2014/02/publishamerica-is-now-america-star-books.html as being scuzzy vanity publishers. So, be careful if you hear from them too.
thanks for the heads-up!
Thanks for the warning!
Thank you for that!
I don’t know about America Star Books, but I regularly get spam adv’ts from something called Publish Wholesale:
“Publish Wholesale Logo Trouble viewing this email? View it ONLINE.
We’ve got your publishing needs covered.
Visit our website at www.publishwholesale.com Call Us
(727) 394-4505
Our competition…
…hides or confuses what you get in carefully crafted and confusing language
…uses banks of phone people who know little or nothing about your project
…charges at least twice what we do for the same or lesser services
We, on the other hand, do it differently…
Simple, all-inclusive packages
Only what you need without all the extras that raise the price, and no surprises
Support the way you deserve
You’ll always work with the same person who knows you and your project
The absolute lowest prices in the world
They’ll shock you when you compare, but we’ve stood behind them for years.”
“The absolute lowest prices in the world” are $959 to publish your book. I’m used to submitting a book to a publisher (usually FurPlanet Productions) and having it buy the submittal from me. At the least, since I’m paralyzed in a convalescent hospital and Medicare takes any income that I get (in exchange for paying all of my medical bills), the publisher bears all the costs of the book’s production. I haven’t had to look into CreateSpace, Lulu.com, or any of the other publishers that you pay rather than pay you, but I’ve seen that they’re popular with many furry authors. How do they compare?
Yeah I’m necroing things a bit, but nobody answered this question so I’m tossing my hat in the ring for future reference.
CreateSpace doesn’t require you to pay anything to get published as far as I know, however you will need to commission your own cover art and buy a copy of your own book to check that the formatting came out all correct, plus paying for editing and whatever else your book needs to have done to it.
CreateSpace is technically Print-on-Demand, and Lulu.com APPEARS to be the same (to me). The major difference between Print-on-Demand and Vanity Press is that Vanity Press wants a ton of money upfront (thus the email asking you for nearly a grand). By contrast, Print-on-Demand shouldn’t be doing so. Yes there are costs associated with going PoD, but you are in control of where those costs are. You commission your own cover art, hire your own editor, and so forth. You then submit the necessary materials to CreateSpace (or whoever), which then prints a book any time there is an order.
In short:
Any time someone is asking you for money up-front your guard should go up. Traditional publishers won’t EVER do this, and self-publishing pathways shouldn’t either since you will be commissioning the work on your own.
nods CreateSpace requires nothing up front to publish your work. (The only exception I can think of offhand is that there’s a small fee if you want your ISBN listed under your custom publisher name rather than listing CreateSpace as the publisher.)
And technically you don’t even have to buy a copy of your book to check the formatting. I checked mine via their online viewer, and all came out fine in the printed version. I’d still recommend getting a print copy to be on the safe side, of course, but even that isn’t an absolute requirement to proceed.
Minor side note on the topic of ISBN numbers with Create Space:
This is actually a rather HUGE deal. If you use an ISBN from Create Space that means that Create Space (Amazon) is the publisher of record, and thus you will be unable to have print copies of that format (paperback) made by any other printers. If you use your own ISBN then this is not an issue as you are the publisher of record.
This makes no sense. Create Space doesn’t own the copyright. You still own the copyright, so you can still do whatever you want with it – get it printed anywhere else you want. As far as I can tell, the only possible downside to using the Create Space ISBN is stigma against self-publishing – but that’s almost entirely disappeared in the last decade.
Using the Create Space ISBN is convenient and absolutely not a huge deal.
That’s true, but I think what Skye is getting at is that the author doesn’t own the ISBN, the publisher does. CreateSpace tells you as much on their ISBN page: “This ISBN can only be used with the CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.” That doesn’t mean you can’t get it printed somewhere else if you want, it just means you can’t use the same ISBN if you do—you’re printing a new edition of the book with a different publisher. If you owned the ISBN yourself, you could just print with whoever you wanted and have it all be the same edition, because you would be the publisher. (FurPlanet and Sofawolf own their ISBNs, so they can use whatever printers are most cost-effective for a given order.)
There are still some advantages to sticking with CreateSpace’s ISBN over using your own even if that’s an option; libraries and bookstores can technically order from CreateSpace directly, since they have the infrastructure to do that, but AFAIK that’s only provided across all of their “expanded distribution channels” if you use their ISBN. If you bring your own ISBN, you may be on your own for that even if you use CreateSpace’s printing services.