Amazon just launched createspace- A books on demand self publishing service.

The service has been around for a while but Amazon made some changes to the service to make it very attractive to publishers just starting out or that do not want to handle inventory, shipping or other processes required with publishing and distributing books and media

With createspace you can create your own estore to sell

• Books- professionally printed, bound and shipped on demand
• DVD- they’ll even assign a UPC and you are eligible for listing on IMDB
• Audio CD
• Audio Books
• Video Downloads- unbox rental or download to Tivo
• HD DVD
• Blu-ray disc’s- coming soon

Amazon manufactures, packages and ships the product when a customer orders one of your products. When you submit a dvd for example a sample is sent for your review and approval before your titles go live. All of this is without any minimums or commitments to quantity. This is perfect for someone starting out wanting to sell books and/or dvd.

Imagine creating a product on Adsense for example- a book with several dvd’s of videos sold together as a set. You are responsible for the content and mastering of the videos- that’s it. Send it off to Amazon and your basically done

Now the first time I read thru the pricing it seemed a little like you had to give up an awful lot to amazon for the service but here is how it breaks down

Example from the createspace site:

If you sold a 100 page black and white book with a list price of $25 through a createspace e-store, you would earn a royalty of $14.85 a sale.
The calculation is

• % share for e-store $5.00 (20% of $25)
• Fixed charge $3.15
• Charge per page $2.00 (100 pages at $.02 per page)
• Amazon share total $10.15

Amazon also reserves the price to lower the price of your product (put it on sale) but you still get the same royalty based on the original price set

If your selling an awful lot of books or dvd’s this probably isn’t very cost effective but if your just starting out, don’t have a lot of titles yet or the money to put out to make up 1,000 books or have the space to keep and ship all that material this is a very cost effective way to enter the publishing world

Having a store on amazon, assigning a UPC to your book, getting listed in IMDB, having a fully professionally made sample to show to prospective buyers is a great way to add professionalism and creditability to your new publishing career. I highly recommend createspace from Amazon and look forward hopefully to use this service for books and dvds of my own

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