Self-publishing has been an adventure! I started my book mid-June and first self-published on CreateSpace September 6th. Here are the Top 10 lessons I learned about what to expect when writing a book and self-publishing on CreateSpace…
1. Your book will be off the market for 1-11 days every time you make a change. 
It usually meant 24 hours of having my book off the market when I discovered a mistake. And then, if you approve the proof, you have to wait for the changes to take effect. The silver lining is they say 3-5 days (gasp!), and thankfully it never took that long. It took a few hours generally. But that’s at least a day to a max of six days you could be off the market for one cute little mistake that will drive you nuts if you don’t fix it. Then there’s another claimed 3-5 days after you approve the proof before it shows on Amazon, but luckily, I found this to usually be a few hours!
2. During the 24 hour CreateSpace proof review time, you can’t upload another proof.
It seems silly to think you can do all your proofing and previewing, load your new version for Create Space review, and would find another mistake in the next 24 hours… but it happens. You cannot submit a new proof until they’ve gotten back to you on the first one. This tacks on another 12-24 hours of waiting in vain if you already need a new version lined up.
How did a bullet appear at the beginning of my title page? It was never in the last 40 previews!
3. What you see is not what you get.
You change something and something else changes somewhere else. You may not even know!
4. I previewed it page-by-page (click-by-click) fully every time.
I really didn’t want to click through every page AGAIN (and by again, I mean for the 40th time), but every time the fear was too great that I would be locked out for 24 hours and not have my book available, because I was too impatient/lazy/late to work to click through every page. It is the ONLY way to ensure it is correct because you never know what random formatting happened on the one page you didn’t check.
5. You have to get permission.
I loved writing English papers in high school, but wasn’t delighted to learn that I’d need a Works Cited (or Notes in this Case) section. I was mid-way through the book when I (thankfully) discovered that I had to get permission for anything I wanted to cite, whether quotes or paraphrases or borrowed ideas. I read this and dismissed it, thinking none of my favorite books did this! Turns out they did. I referenced a handful of my favorite self-help books and realized they all had Notes, mostly endnotes, that I completely read over when enjoying the books. They cited SO much. I was actually shocked. And then deflated. I had found articles and even wanted to reference a chef on Chopped who said cooking saved her life. And now I had to reach out to everyone? So I set out to do so. Some gave me permission, some never got back to me, some said no (Chopped), and some wanted to charge. I learned about fair use and am taking my chances on some quotes I included (and cited) that are under 300 words (but would not hold up in court if pursued).
6. As a techie Elsa would say, “Let it Loaaad, Let it Load!”
I got back into Candy Crush while I was waiting for everything to load. Granted, my computer was probably bogged down by all of my activity, but I still spent so much time watching load bars, loading messages, swirly load things, you name it. Above all, I’m grateful this service exists, but I wish I went in with an expectation that it was going to take me a while to load my document, preview it, and then likely load and preview four more times before submitting!
7. Will it ever be Perfect?
I’m not a perfectionist, but I felt like my integrity was on the line with every mistake. Because there were mistakes. So far, I’ve made at least twenty changes not including formatting issues that seem to pop up as briskly as the sun does every morning. Mystery mistakes still baffle me, and each one felt like a dagger to my heart and soul. The handful of readers that have bought my book deserve better than this missing word.
8. Ebook formatting? Muahaha…
Just when I thought I was in the clear of finalizing my print book, I was in for a surprise with the eBook. While thankfully my template came with some good instructions (that I read fully after a first attempt that was a mess), it was maddening to look at the Word doc and look and my iPad preview and see two completely different formats of the same texts. It would show something indented that, in the source file, was not indented! How do you fix that?! I opted to load as a word doc and roll the dice on Kindle’s auto-formatting, which was far better than the time I wasted on recommended “web page” format that provides more control before conversion.
9. You can’t edit your own book
I thought I was great a grammar. I probably am, but I can’t edit my own book. I’ve been in my book for at least forty hours a week for the last couple months, read it in print multiple times, had an amazing editor, and still read right over thoughts that my brain auto-corrected for me. If I chose to wait on publishing, I would have had at least three other people read a printed proof all the way through.
10. Timing
My advice is to not have a goal. I didn’t take that advice, but I feel like trying to get my book done before my three month backpacking adventure in South America seemed like a valid reason to have a publish-by date. Of course it took longer than I expected and I still wish I had more time to have more readers proof it and not be so pressured on ensuring updates are made the second Amazon approves them.
Every time I saved as a pdf, I had to reformat Page Settings because it was trying to save as 8.5″ x 11″, even though the pages themselves were correct and I corrected it every time. I did this at least 100 times.
How about a bonus #11: Welcome back to Microsoft Word
There might be another program, but I happily bought a template from www.thebookdesigner.com which was worth every penny. My superstar friend and author, Kerry Rego, recommended it (she used it for her books – LINK), and I don’t know where I’d be without her recommendation. But I had to learn word in a way I never knew before. Styles, Section Breaks, mirrored margins, bookmarked and linked table of contents, header and footers with different settings, page numbers with roman numerals and numbers… Not to mention venturing into eBook formatting. It’s been the most frustrating part of all. Every time I save a version (which feels like ALL the time right now), I have to readjust the Page Setup styles for some reason. I change one thing to be centered and barely noticed that half of my document got centered with it. One page number shows up on a blank page, I delete it, and it deletes the others. In a 200 page book, there’s a LOT that can go wrong and ample opportunity to miss seeing it until you do that page-by-page review in the CreateSpace Previewer.
All those question marks don’t make me feel confident in hitting Publish, which is the next step if you don’t select Change! “Feel the fear, and do it anyway!” -Susan Jeffers
