A few weeks ago, CreateSpace was taken over the KDP—Kindle Direct Publishing, and over the past few weeks, titles already in CreateSpace have been migrating to KDP, and this is still occurring as I write.
You will get a notice about transferring your files, with a “Start Now” button to start the process. Then, your files will automatically be transferred, and you will not be able to publish anymore books on CreateSpace.
What if you want to start the transfer earlier rather than waiting? The KDP specialist I spoke to didn’t know and recommended that you wait.
In any case, change is coming, and when it does the process occurs fairly quickly, depending on how many books you have. I had about 200 books on CreateSpace, and within a few hours they were all on KDP.
Your CreateSpace books will appear just as they were originally designed, though they will now be laid out with KDP e-book listed with the paperback. If the paperback or Kindle e-book was previously published, each will be listed as “live,” and if you haven’t already published the e-book you can now publish it on Kindle if you wish.
The transfer is the easy part. What is more difficult is publishing a new paperback on KDP, and later publishing an e-book. Before it was easy to publish a CreateSpace book, and when it was finished, download the Kindle ready cover and upload it on Kindle. Plus you could either use the CreateSpace PDF or upload your own doc., docx. or other allowed file format on Kindle.
But now that option of using a Kindle ready cover no longer exists. Instead, you have to create your cover separately in both paperback and e-book formats, although you can use the same image on both.
At least the process of uploading your original file is still the same. You need a PDF, preferably print-quality (PDF/X-1a:2001) for the paperback, and your own file, as noted, for Kindle.
What is more complicated and time-consuming is using a template. If you or a designer creates your final cover, there is no big difference. You go to the “Help” menu to determine the specs for the front cover, backcover, and spine. Then, you or the designer create PDF, preferably 300 dpi, though KDP will print lower resolution files.
The big difference is the much more limited number of KDP templates. I have now published two paperback books with two different templates and afterward created two Kindle covers with the same image, and both took much longer than creating a CreateSpace cover and using a Kindle ready cover.
Using one of several templates for images, I found I had to use an image that could easily fit into the layout for a complete book, or create such an image in Photoshop or another image editing program. Since it is possible to resize an image, in one case, I greatly expanded an image so the title, subtitle, and author’s name would show up against the image. In the other case, I created an image in Photoshop for the front cover and adjusted it slightly to show off the title, subtitle, and authors name. Then, I created the rest of the image for the back cover and spine to be all black, so the back cover copy, author’s bio, and spine copy would show up against that. At least the template does allow you to change the color and style of the text.In any event, figure that there is a big learning curve in using the KDP templates for creating the cover.
Then, everything else is pretty much the same, and you have the option of getting a free KDP ISBN for your paperback or bringing your own. You can use your own ISBN for Kindle, but don’t need an ISBN for that, and you determine pricing much as before, though the printing costs might vary somewhat.
For now, phone support is available through KDP as with CreateSpace, though in the past, Kindle primarily used emails to communicate. Will that phone support continue? The marketing specialist didn’t know, but let’s hope. I certainly could never have gotten all my questions answered if I had to use email. The marketing specialist was very helpful in telling me all I needed to know about creating covers and using templates, though it will still take a lot of experimentation to know what to do if I want to continue to create covers myself rather than hiring a book cover designer to take over the process.