Support for Indie Authors discussion

Hey-o!

I'm in that 24 waiting period with Createspace to see if my paperback is ready to go. It's wanting me to set up distribution now and I was going to just go with the basic standard for now. But what do you guys know about the Createspace Direct where certain vendors get it for wholesale? Do authors even make anything off of that? Or is the only plus getting your book potentially before more readers?

Anyone here use it/recommend it?

And I'm assuming that even if one only chooses standard distribution at the time of set up that we can go back later and add more channels if we desire to???

I publish to Createspace for Amazon and I also publish to Ingram for the other online retailers. Some authors use Createspace for both and prefer it that way. For me, this would mean less royalties on books sold through Barnes and Noble, for instance...instead of $3 royalty it would be $1 per book. Honestly I don't sell a lot of paperbacks through retailers other than Amazon so it probably doesn't make much of a difference.

Using Createspace for expanded distribution *might* make you price your book higher than you want it to be priced in order to cover CS's cut. So if you want to price your book at 10.95, they might tell you that the lowest you can go is 13.95 with expanded distribution. It depends on how much printing costs and channel costs are. You can add and remove channels later if you wish :).

Thanks, Marie! Yeah, I started talking to Ingram about doing everything outside of Amazon. I think what I'll do is just give it a couple of months with just the standard on CS and see what kind of sales I have. If I'm selling pretty decently then I'll use earnings to sign up for Ingram, buy another ISBN, and pay for the design tweek for the cover.

I'm with you, I'd rather set it up the best way for the long run.