Thanks for stopping by and sharing your pricing information. According to Createspace’s book cost calculator a 6 inch x 9 inch 300 page (which is your average trade paperback) book costs $7.50. If you upgrade to their Pro Plan, $39 per book title the first year and $5.00 per book title each year after, your cost per book goes down to $4.45.

However, that $39 still needs to be included in the cost per book price. Therefore, purchasing one book will really cost you $43.45. To bring that cost down to a decent level, you would have to purchase at least 39 books which would spread the cost of that Pro plan to $1.00 per book and putting your actual cost at $5.45 per book. If you purchased 78 books, your per costs price would come down to $4.95 and so on and so forth.

They say there are no set up costs involved with publishing your book but I haven’t been able to determine if you are required to purchase one of their service packages in order to get them to publish your book.

Even if they are not required to purchase a service package, most authors will because they have no experience with designing a book cover etc. Therefore the cost of that package needs to also be included in the per price cost of the books.

This is not correct. I can buy a single copy of a 300 page book from CreateSpace for about $4.50. If I get an order through Amazon with a selling price of $14.95, my “royalty” is about $3.50. I don’t have to buy in quantity.

I know. I read author blogs and the only thing many of them can think of is getting that book in their hands. And the problem is compounded by the mistaken belief that once they have a book, they will sell millions and be the next JK Rowling. It’s crazy but as long as people won’t listen, I guess these companies will continue to flourish.

Arwen Taylor

You are correct. What people try to pass off as subsidy publishing today is really just glorified book printing. In the past, true subsidy publishers would pay half and the author would pay half. In addition, subsidy publishers were just like regular publishers in that they actually screened the books that came across their desks to make sure they were putting out something that would sell. They wanted to make their money back.

Today’s “Subsidy Publishers” do nothing more than print the book. They don’t do any screening, editing or marketing. The onus is on the author to make sure their book reads well, is edited correctly and to market the book. You may as well be a self publisher.

It’s sad how marketers have mislead writers in such a way but the only thing that can combat that is education.

@ Cathy

From what I understand CreateSpace is the same as LuLu. They are just book printers. It looks like they do have some helpful services that you can pay for such as editing and it looks like they will handle shipping of the book. But in the end, it’s all on you to make sure your book reads well and to market and sell it. Additionally, unless you purchase an ISBN, you will be published under theirs which can limit what you can do with the book.

The biggest problem with places like Createspace is that in order to get a good price on your books and therefore sell them at a decent price to your customers is that you have to buy them in bulk. With LuLu one 200 page book (perfect bound, 6×9 paperback) costs $8.50.

If you want to make money on your book, you have add a few dollars on top of that. How much you add depends on who/where you are selling them. If you are selling them out of the trunk of your car direct to the reader then you might be okay selling them at $10 or $11. And I emphasize might because you would be competing against other similar books selling at $7-$8 that were produced by commercial publishers.

However, if you want to sell your books to bookstores you would have to price your book at a minimum of $21.25 to cover the cost of your book because bookstores require a minimum of a 40% discount off the list price before they will even consider putting your book on their shelves. If you want to make money on your book, you would have to price it even higher than that.

If you want your 200 page book to sell at a reasonable price you would have to buy 1000 copies of your book which would bring the individual price down to $4.80 making the minimum list price you could sell it for to recoup your costs $12.00.

I couldn’t find the per book price for CreateSpace but I doubt they are much better.

I think places like CreateSpace and LuLu are fine if you are selling a specialized product that your target market would buy regardless of the cost and if you are not looking to get your book into bookstores. However most authors are trying to sell mass market paperback fiction books and want to get them on the shelves of Borders and Barnes&Noble and therefore are not best served by these types of websites.

I hope this helps Cathy. Good luck.

Arwen Taylor

In other fields, such as subsidized housing, subsidized child care, subsidized transportation, subsidized agriculture, subsidized education, etc., a government, employer or organization pays part of the cost of a service, and the user of the service pays part.

In the strange world of subsidy publishing, the user (author) pays the entire cost of publishing.

There is NO SUBSIDY in subsidy publishing.

It’s particularly ironic that, publishing — which depends on words — so frequently misuses them.

Also, technically POD is not a “printing technology.” It’s a business method. Although POD is usually done with high-speed laser presses, POD could be done with offset, letterpress, or even a quill on parchment.

Michael N. Marcus

Author of “Become a Real Self Publisher”

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