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Friday, July 23, 2010

Oh, Size Does Matter

in the publishing industry.  I've come to discover that there are books that are considered an "industry standard" size and others that are "custom size".  Guess which one I had been working with?!  So, now our 8 1/2 x 11 books (custom) are getting whittled down to 8 x 10 (industry standard).  Why does size matter?  Because, although you can get your books listed on amazon.com and downloaded or converted into ebooks, you cannot get them in stores through CreateSpace's service if they are not industry standard.  Do I think Barnes & Noble or Borders is going to be clamoring to stock our books?  No, but I'd like to have the option.

I'm sad in a way because I had the crochet book set up as 6 x9, which was just such a fun size, easy to carry, etc., but have converted it into 8 x 10 also.  Well, at least all publications by Many Creative Gifts will be uniform and pretty easily recognizable :-)

Oh, and there are differences between Lulu and CreateSpace, though not a bad as I thought it would be.  The Lulu book definitely had nicer paper, but the colors were more muted; CreateSpace is slightly less quality, though again, not as bad as I thought it would be.  The good point -- the colors seems to be a bit brighter with the CreateSpace book.  Also, the same book, all in color, 32 pages -- Lulu charges $11.80, CreateSpace charges $3.95!  CreateSpace takes longer to ship, but for that difference...

Hope this helps all the budding self-publishers out there!  We're on the verge of making our big book announcement, so please check back!

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