CreateSpace

I'm a writer and had previously dealt with Create Space before it was taken over by Amazon
Create Space is no longer user friendly to self publishing writers. It's tricky because it seemed to force you to use their templates and force you to abide by their format.
Don't use create space. The stress takes over your valuable time. Instead of writing your book, you're dealing wih formatting and call center from out of US, in accents that are even hard to understand.

DON'T EVER SHOP AT OLDIES, EVER! They are liars, and a complete scam website. I purchased several DVD, and after they arrived some did not work, and to make a long story short, it has been months with me contacting them and all's I get are lies which they never intend to carry-out to replace the defective DVDs. All the DVDs you purchase will come on a cheep silicone, or they just won't work.

I've read the reviews here about CreateSpace and was surprised at some of the negative reviews. I've published eleven books and the quality of the finished books has been consistently excellent. Granted, I do all my own work from cover design to interior set up so the cost is zero. The choices available for the size of the book as well as the preformatted interior blanks makes the job extremely easy. Help is available but I've never had to utilize it so I'm not familiar with the costs involved.
There was one incident where a signature was omitted in one of six books ordered. I notified them and within days I not only had a replacement copy but they also included an extra copy at no cost to me. Working with CreateSpace has been an amazing experience especially their distribution which is worldwide within days of publishing.

I recently launched my first book and have talked with many people confirming they had purchased my book from Amazon. Create space shows I only sold 20 books so far. One friend alone purchased 10 books. I know their reported sales are not to be true and they told me I had to get a picture of a bar code of EVERY book so that they could compare to their records. This is almost impossible and no way to prove them wrong. I feel as if they are stealing sales from me.

I went into my CreateSpace venture extremely excited about the platform. At every single corner, I was asked for my credit card. For their error of NOT posting the prices for edits, they would charge me $79 for a one word edit. It was highly disappointing. I spoke with supervisors and NO one could assist me. I am so upset that I spent close to $1,000 with them and got a less than average product.

On 4 april Create Space charged my business account 5 separate charges totaling more then $3500. 00 in a two min time frame. I notified them of the "theft" within 20 min. The claimed they flagged orders and none were sent out. But here is where the real screwing begins, They "Create Space" are not responsible and totally refused to "Reverse" the charges. Now my business will be wiped out by tomorrow after noon. DO NOT DO BUSINESS WITH THESE PEOPLE!

Since being taken over by Amazon they have sunk into a quagmire of totally unnecessary bureaucracy.

Want to get into book stores? You need a special Createspace only ISBN.
Want to update a manuscript or cover after publication? You can't - you have to remove the whole thing and add another with a new ISBN. And even after that they want to see a contract!

Essentially you can't do things that should be quick and easy.

I submitted a title and in the review process they tagged a bad keyword. OK no big deal. I corrected the key word and sent them the update. My title was "Suppressed" pending review. They sent an email that it would be released within 24hours. Guess what? 5 days later and sever calls to their support outsourced to India and nothing. AND they dont know anything AND they wont let you talk to the validation department. What a crappy way of doing business. This is an Amazon company? Close it and start over.

They have great customer service. Very timely. The representative talked me through and stayed on the phone with me until we got everything resolved

My publisher submitted my book and the borders weren't justified. A professional typesetter would have caught this mistake but now I'm stuck with a shoddy product. The only reason they get one star is because zero isn't an option.

I have used CreateSpace since 2009 and created 3 self-published books. Really for someone who has good to excellent writing ability, it's a humiliating experience to try the commercial houses in NYC. They won't accept you unless you know an agent, and agents are usually swamped. With CreateSpace, my first book was sort of a desktop publishing experiment. Considering I didn't think I was going to survive the first year after cancer, it made me proud. The second book was actually the product of many years of writing, and it was polished, but again the commercial houses may like Maya Angelou, but she was their token. They don't like creative nonfiction bios or creative nonfiction autobiographical stories unless you are way down low like sitting in prison. With these next two books, I used Bookcover Pro to develop the covers. I also used another editor to achieve the ideal layout. I had to call the Createspace company a few times to get the cover right---my fault being a bit on the picky side one might say. And also I had a bit of an Adobe flattening issue that took some time for me to work out. It took a few extra trial orders to get things exactly right, but Createspace was great to work with, very patient, and they didn't even force you to work with just one developer. To this day, I am very grateful to CreateSpace, because someday, when I have more audacity, I hope to actually market my books more. The burden of marketing your books is on you, of course, and you should not feel shy just because you self-published! They have a lot of examples of DIY authors whose presentations and touring have helped get them established.

Depending where you are on the do-it-yourself spectrum, there's some good and some bad here. My biggest complaint is that CreateSpace did not tell me upfront that when I signed up to have them set up my manuscript per their interior template, I would not receive a file that I could manipulate myself. (Perhaps it was in the small print, somewhere.) What I received instead for both my custom cover and interior file was a PDF file that I could not alter. Thus, I am locked into CreateSpace, depending on CreateSpace to tell me what the typographic specifications are (typeface, point size, leading, and so on), being unable to make what-if changes myself (for example, what will this look like if I change the typeface or decrease the leading?), and then having to pay them to make any changes, including some (but not all) of their own mistakes. Nor are the folks who worked on my cover and interior skilled book designers. They appear to be technicians who dump text into a template and have no sense of design (say, getting the leading reasonably right) or eye for details. For each round of reviews and corrections, they fix two things and then break something else. Had I to do it over again, I would take my CreateSpace money and pay a real book designer to build my file with my specifications and then give me that file so I can experiment and make my own changes.

It seems like the big publishers are running scared. They will not even consider reading, much less publishing authors who do not conform to their formulas for success. This is much like Hollywood films in the old days rejecting creativity in favor of formulaic success... thus opening the floodgates for independent film makers to take over. That's what's happening with the big publishers forcing authors over to something called createspace.com where an author copies and pastes text and creates the title online, edits it as many times as he wants. And publishes in both ebook format and paperback copies on demand... for free!

I don't want to waste too much time on reviewing a pitiful company which can exist solely because it's under cover of giant Amazon.
Createspace is one monumental mistake. From data transfer to the review process, to printing, to customer service. It's a shameful experience for anyone who knows how to spell the word book. Createspace is a senseless company, threatening one of the human kind's greatest wisdom: The Book. Mediocrity would be a giant step up for this shaking waste of internet space. I hope Bezos will take this birth defect to the moon one-way.

I self published a book Sep of 2016 and on both occasions just before Christmas, I ordered several hundred books. In 2016 they printed the black and white photos very dark and was told it was outsourced to another printer. They remade the books. Again, this Christmas 2017, my ordered was flawed again with very dark printing. They replaced the books again and they were exactly the same, dark printing. Sent all five cartons of books back and WON'T use CreateSpace again. Highly Recommend that you DO NOT use Createspace! They stink!

The help desk in the USA is extraordinary at CreateSpace. As of last week I started reaching a help desk overseas. I had several well-researched, extremely complicated questions. They told me when they picked up that I would have to just keep calling. I did that many times for two days and never got the US. I wrote a very negative review, but sent an email asking for help and got it via a phone call from a supervisor. So I am changing my review. This company has the best help desk in the USA--great people, cheerful, helpful and SMART. I am deleting my negative review. I hope, however, that they will continue to make it possible to ask for help from folks in the USA who understand the very complicated questions. I think that's why they have been popular to date.

I loved CreateSpace because they were available when I needed them, which was not often. But now not only do I get a foreign help desk that cannot understand very complicated questions about publishing, if I want to talk to the desk in the USA, they will not forward the call to a supervisor who can help. I will probably give up and go to another publisher. The overseas help desk say I can just call and call and call and see if I get anywhere, and I have spent an hour doing that in 2 days. I have never felt that the folks overseas answering my emails understood the complicated questions, so this is not an option. The folks at the help desk in the USA were phenomenal.

I got Hacked and they did nothing. I shut down my account by putting another SSN in my account. They sent my royalty payment to someone named Daria Getman. She changed my name and my bank account info. I called them back in July they did nothing. Now KDP is involved I have spent hours talking to them. We will see what happens. Stay tuned

We contracted the publishing of a book destined for a book launch. The books were sent to an incorrect recipient in Italy via UPS a talk only company that does not know about customer service. Create Space received the books that were returned (without contacting the addressee) and since then - after promising that they would be resent - failed to follow up. We are still awaiting the delivery of the book and there has been no further information on their whereabouts. Appalling! Bordering on fraudulent... money was paid, no outcome,

If you want to self-publish your books for FREE, this is the website. The staff is responsive and professional. Your books are automatically listed on Amazon. Great contribution to society - turning aspiring authors to published authors.

The list of problems I had included:

1) The edited manuscript returned to me was filled with over 3 dozen errors. Having accepted he track changes and read the first 100+ pages, I found numerous errors and sent back the manuscript. I asked them to re-edit the manuscript and they refused to do so. But suggested it is stated in their T&Cs that errors can still remain after the manuscript is edited. AND they also suggested I should consider purchasing another round of edit. Looking at the track changes, I realised the 200,000+ words manuscript was edited over less than 2 weeks. This explains quite a lot.
2) After spending a large amount of time to redo the edits and resent the manuscript, they returned an interior proof that had a partial copyright page (which did not bear any copyright statement whatsoever).
3) I asked why they had created an interior proof without a correct copyright page text and dedication page. They suggested I should have sent this when I sent the corrected manuscript. Previously when I published with CreateSpace, they had requested the copyright page text and dedication page separately from the manuscript itself. And these pages were then added before they sent the first interior proof I received.
4) When I finally submitted the copyright page and dedication page, they sent another interior proof with the copyright page beginning HALFWAY down the page in Dec 2017. Since then, I had sent numerous emails begging them to correct the text layout so that it will begin at the top of the page.
5) They have refused to change the layout of the copyright page. All they are suggestion is the interior was created into a pdf format automatically by a software and I should purchase another interior service if I need the copyright page text to appear at the top of the page. I have never seen or heard such nonsense in my life.
6) Their representatives have no idea what they are doing. I have informed them numerous times that no reputable novel, textbook, encyclopaedia, dictionary, magazine, ect would have a copyright page text beginning HALFWAY down the page!
7) They have refused to answer my emails since early January 2018.

I have contacted The Society of Authors and they have informed me that what CreateSpace is doing is wrong. They should not be requesting a separate payment for the Copyright page to begin at the top of the page as oppose to the middle of the page. I ask to communicate with a Senior Manager upon their review of the email communications regarding my queries and they have yet to reply. Approaching CreateSpace was a great disappointment.

I absolutely loved createspace before it merged with KDP. Now it's nearly impossible to contact support and find answers to questions I have. They used to be so caring and helpful. But now the publishing process (uploading cover ect) is awful. I miss old createspace :(

I used CreateSpace when it was BookSurge in 2009, and they were great: access to Amazon, good royalties, and staff were willing to help no matter what it took to get the job done well, which is why I came back

But now, 8 years later, I can't say the same thing. CreateSpace (CS) has you use a template for your book, but you quickly find that the template has severe limitations (like pagination, headers and other kinds of formatting). CS then charged me $149 for help with formatting and even then couldn't get it right. I talked to at least 4 different people to have the problem resolved, and in the end, just asked them to stop work. It was pretty clear that the experience from 2009 didn't fit into their business model today of only providing help until the service fee is exhausted. Result: the publication formatting looks amateurish. Looking back, I would have gone to UpWork for freelance formatting help, then published through CS. You can find someone less expensive and more accommodating than CS's add-on services. I regret not having known this earlier.

I have multiple titles with CreateSpace and before it changed hands, it was a very smooth process to revise exterior or interior files. Now, I have one of my titles suppressed because of copyright validation request. I've called and emailed multiple times and keep getting the runaround. A two word title promotion for the sequel is the only change made to the interior file and I get my title suppressed. This will probably be my last hurrah with CreateSpace.

Update: Since I submitted the above review, my title has been moved to Createspace Hold status (over a week now and still no change). It seems that Amazon doesn't want a title to be in circulation with another distribution outlet. Nothing prevents this if an author is using a different ISBN for another book distributor. Ingram provides hardcover and I use them for my paperback expanded distribution as well. I do have a signed agreement to exclusively distribute my audiobook titles with Amazon Audible and iTunes. But no such contract disclaimer prevents me from doing so with print titles. I have ten titles with Createspace and unbelievable the discourteous treatment I've been receiving.