Pumpkin R.

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.