On Demand Printers and what has happened to Createspace?

While there are other options to the two main players in on demand publishing for the independent author have been Createspace and Ingram Spark. Createspace has essentially been Amazon’s in demand publisher of choice. They where the sound choice for paperbacks which were mostly text. Affordable, of decent quality and with a fast turnaround and a no hassle integration with Amazon. Recently they were taken over by KDP publishing which has been where you would upload your ebook to appear on Amazon Kindle. The merger is actually a good thing as it makes matters easier if you are just publishing now. One place for both, instead of two.

If you have an existing Creatspace account you need only login and follow the fairly easy instructions to have everything ported over to KDP.

Ingram Spark is the on demand printer of choice in our opinion if you want either a hardcover or interior color. Createspace did not offer a hardcover option that you could put on Amazon, and the quality of their interior color was, well…not great on top of being prohibitively expensive. Ingram’s overall quality has always been slightly superior to Createspace’s and the color is much better. The downside of Ingram is there are start-up costs. A fee to set up your book for instance. They also don’t offer a free ISBN code like Createspace did and if you are buying only one they are expensive.

As this is just evolving at the time of this post it remains to be seen if KDP having taken over for Createspace will improve the quality of color or offer a real hardcover option. We expect things to stay largely the same as they were with Creatspace, but we shall see.

We’re going to write more about this in the coming weeks as everything seems to been flux. When the dust settles we’ll offer more detail.

Navigating the interface of either of these on demand printers can be daunting. Check the Author’s Services if you are seeking help.