I'm reviving this old thread in hopes of gathering more information. I've had a few friends express interest in the subject, and while I'm happy to tell them what little I know, it would be nice to be able to send them a link to more info.
Actually, what I'm interested in is not so much self-publishing as Print On Demand. Several small presses I know of use POD services of one kind or another. I'd love to hear from publishers who use POD, if they have the time and feel like sharing some trade secrets.
Julie Carter used Lulu to self-publish her poetry collection a few years ago, and it came out looking good; I believe she was happy with the results. Bill Knott used to use Lulu to self-publish his books, but switched to CreateSpace - I don't know why, probably some technical reason.
I have only ever used CreateSpace. I was pleased with the service and the finished product. Mind you, it is not for the computer-illiterate. If you're not comfortable working with templates, file formats, fonts, etc., forget it.
Here's everything I know about CreateSpace.
The way it works is you upload your manuscript in electronic form, and CreateSpace makes it available for sale on the CreateSpace and Amazon websites. They make it pretty easy, even assigning you an ISBN if you don't have one already. CreateSpace then prints copies one at a time, as people order them. The nice thing about POD is that you aren't charged for the copies up front; the printer takes a percentage of every sale. Of course, if you want to send free copies to reviewers, or keep a stack of copies on hand to sell at readings etc., you have to buy them yourself (at an author's discount).
Some notes:
CreateSpace accepts several different file formats, including MS-Word and PDF. They provide MS-Word templates to format your manuscript, or you can do it yourself as long as you follow their formatting instructions. I used OpenOffice and then exported the file to PDF.
You can use their web-based tool to design your cover, or you can design your own from scratch and upload an image file; again, there are formatting requirements.
I ran into an issue that's likely to affect poets, since poetry collections tend to be short. If you want your book to have spine text, there's a page minimum: 130 pages if you use their cover design tool, and 100 pages if you upload your own cover.
Some CreateSpace users have complained of poor print quality, crooked text on pages, etc. I haven't run into this, myself.
There's a feature in CreateSpace for making your book available on Kindle. I didn't bother making my poetry book available on Kindle because of formatting issues. I did manage to create a Kindle version of another book. It was a huge pain in the ass. I don't have a Kindle device, so I had to test my file using special software, and carefully proofread each page, making little tweaks here and there and then re-converting, re-testing, blah blah blah. This was last year, and it felt to me like the technology was still in a very early stage of development. If you can afford to pay someone to do it who really knows what they're doing and can do it efficiently, that's what I'd recommend.
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