John Beckman Books

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For years I had the paperback versions of my novels done by CreateSpace. The process was straightforward and simple and the results were fine looking books. Then CreateSpace was taken over by Amazon (which will soon be taking over the world). Always trying to fix something that isn't broken, Amazon made the publication of my last paperback an endless chore that never did produce as neat a book as CreaeSpace. But...now you have no choice. You either use KDP publishing or nothing. I've had a lot of experience with the formatting of paperbacks but the KDP process absolutely would not allow me to change things such as margins, headers, footers, gutters etc. No matter how many times I changed them, their "program" would block my alterations. It seems configured for a certain format and is reluctant to allow changes. I've informed them of my problems, but they don't listen to peons.

Of course Amazon will "sell" you their formatting service, but do you really want to spend a thousand dollars when virtually nobody buys paperbacks anymore? And I honestly don't think a non-experienced author trying to use KDP to produce a paperback could navigate the complicated KDP system. You can give it a try, but it is difficult.

So, what to do? I've been publishing thru Amazon for seven or eight years now and while the ebooks sell very well, in all that time only a handful of paperbacks of my novels have been purchased. And why would anybody buy one? They cost three times as much as the ebook version and the author will make only a buck or two off the paperback sale.

This is the 21st century and practically everyone is reading electronically. Either with a Kindle or and iPad or Android or some other device. So my advice is to forget the hassle that KDP has now made of publishing paperbacks. Publish your ebooks and forget about the minuscule number of paperbacks that "might" be bought. It is just not worth all the trouble for very little, if any, return.