Createspace and Kindle Direct Publishing become one

[Brian G Turner]

An email from Amazon today announces that Createspace and Amazon Direct Publishing are to merge into a single service.

Accounts from Createspace will be moved to KDP, and existing KDP publishers will get the expanded publishing options that Createspace originally provided, not least to bookshops, plus easier sale of paperbacks to Canada and Australia.

Here's a copy of the email:

Hello,

We’re excited to announce that CreateSpace (CSP) and Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) will become one service. As a reminder, KDP now offers Expanded Distribution to sell your paperbacks to physical bookstores in the US, as well as the ability to sell your paperback books on Amazon.ca and Amazon.com.au (Amazon.mx coming soon). With these features, KDP’s paperback distribution will be on par with CreateSpace’s distribution. KDP also offers features that aren’t available on CreateSpace. These include the ability to purchase ads to promote paperbacks on Amazon.com and locally printed author copies in Europe.

As a result of these enhancements to KDP and our ongoing efforts to provide a more seamless experience for managing your paperback and digital books, CreateSpace and KDP will become one service. On KDP, your paperbacks will still be printed in the same facilities, on the same printers, and by the same people as they were on CreateSpace.

In the coming weeks, we’ll start automatically moving your CreateSpace books to KDP. Your books will remain available for sale throughout the move and you’ll continue to earn royalties. Once we begin this process you’ll be unable to edit existing titles or create new titles on CreateSpace. To learn more about the move and review the latest, visit here.

If you have a release planned soon or you would like to start the move yourself, you can move your entire CreateSpace catalog to KDP in just a few steps. To get started on your move to KDP, log in to your CreateSpace Member Dashboard. During this transition, you can contact KDP customer support by email and access phone support in English. For insider advice on what to expect during the move, check out the Fundamentals of KDP webinar.

There are a few payment and printing fee differences associated with the move. Any royalties earned while your books are on CreateSpace will be paid according the CreateSpace's payment schedule, 30 days after the end of the month in which they were earned. After you move your books to KDP, new royalties earned will be paid on KDP's payment schedule. KDP pays royalties on a monthly basis 60 days after the end of the month in which they were earned. As a result, you’ll be paid in October for any royalties earned in September on CreateSpace and be paid in November for any royalties earned on KDP. In addition, some low-page count books will see an increase in printing fees when they are printed in the UK and EU. We've already sent an email to the small number of accounts affected by this change. Learn more about KDP’s printing costs here.

We’ll be in touch with more updates in the coming weeks. It is still Day 1 for independent publishing. As Amazon’s recent shareholder letter noted, there are more than a 1,000 authors who earn more than a $100,000 a year from their work with us. We could not be more optimistic about the future of independent publishing and this change will allow us to innovate faster for you.

Best Regards,
The CreateSpace and KDP Team

 

[Cathbad]

I'd heard bad things... but publishing paperbacks on KDP has proven easier than on Createspace!

 

[Jo Zebedee]

I think there’s already a thread on this

 

[Brian G Turner]

I'd heard bad things... but publishing paperbacks on KDP has proven easier than on Createspace!

I went through the beta and it was not a good experience - my Createspace stats were lost, and my paperback disappeared for a couple of months.

I think there’s already a thread on this

I know there's been discussion about moving from Createspace to Amazon KDP, but I've not seen any mention elsewhere about expanded distribution, higher fees for short books, and extended paperback reach.

 

[Cathbad]

I am having a small problem at the moment: My newest book is suppose to have paperback and kindle linked, but it is not showing up linked. On my KDP Bookshelf, they are shown as linked, but not on the Amazon site.

Hopefully, this will be resolved quickly.

 

[tinkerdan]

Here I was trying to decide whether I should do this--not realizing that it was a do or die situation.
It took like five minutes to complete; however I only had one book in createspace.
I wish they would offer hardbound edition--all the family and friends really love those.

 

[Robert Zwilling]

I used KDPs microsoft word add on to publish a paperback through amazon. It had everything preset in it to make a file that could be saved as a pdf and uploaded to kdp to make a paperback with minimum effort. I got a message, would I like to update my Kindle Create Add-in for Microsoft Word after using it to remake a kindle file. Now it can't create a paperback automatically, I have to manually set up all the parameters in Word. My copy of the Kindle Create Add-in for Microsoft Word only seems to make E books now. I uninstalled and reinstalled but it made no difference. At KDP they can still access those features on their copies of the program. There doesn't appear to be upgrades to the program, the only upgrades I can see are the graying out of the options to format the paperback. Not sure what happened but it certainly wasn't helpful. It's still called Kindle Create Add-in for Microsoft Word (Beta) and it still says you can use the same doc file for an E book or a paperback.