CM Simpson: Writer & Gamer

And on to cover creation. Firstly, some general notes: Once you are happy with the content, make sure your cover is ready for upload. This may be difficult to do, if you don’t know the cover size for the template you’ve chosen, so be prepared to make adjustments the first time, and then write down the sizes of covers you are going to format for on a regular basis. If you hire out for your covers you will need to be able to provide these details to your cover creator. I tend to create the design in GIMP, and then use the base cover I’ve created when creating the front cover for the CreateSpace version. You might use a professional cover designer or some other means to create your cover. Some CreateSpace specific notes: I use the CreateSpace cover generator and this means I cannot have colour to the very edges as the cover generator registers these colours and warns me that I could lose cover content. There is a shaded area in the cover generator that indicates where co...

So, in the last two weeks, I have formatted a collection of poetry, a collection of flash fiction and two collections of short stories for print-on-demand release via CreateSpace. It’s not a bad process and there’s a lot to like about it. Firstly, it’s easy and, for the most part, intuitive—especially if you follow the guided instructions. I’ll walk you through what I do, and note where I depart from the guide. Please note that you may want to go about this process differently - and other authors do. I am only sharing what I do and why. I hope it helps. After I have nuked my manuscript (edited and formatted the final draft, added italics markers, and dumped it all into a text document), I make sure I have written a description for the catalogues and saved that in my descriptions file, and that my Author blurb is to hand. Once all that is set up, I start at my CreateSpace dashboard. I click on the ‘Create New’ button in the ‘My Account’ box to the left of the dashboard. I fill ...