Self-Publishing a Book with CreateSpace
It’s frustrating to spend years of your life writing something, proofreading it, perfecting it, only for it to go nowhere. That’s how I felt with The Second Page, until one day it dawned on me that I could just release it as an e-book. So I did. But it didn’t feel right. It didn’t feel real. While my other e-book, A Quick Guide to Teaching English in China, continues to sell 2-3 copies every week, The Second Page wasn’t moving at all and wasn’t giving me the satisfaction of having “published” something.
Then a friend pointed me to CreateSpace, a struggling writer’s dream come true. No longer did I have to kowtow to uninterested agents. I could publish the book myself! With CreateSpace, all that’s required is to upload your own PDF of the interior and cover, order and approve a proof of the book, and start selling it through Amazon (among other outlets). I can’t tell you how great it felt to receive that initial proof, to hold an actual paperback copy of something I wrote. I like the results of the book and the process of CreateSpace so much, I’m going to use it to publish Yes China.
Earlier, I said I wanted to hold out for an actual agent/publisher deal, but I don’t really want to spend the next year trudging through hundreds of rejection letters when I have the option of getting the book out in as little as two weeks. Seriously, two weeks. I just need to scan the text again for typos and finalize the cover art (which is currently a panorama of Guilin that wraps around the whole book). It’ll be released with the subtitle An English Teacher’s Love-Hate Relationship with a Foreign Country, because that’s exactly what it is.
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