Createspace – Closing their Professional Services. Is this another step to closing their business?

WE all know I don’t like Createspace anymore due to their Customer Service debacle and how they treat their customers. They are so not with it. I’m glad to get out now rather than when they close their business down for good…To me this is what it looks like and I’ll tell you why.

I have worked in several businesses which have closed down and slowly but surely they get rid of things they no longer need. If your observant enough…you notice and it makes you wonder. Are they closing? Is this why customer service is so bad? Do they really want to work with Indie Authors or are they just money hungry and we’re not bring in enough profit for them anymore?  

If I follow my instinct the first thing Amazon rolled out was print on KDP!  Why did they do this?  Createspace was excellent at the time and I loved using their website.  From authors around the world I heard scathing comments about KDP Print and how bad they were, rejecting book covers continually. One author had her cover rejected 37 times where as on Createspace it was accepted straight away.  I decided to stay away. I hated the thought of even trying to use them at that stage.

Then suddenly I was having issues with Createspace. Their customer service was all over the place, moving from one to another person, not reading emails, getting things wrong…totally incompetent. In my company they would be reprimanded and given training to upgrade their skill set.  Then it was the turn of the ordering area of Createspace.  Books disappearing, Tracking number telling authors their books were going somewhere else. They couldn’t even tell the difference between the Northern and Southern hemisphere. Astounding mess. Though this one incident had a happy conclusion in the end nearly five months later. I know for a fact this author won’t order though Createspace again.  

Next it ws Copyright Permission. Their policies stated you’re only allowed to upload documents you own or have copyright permission of.  Yes there have been a hell of a lot of stolen manuscripts out there, however there are many ways this is done and most have nothing to do with Createspace.  So here they are demanding proof…Something new they’d never asked before.  If you know your business law (mine was New Zealand) then you can’t share private and confidential information with another party without permission from the person it involves.  I never have and never will share contracts, emails or anything else without permission.  Saying no to Createspace turned them into …well i’m not sure what. On top of this the book was published as an ebook and is for sale on Amazon, but they wouldn’t publish the paperback.  Guess who went to LULU.  They’ve been excellent by the way.

What else can happen?  Oh yes PERMA FREE.  Due to all the fuss I stopped uploading to KDP and started to use Pronoun – who we all know closed this month.  With Pronoun you could make a book FREE and no problems.  I wish they hadn’t closed.  Then Draft to Digital had distribution rights to send to Amazon, however, in their deal you couldn’t mark a book as FREE.  So I did the usual request and the second time they said no because it wasn’t uploaded to KDP only distributed. (They accepted the first…meaning they can’t even get this right)  They told me to contact D2D and get them to send a request. I’m sure this is more work which D2D don’t really want!  Much to my joy they did so but, I can still see a price on it on Amazon.  Though this could be me having a New Zealand Account.

Now the reason for this blog.  Createspace are no longer going to be offering professional services to authors.  They don’t wish to work one on one with you. No Book Cover Design, No Marketing and No Editing (I didn’t know they offered Editing.)  This info comes from a friend I sometimes work with. The original blog was from Book Baby who like me offer all the service to Indie Authors. They found the information in a newspaper in the USA/

ARE THEY CLOSING DOWN?  WHAT DO YOU THINK?

If you do need services for Editing, Cover Design, Formatting and some Marketing (I’m looking at taking a course in Marketing this year) Then please consider using Plaisted Publishing House. We love working one on one.