CreateSpace or Lightning Source: Which is the more intelligent choice for self-publishing?

This is a guest post by Terri Giuliano Long

Congratulations!! You’ve decided to take the plunge and publish your book. Welcome to the indie revolution! In addition to the myriad design and marketing decisions you’re about to make, you must also decide whether to publish only in eBook format or publish in hard copy too. Authors choose one option or the other for various reasons. For our purposes, we’ll assume that you’ve decided to publish your masterpiece, your baby, in paper.

Which service do you use? If you’re the nervous type, who prefers everything done for you, you may want to go with one of the full-service self-publishing houses. It’s been a publishing lifetime since those so-called “vanity presses” made their debut. Back in the day, print on demand was a dirty word and authors who published with these shady companies worked, their detractors whispered, under the sick yellow glint of supreme self-delusion.

Today, even the top dogs use POD technology, and terrific full-service publishers, like Infinity Publishing, based in Pennsylvania, offer an array of high-quality services and they print books that rival any I’ve seen on the market. Of course, those services come at a cost. Royalties are typically low and retail prices can be high.

If you’re looking for a low cost, high royalty option, the two major competitors are Createspace and Lightning Source. While both are reputable companies that produce library-quality books, there are major benefits, drawbacks and differences to each that every author should be aware of before making an educated choice.

Createspace

PROS:

Createspace is a quick, relatively simple, inexpensive option for authors hoping to sell high-quality hard copies of their self-published books primarily online. With Createspace, publishing a book is easy and hassle-free; optional services include complete setup, cover design, formatting, and marketing. CS also offers a free DIY book creation service. Or, if you wish, you can hire your own designer. As long as your digital file meets CS specifications, you’re good to go. You can use your own ISBN (purchased separately, on your own) or, if you prefer, Createspace will supply one for you. (If you opt to distribute through the library and academic institution channel, however, you must use a CS-assigned ISBN. When I published my CS edition, that’s the reason I used theirs.)

Like most self-publishing companies, Createspace allows the author/publisher to choose the book’s retail price. By self-publishing standards, the CS per/book cost is low, offering authors the flexibility of choosing either a higher royalty (by setting a higher retail price) or a lower retail price (enticing for buyers, but lower royalties to the author).

With retail pricing, CS and LS are comparable. Compared to other self-publishing companies, CS and LS come out ahead. At one point, I considered working with a full-service self-publisher. I loved the company, found the staff friendly and professional, their design services excellent, and their print quality superior to CS; the problem was their sales model, which offered absolutely no flexibility and would have forced me to set my retail price at a minimum of $ 17.95, a cost that I felt would price my book out of the market.

CONS:

Createspace offers no return policy, which means corporate brick-and-mortar bookstore chains are unlikely to stock your book. According to a Createspace customer service rep, the company instituted this policy to protect their authors: returns are unpredictable and, with shipping and handling expenses, accepting returns can get costly. This is certainly true, particularly if you factor in return shipping and handling changes.

For their expanded distribution channels, CS offers a set wholesale discount of 40%. The author has no choice in this. The industry standard is 55%, with 47% and under considered a “short discount.” While, yes, less of a discount means that authors earn a higher royalty, a sub-standard discount decreases incentives for bookstores.

Today, with the rapid decline in bookstore sales, and the majority of sales occurring online, you may not care if bookstores carry your paperback book. However, if you suddenly find yourself with a hot-selling title, you may change your mind. If you try to place your CS-distributed book in bookstores, you'll run into problems. When In Leah’s Wake hit the Barnes & Noble bestseller list in August, B&N considered stocking the paperback in their brick and mortar stores. When they realized that Createspace was the distributor, they declined, citing the CS non-return policy. I never reached the point of negotiating discounts. Unfortunately, I ran into the same thing with other bookstores.

Of course, stores can always order your book from Createspace to fill a customer request. Nevertheless, if they don’t stock your book – put it on their shelf or, better yet, in their window – you lose impulse buyers and bookstore loyalists, as well as bookstore employee evangelists. As a solution, Createspace suggests hand-selling your book. If you approach your local B&N or independent bookstore, especially if they anticipate enough local interest to generate sales, there is a good chance that they’ll agree to stock your book. As an incentive, you can offer your own return policy or perhaps ask them if they’ll accept your books on consignment.

These are great ideas, but selling books by hand takes time and energy that many authors simply don’t have.

Lightning Source

In August, when Barnes & Noble declined to stock my book, I contracted with Lightning Source to print and distribute a separate ILW edition. It’s too soon to determine if this will have been a good or bad move. While the Lightning Source print edition of ILW is now readily available to stores, and can be ordered for overnight pickup, LS reports only total sale numbers, giving me no way to tell if bookstores have ordered copies to shelf.

Despite nearly equal numbers – in September, I sold 223 paperback books through Createspace and 188 through Lightning Source – my Lightning Source edition ranks consistently lower on Amazon than my Createspace edition. This hour, for example, my LS rank is # 22,678, CS #4,522. Sales calculations determine rank. This disparity in Amazon rank, and again with total sales being roughly equal, suggests that many of my LS sales come from retailers other than Amazon.

PROS:

Lightning Source, the go-to POD publisher for big guys like Random House, offers library-quality POD as well as offset printing (for higher print runs). They can also scan existing hard copies, a service CS doesn’t offer.

The return policy and wholesale discount makes LS books more attractive to booksellers. LS publishers have the option of accepting or not accepting returns. As a publisher, you set your own retail discount – I offer the standard 55% but you may offer less – giving you flexibility in offering wholesale incentives.

Lightning Source distributes titles through all the major players, including Ingram, Baker and Taylor, Bertrams, and others, which means that stores, libraries and academic institutions can buy LS books without making any changes to their process. Theoretically, if you go with LS, bookstores, libraries and academic institutions should be more inclined to buy your book/s.

CONS:

Lightning Source costs more than CS. LS charges a $ 37.50 setup fee and $ 30 for proofs. Later, if you need to make corrections, you’ll be charged $ 30 per file change, plus $ 30 for a new proof. Createspace offers free setup, proofs have the same low set-cost as books, based on size and page count – in my case, $ 5.17 – and each file change costs $ 25, in addition to the set single book charge.

Should you decide to order a book for your own use or to give to a friend, Lightning Source charges more too – one copy of In Leah’s Wake from Lightning Source costs $6.30, plus shipping; the same book from Createspace if I’m enrolled in their Pro Plan costs $ 5.17, plus shipping. The difference is, the price of CS books is set, with the same cost for 1 or 500 books, while Lightning Source offers quantity discounts.

With LS, the book creation process is more complicated than with CS. First, LS is entirely DIY. Although they do provide optional marketing services, they offer no design services. If you run into a problem with a digital file, you’re responsible for making corrections. While the same is true with CS, CS offers design services.

Before you begin, you must create a publishing company. There is no need to incorporate. You can set up an LLC (Limited Liability Corporation) or operate under a trade name, also called a DBA (Doing Business As. Here’s info from the Small Business Association on both. Lightning Source requires you to fill out a standard business application. This is not a hugely big deal, but it can be time-consuming. By the time I had my paperwork in order and submitted, two weeks had gone by.

Another drawback: Amazon stocks CS titles, while listing LS titles as having a 1 – 4 week delivery time. (LS claims to ship Web orders within 5 days.) This is purely anecdotal, but the delivery lag seems to be a turn-off for buyers. On Amazon, my LS edition retails for $ 2.00 less than my CS edition, yet my CS sales are much higher. To check the veracity of Amazon’s listed delivery times, I ordered a copy of my LS title; it arrived in less than a week.

Amazon’s delivery time for my LS edition recently increased from 3 to up to 4 weeks, so these artificially extended delivery times may be a marketing decision on Amazon’s part. I’m not sure. It’s possible that they’ll reverse it, but, while I hate to be a naysayer, I don’t see that happening unless they get a lot of flack.

Selling through both distributors

You may be thinking, as I did – I’m smart: I’ll use CS for Amazon sales and LS for distribution.

If so, hold on.

First, by publishing print editions through both companies, using separate ISBN numbers (as I currently do), you kick yourself in the head. Book Scan, the company that tracks book sales, tracks by ISBN number. There is no way to show that two ISBN numbers belong to one book. Having two separate editions of a book hurts your sales rank. This is true on retail sites like Amazon and it’s also true of tracking for bestseller lists like USA Today or the NY Times. As we all know, once they hit stride, bestselling books sell because they’re bestsellers.

The other day on Amazon, my CS edition ranked under 3,500, while my LS edition ranked over 19,000. If every sale were credited to one edition, the higher sales numbers should have put my rank under 1,000. Sales numbers affect not only buyer perception. They also determine where your book populates in queues. A book with high sales finds its way into the “readers who bought this also bought this” queues of popular titles. When you finish a book you loved, where do look for another? First, check the author’s backlist – and then you look at those queues. Believe me, a book on the first page of the queue on the detail page for The Help sells copies.

A book queued with a hot title has what we refer to as “a positive meta-message.” In other words, a book associated with a hot title gains status in the buyer’s mind. Currently, ILW is queued with Midwives, While I Was Gone, and a few other older Oprah book picks. I’m ecstatic! Truly, I am. But – what if I’d been smart and stuck with one edition? Combined sales may have put it in the queue with newer bestsellers, maybe even on a back page in the queue under The Help.

Yes, if you own the ISBN for your book, you may use the same number for both LS & CS print editions.

BUT – while this may help your Book Scan rank – if you’re NY Times bestseller caliber, kudos to you – it changes nothing on Amazon, the world’s number one reseller. On Amazon you will still have two detail pages – one for the CS and one for the LS edition. Despite using the same ISBN number, sales of CS and LS editions will be credited separately. So, except for Book Scan, you’ll still be dealing with ALL problems outlined above.

Important: LS requires you to own the ISBN. You canNOT use a Createspace-supplied ISBN number with LS. If you publish with CS and opt in to the library and academic institution distribution channel, you MUST use a CS ISBN.

What to do?

It takes about 4 – 6 weeks for LS titles to populate on online retailer sites. A few weeks after mine did, spurred by the rank issue – I’d failed, stupidly, to consider the rank issue beforehand – I contacted LS and asked them to cancel distribution to Amazon. I figured I’d use CS to service the Amazon behemoth and LS everywhere else.

No dice. With Lightning Source, it’s all or nothing. You distribute or you don’t. You can’t pick and choose.

Meanwhile, I’d already cancelled CS distribution. Practically overnight, the CS edition disappeared from online retailer shelves – e.g. BN – leaving me with a LS-distributed book with a 1 -3 week delivery time! Ack! A week earlier, the LS book had been listed as in stock! SO . . . I restarted the CS distribution – what choice did I have? – putting me right back at square one.

My advice? Wait until your eBook sales pop to spring for a paperback. Six months is a light-year in this evolving publishing world, and who knows? The rules may have changed by then. Or, publish your paperback with Createspace.

If you have the time and resources, consider hand selling to bookstores. If sales justify it (you’ll have to decide when that is) and you can afford to, offer your own return policy. This may not fly with corporate retailers like Barnes & Noble, but it will probably work in local BN and some indie bookstores.

For now, while it’s certainly not optimal, experience tells me that this is our best bet.

 

***NEW UPDATE from Terri***

I was contacted recently by Aaron Shepherd/Shepherd Publications. According to Aaron, who's published 12 books, if you use the same ISBN number for your Lightning Source and Createspace books, you will not – as I had been told by the CS rep I spoke with – end up with two detail pages. You could, however, still encounter the problems I mention above with availability and stocking.

Here's how Aaron recommends getting around this: https://www.newselfpublishing.com/PlanB.html

I haven't tried Aaron's method, only because I  just learned about it and have not yet had time to make the adjustments. Although it seems rather complicated and time-intensive, it may be worth trying.

*This post was originally published on Molly Greene's blog:  Worth Becoming.  Molly is an author, blogger and freelance writer. Her debut novel, Mark of the Loon, is scheduled for release early 2012. Follow her on twitter @mollygreene and visit her awesome blog, www.worthbecoming.wordpress.com. You may also enjoy the post “How to Sell 100 Books a Day” that appeared on Molly's blog and was written by Ms. Terri Giuliano Long.

 

Terri Giuliano LongAbout this post’s author:

Terri Giuliano Long grew up in the company of stories both of her own making and as written by others. Books offer her a zest for life’s highs and comfort in its lows. She’s all-too-happy to share this love with others as a novelist and a writing teacher at Boston College. She was grateful and thrilled beyond words when her award-winning debut literary novel, In Leah’s Wake, hit the Barnes and Noble and Amazon bestseller lists in August. She owes a lot of wonderful people – big time! – for any success she’s enjoyed!

In Leah's Wake can be purchased through Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Also available at local indie bookstores through IndieBound.

Jeannie Faulkner Barber

My co-authored suspense, Scent of Double Deception is now out through Createspace. Don A. Martinez (Desert Coyote Productions) is my editor/publisher. After the first of the new year, my solo suspense, Taste of Fire will also be self-pubbed through Createspace. I am thoroughly pleased, but then, Don is handling the typesetting, etc. Price-wise, I think the Pro Plan is the way to go.

Brooke

Other factors not mentioned in the article: LS distributing arm has a feud with the other major distributors that can negatively affect the number of stores wishing to stock your publication.

Also, LS refuses to confirm the return sources for books (supposedly being returned from stores) so don’t be surprised when these little gems come bouncing back deducting money from your profit.

And, last but not least, most of the people at LS I dealt with about “issues” on the different steps; pre-, during, and post-publication, expended the least amount of effort necessary:

E-mail messages and phone calls, irrespective of when they were placed, were returned at the close of business-

Shipments, routinely, had damaged contents thank to the flimsiest cardboard in the world used on their packages-

Charges for shipping were excessively expensive.

I would never go back with LS regardless of incentives or even under extreme duress.

Emlyn Chand

Like you, Pavarti, I was all set to go with LS. Then this mess happened. Suffice it to say, I’m using CreateSpace now. It’s a zillion times easier too!

Janice N. Richards

Just a notice on Lightening Source. They print through Ingram Press. It takes a 15 day turn around depending on what state you are in. Most publishers print hard copies through Ingram. They are located in Tennessee. Printed on demand will be to someone close to Tennessee in 24 hours. However, someone like myself in Idaho takes a full fifteen days. If you are going to do a Self Publishing book you have to account for that. It’s a given. I tell my costumers that up front and I tell them it’s a 24 hour turn around to ship from me once I receive it. I think Createspace from what I have heard from other authors is great if you are doing just ebooks. However, in my opinion a hard copy needs to be with a reliable publisher. Lightening Source is one of the best. They are usually the middle man between many a POD publisher and Ingram. You hay be using them and not knowing it. In fact it’s hard to go directly through them for that reason. I think you have been fortunate to have gotten their services.

Eric B

CreateSpace does not publish eBooks, they are a hardcopy publisher only. They are a subsidiary of Amazon while LightingSource is a subsidiary of Ingram.

David Rozansky

Flying Pen Press uses Lightning Source exclusively as its printer and distributor, for a variety of reasons, most of which you state. But our experience is a little different than yours in one or two places.

It is not necessarily true that shipping time through Amazon is longer. In fact, once Amazon registers a fair amount of sales of your Lightning Source title, they will stock the book in their warehouse.

It is also important to note that the main Ingram warehouse in La Vergne, Tenn. is contracted out as one of the “warehouses” for Amazon. That is, Amazon often uses Ingram as its wholesaler. Lightning Source’s primary printing plant is only a quarter mile away, and you should note that Lightning Source is a subsidiary of Ingram. A truck carries the POD books from Lightning Source to the Ingram warehouse eight times during the work day, and most all Amazon orders are out the door before the end of the day, if ordered by 5 pm.

For us, we found that with the Amazon orders and bookstore orders through Ingram, the Lightning Source POD books are in the box before the warehoused books are, as it takes longer to find the book on the shelves than it is to have the POD books arrive from down the street, which come all sorted by order.

Despite this, Amazon will declare a 2-4 week delay if it dos not have the book in its warehouse. Why? Because if the customer orders more than one book through Amazon, Amazon has to wait for the POD book to arrive at its warehouse before it can pack the books together.

However, when the customer orders only the Lighting Source POD title (or titles), Lightning Source drop ships the order, and it usually ships via UPS ground before the end of business the same day as ordered, if by 5 pm. Even Amazon doesn’t ship that fast from its own warehouse.

And, to boot, Lightning Source has the same relationship with BN.com, the second largest online retailer of books. There’s a nice backdoor issue here: Even though BN.com and Barnes & Noble Booksellers are independent of each other, the brick & mortar chain watches what sells on BN.com as part of the algorithm in determining what titles the stores should stock. Often, a surge on Amazon will bleed over to BN.com, which then moves some copies onto the shelves of the largest chain of bookstores in the world. Lightning Source handles all this distribution without us having to even pick up the phone. It just happens.

We also have found that Lightning Source is faster to deliver bookstore orders than any distributor, for the same reasons: proximity to Ingram for mixed POD/warehoused orders, and same day print and ship policy for every bookstore drop-ship order (whether to the store, or to one of the store’s customers).

Another experience we have is that Lightning Source has printing facilities all over the world. Our books can be printed in the US, UK, France, Germany, Brazil, Australia and throughout the world on the Espresso Book Machine. We deliver books to the global marketplace. And Lightning Source is likely to build or contract more facilities in yet more countries in the next few years, with the intention that no one in the world will ever be more than 24 hours delivery away from same-day POD manufacturing. CreateSpace can’t even begin to touch this level of global distribution.

Lightning Source in the US is in La Vergne Tenn. and near Allentown, Penn. The Pennsylvania plant gets books to New York City within 24 hours of order, in many cases. There is also talk of opening a plant in Las Vegas, for those of us here in the Western USA.

One of the advantages of Lightning Source is that you are automatically listed in the Ingram digital catalog. This is a huge advantage, as booksellers can order our titles with the rest of their order and not have to worry about shipping in an extra carton from a lone publisher, or about having to figure out some indie press’s nonstandard return policy.

And when it comes to selling to non-book stores–a big bonanza for self-published authors and indie publishers–the Ingram card is a big one. Ingram is a wholesaler they trust and often have commercial accounts with. Local retailers are very resistant to ordering anything with Amazon’s name on it due to the competitive nature of retail brick and mortars versus online retailers.

As to the ISBN issue, it is far better for an indie publisher to have their own ISBN than some other publisher’s ISBN. The computers around the world that order books, order by ISBN; if the ISBN belongs to CreateSpace, then in booksellers’ eyes, CreateSpace is the publisher. Controlling your own ISBN, and by association, your own listing in Books in Print for both your title and your publishing house, is an incredibly effective marketing tool.

The final reason–and perhaps the greatest reason–we choose to use Lightning Source over CreateSpace is that Amazon is notorious for changing their rules and policies and prices, literally without warning. Not a month goes by that Amazon doesn’t do something to completely change the way books and ebooks sell on their site. I don’t trust CreateSpace to be predictable with the supply of our books.

Lightning Source, however, has been consistent with its prices and high quality for years, to the point of monotony. Having a supplier I can plan on and rely on is critical, especially when we have a long-term global marketing plan. Amazon is just too cagy to trust.

Keep ’em Flying,
David A. Rozansky, Publisher
Flying Pen Press
Twitter: @DavidRozansky
URL: https://FlyingPenPress.com

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