by Caroline Breeze

Created on: September 15, 2009

CreateSpace.com is one of the easiest and low cost self-publishing platforms available and accessible through the internet. It offers the possibility for authors of books (paperback), music and audio CDs, DVDs, and audio (mp3) and video downloads, to publish and sell their works with no upfront costs to pay and no membership fees to subscribe.

Where books are concerned however, you are required to purchase one copy of your book plus shipping and handling, to proof it before it is offered for sale on the market. It would be in fact the only sort of upfront cost that you pay which in part you determine yourself to a certain degree because you are the one who sets whatever list price you want for it to be sold.

You set the list price and they deduct a percentage of the list price plus their fixed charges and what's left constitutes your royalties on the sale. As for taxes and other questions related to shipping and handling it's best to check out the site and ask questions if needed for more clarifications.

With CDs and DVDs, where you send in a master copy, the cost to you would be the actual production of the work you submit plus the purchase of high quality CDs and DVDs on which your record it (guidelines are provided for this). To CreateSpace, you pay nothing and at the time of this writing, you are not required to purchase any copies as proofs beforehand.

As for the downloadable videos and mp3s you wish to upload and offer for sale the cost is zero and you can just sit back and earn royalties for each sale of your hard work. For downloadable movies, you can either earn through the 'Amazon Video on Demand' option where customers rent your movies, or you can earn royalties through downloaded sales.

They have three steps to follow:
1. Sign up (it's free)
2. Upload your content or send a master copy (guidelines for the types of formats they accept/require for each type of content, are given in their website)
3. Proof your content then choose your distribution channel.

This is not a publicity piece for CreateSpace but one (actually two) of the advantages that puts them at the top of my list of publishers to consider is the fact that they offer free ISBN numbers for books and free UPC codes for CDs and DVDs for publishers who don't already have their own.

(Note that nothing or hardly anything is really free anymore in this world today and the cost is most likely recovered in small increments with each sale of your product but heck!; the absence of such an upfront payment

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