Publicani

Amazon has two POD (Print-On-Demand) publishers: BookSurge and CreateSpace. Amazon owns CreateSpace and, I believe, “almost” owns BookSurge.

For additional cost, BookSurge offers complimentary services while CreateSpace does not. I used some of the services BookSurge provides and was always happy with those. BookSurge does a good job and is practically always on time. You get a team working for you: your publishing consultant (mine was Zach Coddington and I was happy with him), your Product Fulfillment coordinator (mine was Douglas Thompson, also a good fellow) and other people who gently guide you through the process of publishing your book.

CreateSpace, on the other hand, is completely Internet driven - there are no people you can talk to, and your emails are answered with Do-Not-Reply’s return address.

Yet both CreateSpace and BookSurge produce identical final products. I couldn’t see a difference between my books whether published by CreateSpace or BookSurge. So, if you are able to format the text and design the cover for your book yourself, I see no reason why you should use BookSurge, especially because in one aspect CreateSpace is much better. A major factor in deciding which publisher to use, from my pont of view, is the minimum price they charge for the book. CreateSpace lets you have much lower price than BookSurge does.

For Publicani, Booksurge couldn’t go lower than $16.99 despite my numerous attempts trying to make them change their mind. I am not even sure they could change the price even if they wanted to - I suspect they are stuck with Amazon’s determining prices algorithm.

Publicani exposure is important to me, so when I learned that CreateSPace can offer the same book for $7.95 I decided to switch. Before I did, I told BookSurge about CreateSpace and asked them again to lower the price. They couldn’t.

So the good news for Publicani readers is that the book is available on Amazon for $7.95 and is even eligible for free shipping under some Amazon’s conditions.

And as an additional benefit, preparing the book to a new publisher, I made some small formatting changes and corrected a few typos. I think the price is so low, that instead of correcting the free online version, I discontinued it altogether. I might bring online version back at some future time though.