Thursday, December 9, 2010

CreateSpace and Kindle Conversion Update - Part II

Several weeks ago I received my converted file from CreateSpace for upload to Amazon's DTP to sell this particular book in a Kindle conversion, for which I paid the grand sum of $69. All went well and the Kindle version has sold some copies, though I have yet to recoup my $69 though I am sure I will in a fairly short time frame.

I have both horrible news and good news to report. Just to test things out and see how the reporting of sales works, I purchased the first copy of my book in Kindle format, downloaded it onto my Mac laptop, opened up my Kindle reader software, selected my book and began "flipping" the pages. Everything looked great! Then to my horror, the Kindle app simply shut down and I received one of those annoying error messages asking me to send an e-mail to Apple.

Knowing the poison pen is often poised in the hands of Kindle book readers and not wanting the book destroyed before it could even get started as a Kindle book, I fired off an e-mail to CreateSpace informing them of my horror, dismay and concern.

The good news is CreateSpace promptly CALLED me by phone and the individual "assigned" to resolve the problem gave me her name (can you imagine that!) so I could stay in contact with her. She informed me CreateSpace was horrified as well! The next day she informed me they could not crash a Kindle reader with my book and I told them what page it crashed on and that it crashed on the Mac app. A short time later another call - she had crashed the Mac app! Turns out the problem is with the software for the Mac. Now really concerned.

This morning I received an e-mail informing me I would be sent a reformatted file to replace the other file on the DTP. My Kindle programmer had found the glitch in the software and while she could not fix the app, she had figured out how to make my book read just fine on every Kindle app.

Am I happy this happened? No! Am I pleased with the response to my problem? An unqualified yes! CreateSpace resolved my issue to my satisfaction and showed initiative in doing so. My Kindle programmer kept me up to speed on what was going on and resolved the problem in a reasonable period of time. 

Will I use the CreateSpace Kindle conversion service again? Probably, particularly the  more I read how you prepare a file for upload to the DTP. I just keep getting more and more confused the more I read and have almost come to the conclusion $69 is cheap compared to the time it would take me to learn how to do it correctly myself.

2 comments:

  1. Hi Kevin –

    Thanks for sharing your experience. I have a book on Amazon - since July - and am trying to find exactly where to have it converted for Kindle. Can you offer a couple of lines of guidance on where to get to the $69 conversion process.

    Thanks
    David
    david@davidmperkins.com

    ReplyDelete
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