In my book Publishing & Marketing Realities for the Emerging Author, I discuss at the length the benefits of Lightning Source for the Emerging Author. We’ve been with LSI for 3 years, and we love them. Although it seems that things are changing.
Thanks to a comment by a reader, this article was brought to my attention:
“Amazon and Lightning Source, the End of an Era”
I find this article interesting on many levels, first the concept of taking a short discount. 55% is the industry standard discount, but this article recommends 20% discount, giving the author more of a “royalty” from each sale. Quite interesting really, but this must be if you only intend to sell on Amazon. I know B&N won’t buy a book at only 20% off cover, or at least they wouldn’t. That said, we sell so few books through B&N, it might be worth changing the discount percentage as an experiment.
Also in my book, I talk very briefly about Amazon’s CreateSpace, and how it is definitely beneficial to the emerging author and could be the way to go under some circumstances. Still, I didn’t recommend them, but this change in Amazon’s distribution may just make me change my mind. For my new titles printed later this year, I might just go with CreateSpace for them, or at least so both LSI and CreateSpace as Friedlander recommends.
This just goes to show all of us just how fast the industry is changing. My book was written seven months ago, and it’s already out of date. Amazing. Time for a second edition, I think.
Christine Rose 
We certainly would love a shot to print your books as well. The only difference between us and Lightning Source is we don’t have Amazon spoon feeding us money. CreateSpace is actually a great system don’t get me wrong and I definitely recommend it to anybody printing between 1-35 books total. I get a ton of authors coming from these places though and I will tell you what the differences are. And this is not a shameless promotion, there are other book printers out there that can do exactly the same thing and easily rival CreateSpace
#1) Good luck talking to somebody on the phone
#2) Take it or leave it the way the book will look= No hard copy proof to review
#3) Unit price stays the same 1-10,000 = no unit price breaks for increasing quantity
#4) Turnaround time
#5) Files need to be PERFECT for submission
#6) Anybody can get on Amazon, anybody can do distribution. We do both
#7) Doing it yourself allows you to not give up royalties on every book sold
#8) Your book sitting on Amazon is not exactly a marketing plan or strategy. Amazon and CreateSpace only does promotion for limited clients, even though they promise the world
#9) Will not help with cover design, website, SEO, marketing, PR releases, bulk sales, book signings, blogging, book reviews, etc etc etc
Tell me more about what you do, Billy. Email me christineandethanrose@gmail.com
Interesting post, Rose. I’ve been using Createspace for a couple years now, mainly because I wasn’t really that familiar with Lightening Source and I thought the CS/Amazon connection made it a good POD resource. I’m quite satisfied with them. I love their customer service. You have a problem with a project – you let them know electronically via their web site and they call you back – within moments of your request.
They also offer a 20% option for books sold through their online store, so if someone comes to your site to buy a book and you don’t want to mess with the shipping and handling stuff, you can direct them there. I wonder how else this might be leverage for maximum author profitability.
Brilliant! Thank you for this input. We’re going to experiment with CreateSpace for O. M. Grey’s next two titles. We’ll see from there!
Interesting stuff, Rose. Thank you. 🙂 Information is power to the author!
It most certainly is!