Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) recently introduced a paperback option for KDP users who’ve been using the service to create Kindle digital books for many years, now. The option is attractive to self publishers as it gives them a print media outlet they didn’t have previously.
On KDP, that is.
But ever since Amazon bought up a company called CustomFlix and rebranded it as CreateSpace back in 2005, that option has always been around for authors and digital publishers in need. It’s just that as a separate resource, you’ve always had to to jump from one platform to the other to get your work done. In fact, quite a few self-publishers on KDP didn’t even know they had the CreateSpace option.
And so now they have the paperback option in KDP. But is it worth using it compared to what you can still get with CreateSpace?
The answer, for now, is no.
To date, the KDP paperback service does not offer the following: proof copies; author wholesale copies; expanded distribution.
Those are big things to have for self-publishers. (Well, okay, maybe not the expanded distribution–where you fetch mere pennies per book sold.) Amazon.com will no doubt move all of these CS features into it new KDP paperback option–and the writing’s on the wall that CreateSpace itself will eventually be fazed out soon thereafter. But for now, it’s definitely worth the extra small amount of effort to continue using CreateSpace and KDP separately, and so enjoy the benefits that only CS currently offers.
Here’s an Amazon support page that compares the two platforms: https://kdp.amazon.com/help?topicId=A1KVZXJFW9L4OY
