Amazon's CreateSpace publishing arm no longer offers author services such as book design, professional editing, and book marketing. For those authors who relied on Amazon for all aspects of their book publishing career, this means having to scramble to find service providers for these crucial tasks. According to a spokesperson from Amazon,
“After a thorough review of our service offerings, we’ve made the decision to discontinue CreateSpace’s paid professional editing, design and marketing services. We will work closely with impacted employees through this transition to help them find new roles within the company or assist them with pursuing opportunities outside the company.”
This change didn't surprise too many people in the indie publishing world, as Amazon continues to grow larger and move away from personalized services of any kind. That's never been a large part of their business model, and will likely continue to shrink as the company grows.
Amazon's business plan may be all about the numbers, but here at FastPencil/Infinity we've always dedicated ourselves to helping individual authors get the most out of their self publishing experiences. We've always provided free tools to help authors write and proof their manuscripts as well as create their covers and format their books. For those who don't necessarily want to do it all on their own, we offer a wide variety of professional designers, editors, and advisors to help them produce the exact book they've always dreamed of creating.
In order to compete in the crowded field of indie publishing today, authors have to produce a professional product that stands out from the pack. The best way to do this is to gather a professional team to guide a manuscript from first draft to polished product. At FastPencil, we offer these services to make your book the best it can be:
- Professional editing. The best investment you can make in your writing career is a great editor. Readers are savvy today, and they know when a book's been professionally edited and polished. Writers aiming to reach the bestseller lists, and even those who are publishing the book they've been thinking about for years, all deserve the finished impression a great editor will give to a book. We offer line editing as well as grammar checking that includes a deep understanding of your stylistic word usage, complex line editing, or simple copyediting.
- Cover creation. Readers today certainly do judge a book by its cover. In fact, survey after survey agree that the book cover is the number one detail to grab the attention of most readers. Without a genre-appropriate cover with fonts that fit the niche, your book is likely to sink through the ranks in a speedy descent. We offer professionally designed covers, for both ebook and paper versions of your book. No matter the genre or topic of your book, the members of our cover design team will create a cover you'll be excited about and proud to publish.
- Marketing The days where you could simply publish a book and be sure that it would sell are long gone. If today's author wants to sell any books, he has to be a marketer as much as he is a writer. Book marketing is a complex topic, with literally hundreds of different venues, each of which has its own strengths and weaknesses. What works for a science fiction novel will waste money and time for a romance book, and those new to book marketing have no way to know which is which. We offer a variety of marketing services, from basic book marketing collateral to PR campaigns fit for national book conventions.
Our company's goal has always been to help the individual author to produce the best book he can, and to help make sure it meets its true potential in the marketplace. If you're an author in need of personalized help in creating and publishing your work, FastPencil has all the professional help you need, all in one convenient place.
Keep the Faith and May the Force be with You!
* This offer is for FastPencil and Infinity authors and prospective authors only.
