If you're looking for a book design firm, I highly recommend ebookpbook

If you're an author who is looking for a competent firm to get your book self-published in both electronic and print versions, I highly recommend ebookpbook, and an associated entity, Newgen KnowledgeWorks. 

Jason Pearce is the guy I worked with after finding ebookpbook listed as a resource on Amazon's CreateSpace web site. For quite a few years CreateSpace offered interior design and cover design services on a fee basis.

But fairly recently CreateSpace stopped doing this, so publishing a book via CreateSpace's print on demand process now requires that an author find a way to get interior design and cover files prepared by someone else.

Believe me, it isn't wise to do it yourself, unless you're well-versed in book designing. I've written three published books, so I know how tricky it is to fashion a book that's easily readable and looks good, both inside and outside.

Pearce, via Newgen, worked with CreateSpace on book design services, so now is doing the same thing directly. 

We are proud to have partnered with Amazon CreateSpace for several years to help independent authors see their work published. Now, with CreateSpace’s decision to no longer offer paid services to authors, we hope that we can work with you directly to get your book to market.

Here's the "pitch" that sold me as soon as I read it on the ebookpbook home page.

As an independent author self-publishing a book, you want to know that you are in experienced hands. For 20 years, we have been helping both independent and conventionally published authors get their books to market.

During that time we have learned editorial and formatting conventions that are centuries old, and we have ridden waves (both the ebb and flow) of new technologies in print and electronic publishing.

As a team, we have worked with some of the world’s largest fiction and nonfiction publishers and with many independent authors self-publishing their first book. We are members of the International Digital Publishing Forum and work directly with the major retailers and distributors, including Amazon CreateSpace, Apple, Barnes & Noble, Ingram, and Books on Demand.

For all this experience, we treat every book as a new journey. Our role is to guide you through the self-publishing process as effortlessly as possible, to produce a final book that you are completely satisfied with. And we’ll charge you only when we reach this destination.

We offer interior formatting, ebook conversion, cover design, and editorial self-publishing services. We consult with you throughout to ensure the best services fit for your timeline and budget. We don’t sell “packages” or services that don’t add value or produce results, and we promise not to sell services you don’t need.

We respect your copyright and will always keep your content secure. All the files we produce for your book belong to you. We collect only the minimum personal information we need to provide services to you, and this information will never be given to any other company.

Now, my situation was a bit unusual, because my book, God's Whisper, Creation's Thunder, already had been published in print form on CreateSpace, and I was looking for someone who could produce an e-book/Kindle version. A p-book, by the way, means a print book. 

After I contacted ebookpbook and sent the interior design file to Jason Pearce, he emailed me with a very reasonable price for converting my 200 page book to an e-book format: $79. 

Pearce also noted that after looking at the interior design, there were some things that could be "tweaked." Understand: all Pearce said was the following. There was absolutely no pressure put upon me to redo the interior design.

I'd also be inclined to open up the spacing a little, to allow the text to breathe. Publishing conventions would remove the running head from chapter opening pages, and set the first line of any paragraph after a heading flush left. But these are all minor tweaks that can be easily made. And all that said, the book is easy to read as it stands.

I followed up with a message that said, "I'm into tweaking," because I hadn't been all that happy with the interior design that a local graphics firm did, which apparently was their first foray into book designing. It looked OK, but to me it just didn't appear as professional as it should have.

Jason Pearce did an excellent job with his tweaking, which required that the page count remain the same, as otherwise I would have had to republish the book on CreateSpace. He sent me a new file. I uploaded it via my CreateSpace account. Bingo! A better looking book.

And here's what really impressed me.

Pearce refused to charge me for the interior design changes. I offered to pay him, but he told me that since I didn't ask for those changes when I first contacted him, being interested in an e-book conversion, he didn't feel right charging me for the interior design work.

I'm planning to use ebookpbook and Jason Pearce from the start for my next book project, because I found Pearce to be so competent, honest, and easy to work with. He lives in Chennai, India, but this made zero difference to me, since we communicated exclusively via email. 

(I mention this only because until I asked Pearce where he lived, I thought he kept some very late hours, since I'd get a message from him at midnight here on the West Coast, which is the middle of the day in India.)

Comments

[Rain Trueax]

My husband does my books and has used various ways to accomplish that. Amazon now has a place they offer to make print versions of your eBooks. What we eventually did was buy a Mac, which we never had wanted before, in order to use Velum. Velum does a nice job in making a book look professionally published. If a person can't do it themselves, then a system such as you found seems good-- a set fee. The one thing nobody should do is go to a Vanity press. They can lock up your rights, take part of the money and do nothing to get the books seen. What I've learned is, unless someone has a large community waiting for their next book, getting books seen is half the work of writing a book.

[Tanela]

Hi. You blog post was extremely helpful. I have been looking for a solution to fill the CreateSpace gap. Can you tell me approximately how long ebook book took to complete the process?

Thanks so much
Tanela

[Brian Hines]

Tanela, i recall that it took a couple of weeks. It went quite smoothly. There were a few glitches in the final ebook, but nothing serious.

[NYJ]

EbookPbook was one of the worst experiences I've had for a paperback. I paid $179 for a service that made bleeding mistakes, formatting mistakes and forgot to add a space between the words in my spine. Very disappointing service. And they refuse to give me a partial refund.