KDP PrintIt’s finally underway: after launching KDP Print in 2016 and announcing the phase-out of CreateSpace, Amazon’s Print-on-Demand wing is now retiring. If you currently have books are on CreateSpace, they will be automatically moved to KDP Print in the coming weeks. From KDP:

In a few weeks, we’ll automatically move all accounts to KDP. If you’d like to get a head start, you can move your entire catalog yourself in a few steps. To ensure a quality experience, we’ll enable the ability to move your CreateSpace books to KDP in phases, so authors may see it at different times. See an overview of the process.

There were questions about KDP Print being a lesser version of CreateSpace, with lower-quality books, fewer distribution options, and the inability to order proof copies before publication. At least some of those bugs have been ironed out. Chris McMullen has an outline of the differences from June, while Author Carmen Webster Buxton has a good post on the current process, which includes difficulties that are still arising with the changeover.

Part of this has to do with this note from Amazon: “We’ll enable the ability to move your CreateSpace books to KDP in phases, so authors may see it at different times.” So this won’t necessarily be the smoothest process, with some authors claiming it’s not working when it’s working for others, which isn’t the greatest rollout.

For instance, their video on the main page is fairly unhelpful, as it’s about switching to KDP from CreateSpace, when most authors likely have both a CreateSpace and KDP account already and need only to switch print options.

 

Overall, once this works smoothly it’s a sensible move by Amazon and should ultimately be an easier option for authors to create print books, having all options in one place.

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