CreateSpace Microsoft Word to PDF Converter

I'm a big fan of Lulu's Microsoft Word to PDF converter. It means you can upload your book manuscript directly to the Lulu web site and have it generate the print-ready PDF for you. So you don't need to buy Adobe Acrobat, and you don't need to worry about things like PDF transparency settings. Best of all -- in most if not all cases the Lulu-generated PDF is suitable for uploading to CreateSpace. This is one of the themes of my book Book Publishing DIY : The Do It Yourself Guide to Self-Publishing using Lulu and CreateSpace.

So what about the brand new Word-to-PDF converter provided by CreateSpace? Is it as good as the Lulu's? In a word, No! At least, not yet.

I uploaded the original Microsoft Word manuscript for my book onto CreateSpace as a test. Remember that this document converted perfectly on Lulu, and I even used the result for the interior of my book on CreateSpace.

Some people have asked whether CreateSpace provides a preview of your generated PDF, so that you can see if it worked out ok. The answer is yes, as you can see below.

What's wrong with this picture?

To start with, it has the the words For Preview Only stamped across it -- which means you can't use the CreateSpace-generated PDF elsewhere. So beware that if you upload a Word document to CreateSpace, you will be locked in. It makes sense for them, I suppose,  but maybe not for you. Not if you want to sell the same PDF as an e-book from your web site.

Actually, I wouldn't want to use it elsewhere -- because it confirms my worst fears about the conversion process:

The headers and footers that you can see in the picture are not my originals. My originals had the author name and book title in mirrored headers. My originals had the page number to the right or left in mirrored footers.

Figure 1 in the picture has been shrunk, which, along with some other conversion anomalies, affects the pagination of the document... which messes up the Contents Page and Index of mybook.

Oh, and the Roman numeral page numbers in my front matter (not shown) have been replaced with Arabic numerals.

I could go on.

The bottom line is that this conversion is currently only suitable for very simple fiction books with no images, no self-made headers and footers, no Contents and Index, and so on.

So I'll be generating my own PDFs, or using the trusty Lulu Word-to-PDF converter -- even for the interiors of my CreateSpace books. And if I'm going to use Lulu for my CreateSpace PDF conversions, then I might as well go ahead and publish the same book on Lulu too, hadn't I? Two publishing platforms for the price of one, you might say.

(if you try this at home, note that you would need to run the conversion twice; so as to incorporate the CreateSpace and Lulu ISBNs in their respective print-ready PDFs)

Message to CreateSpace: This Word-to-PDF conversion feature will be an invaluable feature for some authors, when you get it right. 

Tony Loton is author of Book Publishing DIY : The Do It Yourself Guide to Self-Publishing using Lulu and CreateSpace

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