Well, Amazon finally admitted they were pulling the plug to all of their CS authors (probably because so many were outraged by discovering it accidentally!). Here's their 'official' summary of their actions:
We're excited to announce that CreateSpace (CSP) and Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) will become one service. As a reminder, KDP now offers Expanded Distribution to sell your paperbacks to physical bookstores in the US, as well as the ability to sell your paperback books on Amazon.ca and Amazon.com.au (Amazon.mx coming soon). With these features, KDP's paperback distribution will be on par with CreateSpace's distribution. KDP also offers features that aren't available on CreateSpace. These include the ability to purchase ads to promote paperbacks on Amazon.com and locally printed author copies in Europe.
As a result of these enhancements to KDP and our ongoing efforts to provide a more seamless experience for managing your paperback and digital books, CreateSpace and KDP will become one service. On KDP, your paperbacks will still be printed in the same facilities, on the same printers, and by the same people as they were on CreateSpace.
In the coming weeks, we'll start automatically moving your CreateSpace books to KDP. Your books will remain available for sale throughout the move and you'll continue to earn royalties. Once we begin this process you'll be unable to edit existing titles or create new titles on CreateSpace. To learn more about the move and review the latest, visit here.
If you have a release planned soon or you would like to start the move yourself, you can move your entire CreateSpace catalog to KDP in just a few steps. To get started on your move to KDP, log in to your CreateSpace Member Dashboard. During this transition, you can contact KDP customer support by email and access phone support in English.
There are a few payment and printing fee differences associated with the move. Any royalties earned while your books are on CreateSpace will be paid according the CreateSpace's payment schedule, 30 days after the end of the month in which they were earned. After you move your books to KDP, new royalties earned will be paid on KDP's payment schedule. KDP pays royalties on a monthly basis 60 days after the end of the month in which they were earned. As a result, you'll be paid in October for any royalties earned in September on CreateSpace and be paid in November for any royalties earned on KDP. In addition, some low-page count books will see an increase in printing fees when they are printed in the UK and EU. We've already sent an email to the small number of accounts affected by this change. Learn more about KDP's printing costs here.
We'll be in touch with more updates in the coming weeks. It is still Day 1 for independent publishing. As Amazon's recent shareholder letter noted, there are more than a 1,000 authors who earn more than a $100,000 a year from their work with us. We could not be more optimistic about the future of independent publishing and this change will allow us to innovate faster for you.
In short, if you have ANY pride in your work, get your stories off of CS NOW!!! Secondly, authors will undoubtedly LOSE money with this transition, as there's NO indication anyone will save money other than Amazon! (Among other details, Amazon has always taken a bigger share of commissions than CS does, plus now there are more 'fees' involved. Finally, it's now both harder and more expensive for most of the world to order print books via Amazon than they did under CS.
Finally, I've read up on getting off of CS. Amazon has NEVER sold ANY print books outside of the U.S. Instead, Amazon subcontracts Ingram Sparks to print the books for them. That means, all you have to do to move your books there is do remove them from CS immediately, wait a week or two, and then submit them to IS using the same ISBN.
If you move the books earlier, IS will recognize it as an Amazon books and refuse to accept it. Once it's 'flagged' as being unplublished, they already have the book on their site, with the current ISBN, and should have no problem publishing it without problems.
Except … IS refuses to publish ANY BOOK not created using InDesign. Since they're already publishing many pdf's created from WORD files, it's clear this restriction is meaningless, meaning they're posing the restriction merely to be dicks about it (i.e. refusing to deal with conversion complaints). So, if you haven't always published via InDesign (which NO author ever works in themselves), you're shit outta luck!
At the moment, I'm unsure whether to halt printing print books at all, switching to IS (which is a better publisher but charges substantially more per book (i.e. POD is no longer "free" for the authors), or submit to King Amazon and allow them to mangle my print books. :(
