Update: Printing Hiatus Clarification
Okay, I thought it was only fair that I provide more detail for why I won’t use CreateSpace for the foreseeable future after my experience with trying to print “Web Of Lives 2″ and “Web Of Lives: Demons 1″. If you plan to use their service (especially for comic publishing), just be warned. My issues may not be your issues.
It started with my getting canned, general rejectioned notices from uploading the interior file for “Demons 1″ and being told that all art has to bleed or not (like one panel is not allowed to bleed as an artistic style), and that narrow margins were not allowed. And then they told me that “Web 2″ had the same problem even though the initial notice didn’t mention any issues with margins, just a small mismatch of cover title name to interior title name.
I disagreed with that rule of bleeds and narrow margins from a philosophical perspective that it should be my choice as the publisher and not theirs as the print service.
After several email exchanges and escalating to two supervisors, I finally felt that we were making headway to what I thought were valid issues around the file’s page dimensions and text bubbles possibly being cut off.
So I uploaded the modified files with the additional email note that the crux of a lot of my frustration was not being able to view what they were viewing because something wasn’t adding up in terms of their PDF instructions margins and what my software was displaying. Through this whole process, I repeatedly asked to have the files uploaded so I can view the digital proofs and determine where the problems could be myself. But they had kept giving me rejection notices at the file upload step.
Then after the final files upload, I got the EXACT SAME canned, generic rejection errors regarding margins and bleeds and text cutoff that started the whole mess.
So after a week and a half of frustration and wasted time, I have had it.
And do I think it was homophobic with the timing of the “Demons 1″ file starting this whole mess? I can’t say. None of my interactions mentioned the fact that “Demons 1″ had gay content. BUT it didn’t help that in one of the email exchanges a rep trying to be helpful tried to give me a list of pages violating their bleed rule and the VERY FIRST page was the one with a depiction of gay male sexual activity. Whether they noticed that, I don’t know and have no further comment on the matter.
Time to move on.