Loading the CafePress Book

This is a Historic document. As of July 2017, even though the CafePress site still had help documents explaining how to use their self publishing system, their self publishing wing was no longer functional. When I wrote them to ask about the help documents, they apologized and said they would be taking those down.

Once you have your shop ready in CafePress, you can load your book into it.

The key here is that they do NOT take Word documents or anything else - they require a PDF file, and they require embedded PDF fonts.

Word 2007 has a free add-on that you can download from Microsoft that lets you save PDF files directly from Word. However, this did not work for me.

PDF995 is a free software product that installs like a printer. You "print" to PDF995 and a PDF file is created. However, this did not work for me either.

I signed up for Adobe's "get five PDF free" online system. The PDF they generated did not work properly.

In all of these cases, either it wasn't the right size, or the fonts wouldn't embed the way they wanted them to. There is no live help here (unlike Lulu) so I had to email in my problems.

CafePress did end up "fixing" my PDF file for me - i.e. I mailed them my PDF file and they mailed back a "good" version. but you can imagine this wouldn't be a good workaround for long term working.

Once you get a PDF into their system, you then load up JPG images for the front cover, back cover and spine. They do not offer the cool "create covers on the fly" options that Lulu has. The Lulu built-in covers are actually quite nice looking. You have to give them final JPGs yourself.

Also, Lulu will automatically put your ISBN in barcode form on the back cover. You have to own the ISBN, but they make the barcode for you. With CafePress, not only do you have to buy your own ISBN but you have to buy a barcode version of it (or a barcode font) and incorporate that yourself as part of your cover submission.

Now, to set a final sales price. CafePress is EXPENSIVE. For my book, it was $21.10 for the BASE PRICE, never mind shipping or any other profit you would want to make. It is much more expensive than other free self publishers I have researched.

NOTE: - I did finally figure out how to get Word 2007 to create a PDF file that could upload into the CafePress system. Here are the instructions I was given on the Microsoft Word forum -
On the Save to PDF dialog, check the 'Options' button and check the ISO 19005-1 compliant box. This should embed the TNR font in the PDF. Without this box checked, the PDF uses resident fonts when viewed.

CafePress Book Sample - Photos of the results!

Believing Your Eyes - a medieval romance at CafePress.com

CafePress Self Publishing Main Page
What Does It Cost to Ghostwrite a Book?
Lisa Shea's Editing Services
Lisa Shea Free Ebooks
Lisa Shea Full Library of Published Books

Getting Your Book Published
Writing Tips and Online Books

Lisa Shea Medieval Romance Novels
Online Literary Magazines

Lisa Shea Website Main Page