Proof #2 arrived today, and I’ll be doing Proof #3. Some things are kind of unavoidable: Part of the back cover keeps showing on the spine (where it looks like ass), even though I moved it in the last proof. I realized that, since small shifts in placement of the cover graphics in different print runs are unavoidable, I should make some adjustments to the back cover so that the contrast isn’t as dramatic and it doesn’t look as bad if it overlaps the spine a bit.

Other things are just Amazon really not improving on what CreateSpace did. CreateSpace (like most printers) indicated that a proof was a proof by stamping “PROOF” on the last page of the book. I guess Amazon decided that this was not enough to prevent people from selling on their proofs, so now there’s a ribbon printed across the cover indicating that the book is a proof and should not be resold. (Like this is going to prevent people from buying and selling proofs, right? I mean, they know what they’re getting.)

Well guess what? That ribbon runs over the subtitle on the front cover, so I’m really having to guess as to how that’s going to look in the finished product (which pretty much defeats the entire purpose of a proof), and it runs over the jacket copy on the back cover.

That’s a real problem, because jacket copy is just a freaking minefield. Gimp doesn’t let you spell-check your text, nor copy-paste it from elsewhere. So there’s always about a million little typos, which are hard to catch because my (basic-ass) printer just isn’t able to produce a cover with legible jacket copy. Because of the limitations of my printer (no worse, I would argue, than most home printers), it’s also hard to tell if the color used for the jacket copy blends into the underlying graphic or stands out properly until I see the final, high-quality print. (Obviously that’s also hard to determine from a computer monitor, because it’s backlit, and I just have a harder time proofreading on the computer.)

Needless to say, having a ribbon over the jacket copy that makes it illegible and invisible isn’t helpful. At all. Fingers crossed I caught everything, but wow—Amazon is not making this easy.