cover

Progress report

I finished the new version of the cover for Book 2! I’m happy with how it turned out. Apparently when you have a really bad-ass character who is supposed to look absolutely terrifying (scars, broken nose, etc), BUT you want him to look romantic for the cover (hidden depths!), the key is: Have him close his eyes. Works wonders.

Progress report

I finished the cover for the second book today—it’s a bit of a quandary for me because I wound up with a cover that I think is very true to the couple, but it’s not a clinch. The clinch is actually kind of important in the romance genre, because it helps convey to readers the heat level of the story—a couple getting handsy/naked on the cover means that they’re doing that inside as well.

This series is fairly adult, so I feel a bit odd about this cover—the couple is being a bit weird, but nothing romantic or explicitly sexual. In a way, it works, because they are an odd couple (quite a bit stranger than the other couples in the series). I think readers will be OK as long as the rest of the book covers and the descriptions take a more-traditional approach.

Progress report

Whew! Well, I didn’t get much sleep last night, so I wasn’t expecting to be very productive today, and indeed other than a little editing, I wasn’t. But then I decided I should start trying to figure out the covers, and I hit on a cover design for the series that I really like. We’ll see how things go with the actual artwork, but I like the basic template a lot. I seen other people recommend this, but I do think that if you’re going for a specific feel for a cover, color-picking from photographs or artwork that are of the place or the period is really helpful.

Also, I used new GIMP for the first time today—it looks different from old GIMP, but it basically operates the same, so it was a pretty quick learning curve.

Progress report

I heard back from the copy editor of Tribulations, which makes me hopeful it will return to me sooner rather than later. So today I updated the cover, since that needs to happen. That was a more-complicated one, so I’m glad it’s done.

I’m going to be pretty busy the next week or so, so I’ll probably take a little holiday from book stuff. Then if Tribulations gets back to me, I can put that out, and if not, I’ll get to work on the second romance book (I want to write out the entire series before publication—it’s just that kind of project).

The end of the Great Cover Revision of 2021

It’s done, baby! Everything’s getting approved!

Just to show the issues with printers: Here are two proofs from Amazon—produced by the same company at different times.

IMG_8453.png

I never altered the colors. You can also kind of tell that the image is further to the left on the top cover than on the bottom—that gets especially notable on the spine.

Amazon isn’t particularly bad at this—all printers do it, it’s just the nature of the beast. But it’s something to keep in mind when designing covers, you have to build in at least some error tolerance (and try not to be all Walter White about it).

And more covers

So! The Trust proof came back—I made a couple of changes (oh, the wandering bar code), but I didn’t think they required a second proof, so I’ve published that with the updated cover. I also updated the covers for the large-print editions of Trust and The Weirld, and I ordered proofs for those.

I know I’m going to have to re-do the covers for Tribulations and Trials, but that’s a matter for another day.

Covers covers covers

The proofs of The Weirld and Trang arrived today with the new covers, plus I updated the large-print cover of Trang. I approved The Weirld for sale with a minor change, but Trang is going to need another proof—like any other printer, when Amazon tells you “The bar code goes here!” what that really means is that the bar code will show up in that general area, hopefully. So I needed to put a little extra space between some of the elements and that bar code to give it the room it needs to roam….

As I was previewing the large-print edition of Trang, I realized there was an error inside the book—some of the page numbers in the first chapter are italicized when they shouldn’t be. So I went back and looked at the old files, and I can’t fix it—that was back when I was masochistic and laid out books in Word, which was never especially stable even back then. Nowadays, I can’t open a Word file and have the layout look anything like it used to. So, my apologies for the error, but it ain’t getting fixed!

Trust cover revision

That didn’t take long, did it? It’s a lot easier to throw art and text together into a new file than it is to come up with the concept & art in the first place, that’s for sure. Which makes me think I should continue through and update the large-print covers—but I’ll see what my schedule is like. I’d like to get back to writing, but this is obviously a good project for days when I don’t have a ton of time or focus.

Whew! Trang cover revision

I was able to do that—luckily GIMP does fine with the old…whatever-I-was-using-before files (Microsoft Paint?), so I was able to figure out what the hell fonts I used. It was also good that I kept the art elements (that series has a consistent cover look, so I knew I’d be reusing them). But wow, the Trang series has some busy, busy covers, with about a gazillion layers….

Weirld cover revision

I started out with The Weirld, because I don’t have tons of time today and The Weirld was done in GIMP before. Once I got into it I could see that there was a big difference between what was required for a CreateSpace cover and what Amazon would have you do nowadays. I had to re-do all the text, which meant I had to reassemble the cover. Fortunately I had the art on hand, and because the old file was GIMP anyway, matching colors and fonts was super-easy. I got it done and will order a new proof.

Hopefully this update will settle things for a while—I’m certainly happy that the text on the cover will be sharper. But there’s also a difference in the color values that I’m less thrilled about—the old CreateSpace cover was brighter, while the Amazon cover is more yellow and muted. I don't know if the update will help that in any kind of permanent way—that seems like one of those “perils of changing printers" issues.

What is the purpose of a proof, again?

Amazon wanted me to fiddle with the paperback pricing, because they’re selling paperbacks in Australia now. Fine by me—all the paperbacks except Dislocated World were done on CreateSpace, and there’s some weirdness with the distribution in Amazon’s markets as a result, so I figured I’d fix that.

Then I got to feeling like I should order proofs of the paperback versions of Trang, Trust, and The Weirld, because who knows? Strange things can happen when you switch printers.

I did that, they came…and yeah, they look a little funny now. Like, the covers are there and the interiors are there, so you’re getting a book, but they definitely rendered a little differently, and I feel like they could all use a bit of an update just so that the type is clear and whatnot. You know, once I have the chance to do that. In the meantime I went ahead and approved them, since they’re readable and whatnot.

Aaaand Amazon just told me that Trust cannot be approved for publication because the cover has errors on it.

Remember: I ordered a proof. If there are the kind of errors that make a cover so that it can’t be published, that’s supposed to come up before the writer pays for the proof. Traditionally, the proof is supposed to be the finished product, and proof approval = ready to go.

I guess when you’re deliberately making the proof cover so that no one can see the art, this all makes perfect sense.

At least it's done

Yesterday and today were committed to 1. inputting corrections to the e-book that I caught while laying out the paper book, and 2. uploading the interior manuscript and cover for the paper version to Amazon.

It took two days, and it wasn’t like #1 was the problem. Amazon’s changed the old CreateSpace platform—I don’t know if it’s any less fiddly than CreateSpace, but it’s fiddly in a different way. You make a PDF this way, and it works just fine, but if you make a PDF that way, all is lost.

I did a PDF of the cover and uploaded it—and the software oriented it vertically rather than horizontally, which of course was confusing for all concerned. There was no way to adjust that in Amazon’s software that I could find, so I decided that the best way around was to upload a PNG file into Amazon’s “Cover Creator” program, which worked…except Cover Creator did the whole 90/10 thing Amazon tends to do, where 90% of their software is really intuitive and easy to use, while 10% is completely opaque.

Case in point: I decided after previewing my cover that I wanted to adjust a few things, so I needed to swap out the PNG file (which was the entire cover) for a new one. Well, good luck figuring out how to do that! The very simple, easy-to-use interface had nothing telling you how to do that, you couldn’t go back to an “upload my image” page, and it was all saved so that shutting everything down and starting over helped not at all—the old PNG file was, to all appearances, there to stay.

Finally I found instructions on a completely separate page that wasn’t part of Cover Creator—and all you have to do is click on a certain part of your image, and then this super-easy, super-clear drop-down menu will emerge from hiding and you’re back in The Good 90% of Amazon. I mean, I’m grateful that they’ve got The Good up to 90%, but one unintended side effect of the 90/10 contrast is that it makes you feel really stupid—this tool is so easy to use, once you’ve unearthed it from its secret tomb.

Anyway, I’ve ordered a proof (always always order a proof!), and assuming that looks OK, the paper book will be up on Amazon sooner rather than later. (ETA: Well, Amazon’s proofs are definitely cheaper than CreateSpace—you can splurge on expedited shipping, but I didn’t, and it was less than $10.)

After that, I have some non-book stuff that needs attention, but then I’ll get back to writing Trials until Tribulations comes back from the copy editor. I do still intend to do large-print editions, but I’m a little layout-out’d at the moment, and I’m going to have to do more with layouts once Tribulations returns.

A little bit of this, a little bit of that

I did blurbs/jacket copy for both Tribulations and A Dislocated World today—now I’m working on getting appropriate measurement for the Tribulations cover, since I know how many pages it will be. Amazon took over CreateSpace, and their tools are frankly a bit clunky and involve extra steps and more opportunities for software incompatibilities—if you just give me an online calculator, I can do the rest, thank you very much. Anyway, at this point I think everything is going to work. Fingers crossed!