Previously on Game of Tomes

In The Prints of Proof, I resolved the burning question of which book design for Raether’s Enzyme to bring to market by creating paperback proof copies of each design. After studying the proofs and consulting with my trusted beta readers, I settled on one of the three excellent designs. Eager to get the book to market before the murder hornets descended on me, I uploaded the book’s files to Kindle Direct Publishing, IngramSpark, and Smashwords. Hilarity ensued.

Covering my assets

With the great power of self-publishing comes great responsibility. Promoting my books is up me.  For my soft launch, I’ll be announcing the publication of Raether’s Enzyme on my social media. With a little luck, some of my friends, family, and will find the premise of the story interesting. Some of those good folks will enjoy the book enough to recommend it to their friends. Word-of-mouth will spread.

To reach readers beyond my social network, I need to advertise. The twenty-first century is awash in advertising opportunities. To put it mildly. Exploring and exploiting them requires ad media tuned to the various marketing channels. Facebook, Twitter, et al have idiosyncratic requirements for what makes optimal ads on their platforms. As I prepared to engage my designer’s talents, my research revealed that the number of ad formats was daunting. When you add the number of images required to fortify my web site, Facebook page, Twitter and LinkedIn profiles, the project was too large. And any or all these requirements were subject to change without warning.

Rather than ask him to produce all the ads and artwork I would need, I asked him to set me up with graphical assets that I could combine and arrange for all the scenarios I was facing and might face over the life of Raether’s Enzyme. The cover art for Raether is amazing. The title typography is dramatic. The background is a fascinating biofluid texture. He provided me with the title in SVG vector form and extracted the biofluid from the cover art as a PNG file. To round out the package, he rendered the cover as a paperback book and on a tablet (for the e-book). These building blocks empower me to apply my (admittedly modest) Photoshop skills to build ads that play off the strengths of his cover designs.

Ad-ing it up

I set to work building the images I’d need to announce the publication. There wasn’t room for the full back cover blurb. I distilled it down to three sentences, two of them quite short. Putting them into the artwork, I hit my first speedbump. The back cover text is in a font called Thonburi. The only free-to-use version of Thonburi I could find for Windows is for Thai systems. The text of my English sentences rendered as fragments of Thai characters. After consulting with the designer, I settled on Franklin Gothic Medium for my ad copy.

I knocked out the ads and banners on my checklist with time left to pursue a stretch goal: producing a video teaser trailer. By default, I resent PC makers pre-installing third-party ‘bloatware’ on new computers. It’s mostly crap I don’t need or want. The nice folks at MSI preloaded PowerDirector14 on my machine and I’m happy they did. The free portion of its feature set was enough to do the job. The learning curve wasn’t too steep. Before long, I had combined my assets, a few transition effects, and sound effects from soundsnap to create an intriguing thirty second video that had the flavor of a movie trailer. Minus the epic “In a world…” voice.

I was pleased with myself. I downloaded it to my home theatre PC and watched it on my big screen over and over again. The final image features the mock book and tablet. After working on the ads and the video for days on end it finally hit me: a dreadful certainty that the paperback cover I had uploaded to Amazon KDP and IngramSpark was still too dark. It failed to deliver on the promise of the ads. It was one week before Raether’s scheduled launch and I had to fix the cover.

Re-cover-y

Looking back, it was clear that I had settled for a darker cover too readily. My frustration with the screen-to-print issues got the better of me. I should have worked through the problems with the aid of the designer and landed a version of the cover art that printed well back in September. I had run an experiment on my own with an enhanced version of the cover art and a matte cover, but abandon it because the matte finish made the biofluid look chalky. I needed to recreate those enhancements and make them work with the glossy cover finish that worked so well with the liquid theme of the art.

Prudence recommended contacting the designer to ask for a version of the cover with the enhancements I believed would rescue the art from the CMYK darkness. Pride, courtesy, and desperation argued against that. I owned the mistake so I should fix it. It would have been rude (and unprofessional) to interrupt the designer’s work for other clients with my fire drill. The designer is in a different time zone, so even if I was willing to inflict my panic on him, it would be more efficient if I could make the changes and test them with KDP’s previewer on my own.

Easier said than done. I don’t need programs as powerful as Photoshop often enough to justify subscribing to Adobe’s software-as-a-service. For my occasional needs, I have work-alike programs from Affinity. They are generally potent beyond my ability to fully exploit. When I opened a copy of the cover PDF file in Affinity, I ran into two problems. The bleed portion of the cover image was missing. Affinity showed only white. That had the risk appearing at the edges of the paperback cover. The second problem was my old nemesis: Thonburi. All the back-cover text was a mess of arbitrary Thai characters if I had the font installed. Absent Thonburi, the software substituted another font. In the course of ‘fixing’ the imagery, I was breaking the typography.

Necessity is the mother of subscription. I couldn’t bring myself to buy into the full Adobe Creative Suite, but a seven-day free trial of Acrobat Pro DC enabled me to convert the cover PDF into a PNG file that combined (flattened) the image portion with the text. I adjusted that to match my matte cover experiment, boosted to contrast for good measure, and saved it as a PDF. KDP raised no alarms when I uploaded it. I ordered a new proof copy with next-day delivery and told myself to hold off on uploading the new cover to IngramSpark.

Hold the WordPress

My plan was to share the video from this very website, which is powered by WordPress and lives on a BlueHost server. WordPress had other ideas. My attempts to upload the video to the site’s media library failed. “Sorry, this file cannot be uploaded for security reasons.” What?! It’s a simple MP4 video file! It plays just fine on my desktop and my iPad! I consulted various oracles and tried different WordPress plugins to no avail. One of the plugins revealed that MP4 files were on the list of permitted file types. Something else was going sideways during the process and WordPress was barfing up an incorrect error message.

Well, bugger. I didn’t have time for a trip to Techsupportland.

I created a YouTube channel for Tensile Press and uploaded the video there. That should work, but viewers will have YouTube spraying ‘watch next’ content at the end of the video. Because YouTube.

Pressing the button.

The jolly, candy-like button. KDP advises that when you press the paperback publish button, it may take up to 72 hours before the files pass through final review and the book is available for purchase on Amazon. I was slipping inside that window and the proof copy with the new cover had not arrived. The new cover looked better and brighter in the previewer. No guts, no glory. I pressed the button. And waited. No guts, no glory. I uploaded the new cover to IngramSpark. And I went to bed.

The next morning I received e-mail from KDP. My files had failed the final checks. The message’s wording was that of a human being. At long last, actual human eyes had evaluated Raether’s files. It wasn’t the new cover that was the problem. It was the interior PDF, which had passed the automated tests over a month before. The interior design brings the biofluid effect inside the book. You see it in the front matter and in each chapter heading. It is super cool. The biofluid extends to the edges of the pages it appears on. For printing purposes, that means the artwork must extend past the edges of the books page into the paper that gets trimmed away, into the bleed. The interior file I had uploaded ended at the page edge. It did not include the bleed. This should have been easy for the automated tests that run when you upload to detect, but they didn’t. The final human-powered check discovered problem. This error also explained a few problems with the test copy I had ordered from IngramSpark. The designer supplied me with a full-bleed version of the interior. I uploaded it to KDP and IngramSpark, which accepted the update. I pressed the KDP publish button a second time. And waited.

The next morning KDP’s e-mail congratulated me on having published my book. That afternoon, the proof copy with the new cover (and bad interior) arrived. It looks amazing. The colors are a close match to the vibrance of the art on-screen. I hope you relish it as much as I.