S L Flynn

An author's blog

Tag: book design

A Dream of Launching

October 20, 2020 /

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.

The Prints of Proof

October 10, 2020 /

Previously on Game of Tomes

In A Dance with Designers, three talented teams of freelance designers produced covers and interior book designs for Raether’s Enzyme. Each team’s cover captured a different aspect of the story and were viable keys to unlocking readers’ interest. The teams mastered the layout challenges posed by the manuscript’s stylistic flourishes. The dance ended with a cliffhanger: I had three great designs and could only bring one to market. There was one last test.

Kindle Direct Proof

The final test was to upload the designers’ files to Amazon KDP and request proof copies of the paperbacks. This would get me as close as possible to what a real reader would experience. I had prior experience with the system that gave me cause for concern. This time I had professional design products, not dev. I was optimistic. Too optimistic…

I’ll break here and to say that the trials I recount here are 21st Century First World Problems™. KDP and IngramSpark afford indie authors an amazing opportunity to create real live books without the overhead of a full-blown print run. Raether’s Enzyme would not be available in paperback if it wasn’t for Print On Demand.

Okay, back to our story. I chose the design I favored ever-so-slightly for the first proof. With the files uploaded and the automated tests passed, the online preview of the book looked promising. The cover was a bit dim, but the interior tracked the designer’s PDF file perfectly. I ordered four proof copies and sat on the porch steps waiting for the delivery.

The covers were rather dim. Areas that glowed on the screen with red were like dried blood. The magical cyan was the green of chalkboards. Whole areas of subtle detail were lost in the darkness.  I’ve worked in and with computers long enough to know that unless the screen to printer pipeline is calibrated, what you see on the former isn’t what you’ll get on the latter. The additive colors on your screen work differently than the subtractive colors used by printers. Gamut mapping is a science. But it struck me that in the years that KDP had been serving indie authors, it should be able to print the users’ cover files with greater fidelity.

Diving into the KDP community forums revealed that dark covers were a persistent issue. The best advice anyone had to offer was to print on glossy paper (I had chosen a matte finish) for a 10%-20% boost in brightness. That was useful. I would try that. But that would mean another week or so before the next (single) proof copy arrived. The process was broken. For the time being, I had to deal with it.

I imagined ways it could be better, wrote them up, and posted them to the section of the KDP community forums dedicated to feedback and feature requests.

First things: I’m still new to this but have been in the system since CreateSpace. I know that printing cannot deliver the luminosity and range of colors that you can see on the screen. I recognize that an ideal pipeline would include calibration of the monitor to the printer. I understand the difference between RGB and CMYK but am not versed in the art and science of gamut mapping.

KDP has done an excellent job with my books’ interiors. The covers of my proof copies are invariably MUCH darker than source PDFs and images. The new previewer hints and the darkness to come, but IMHO understates it. The availability of proof copies on demand is a miracle of 21st Century publishing, but the one-week time between requesting a proof copy and having one to evaluate makes an iterative approach to getting the desired cover very, very slow.

Any or all of the following would improve productivity and reduce resource use. Please consider implementing these features for KDP.

COVER PROOF COPIES. Allow the author-publisher to request a printing of just the cover.

FILTERED COVER PROOF GALLERY. Like a cover proof copy, but with multiple miniatures of the cover on a single sheet. One displays the cover as uploaded. The others show the printed results with variations on the cover. RGB vs. CMYK. Selected embedded color profiles (community wisdom is that these are discarded by KDP, so maybe not). Gradations of enhanced saturation and/or brightness. Label each so that the customer can adjust their cover to match the one that looks best to them.

SMARTER COLOR MAPPING. Amazon’s a smart, capable company. Do a better job at translating the customer’s colors to what the printer can deliver. Train a machine learning system to provide customer-satisfying results. Something to keep my spirits from falling when I open the box of proof copies.

GREATER TRANSPARENCY AND BETTER GUIDANCE. Community members have done heroic work in offering workarounds to weaknesses in KDP. They aren’t in a position to solve our problems with this aspect of self-publishing. KDP should tell us up-front how to get the best color fidelity for our book covers. At the very least, it should document which printers to target so that we have a better chance to get things right the first time.

KDP is an important partner in getting Tensile Press books to market. Addressing the issues around cover color fidelity will make it a cherished partner.

Thank you for your attention.
Sean Flynn
Tensile Press

This is a “compliment sandwich” with some “plussing” in the middle. These was no response from the KDP team. Various jaded community members took time out of their days to tell me that it was foolish to expect any improvements to the system. One helpful soul recommended that I send the same message to KDP tech support. I did. The response was a polite email thanking me for my input and assuring me that they would forward the message to the business unit. Time will tell.

With help from the designer and a glossy cover, the second-round proof copy looked great.

I still had two more designs to proof. Swapping in their cover and interior files one after the other would take weeks—possibly months if changes were required—before I would have all three in front of me to compare. I cheated by creating two new books with slightly different titles and KDP-supplied ISBNs. With the files uploaded for each, I ordered both as proof copies. In these cases, the covers and interiors were fine.

Proof of spines

Now there were three real-world copies of Raether’s Enzyme, each a unique embodiment of the story. The fruit of the dance with designers lay on my dining room table. I studied the covers under sunlight, LEDs, and the sky. Magical. Sophisticated. Electric. I paged through them all, weighing how each rendered the general text and played my various formatting games. A favorite emerged. A personal favorite. For a final final test, I met separately with two of my stalwart beta readers and asked for their impressions. Both preferred two of the designs. To my great relief, one of the two was my favorite. My marketing-savvy reader told me that an image should contain one, or at most two messages. He pointed to one of the proof copies and said that it had the most direct message. It was the design I had chosen based on the emotion in its cover and the way the design infused the interior. Sometimes marketing and personal taste converge.

The Bill-ion-aire, and the rest…

Amazon (via KDP) is a big market for independent authors. It is not the only market. I want Raether to available to as wide an audience as possible. Or at least as practical. Alexa will tell you that I’m quite fond of Amazon, but she doesn’t know that I like my local bookstores too and favor them when it comes to new books from my favorite authors. Readers enjoy their books on tablets, phones, laptops, desktops, and eReaders. They check out print books and e-books from their local libraries. Raether’s Enzyme should meet them where they want to read.

The self-publishing ecosystem makes this possible in numerous ways. After research and deliberation, I decided to split my non-Amazon betting by putting the print edition and the e-book into separate channels. Part of this was for eggs-and-baskets reasons. The other was to learn more about these channels for future projects.

Sparking Raether’s Enzyme

IngramSpark, that is. In many ways, IngramSpark is like KDP. Authors upload cover and content files. IngramSpark’s printing arm, Lightning Source, prints copies of the book on demand. KDP is a vertically integrated tentacle of the vast quasi-monopoly that is Amazon, who prints and sells the book. IngramSpark is part of Ingram Content Group, the largest book distributor and wholesaler in the United States. In that role, it is the ally, rather than adversary, of bookstores large and small. Adding your book to Ingram’s catalog makes it visible to your friendly neighborhood bookstore, Barnes & Noble, and your public library.

As in KDP, after your files are uploaded, IngramSpark guides you through setting the price of your book. This was my first real contact with life outside of the Amazon basin. I learned why paperback books cost what they do. To make money, bookstores need a wholesale discount. IngramSpark recommends 55% off the cover price. When I combined the price I had set for the paperback on KDP with the discount and the cost of production, Ingram calculated that my profit would be negative. I would owe for each copy sold. I needed to raise the list price by…a bit. To maintain the goodwill of the non-Amazon universe, my Amazon price would have to rise to match what I needed to charge to make things work with Ingram.

Bookstores very much want to be able to return unsold books for a refund. Margins are small. They need to manage the risk of stocking new authors. I understand and respect that. Tensile Press (which is me) can’t afford to be on the hook for a big return. Or a multitude of little ones. So, at the very real risk of Raether never appearing on a bookstore shelf, I opted out of offering a return policy.

Smashing all the words

The prospect of plugging into all myriad e-book stores daunted me. There are several outlets that will handle the multiplexing for you. I went with Smashwords. It has a good reputation and I have some pleasant memories of working with (what I think is) its founder, Mark Coker, back at Apple in the 1980s. When you upload to Smashwords, there’s little room for shillyshallying.  You’re either in the pipeline for immediate publication, or you’re available for pre-order. I freaked out. I hadn’t set a date in my mind, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t that day. I picked a release date a few weeks in the future. And I found a button on the dashboard to ‘unpublish’ the e-book. I clicked it.

Finger on the trigger

I sat there and asked myself, “If not then, when?” It was 2020. The murder hornets appeared here in Washington in the second act. Chekhov’s Gun required they be used before the curtain fell. Did I want to risk dying in whatever ether, cocaine, and peyote infused madness the 2020 writer’s room had in store without having published one book?

…………………Bang.

The answer was no. I republished on Smashwords with the original release date. I set the release date on IngramSpark. I set the (e-book) release date on KDP. The hammer struck the firing pin. The firing pin hit the primer. The powder began to burn. Raether’s Enzyme was on its way down the barrel and into the world.

Two days later an excited email arrived from one of my beta readers. Raether’s paperback edition was available for preorder on Amazon. After a moment of confusion, I realized that the IngramSpark had pushed the preorder to Amazon. As I write this, I’m working through Amazon’s support network to override that edition with the KDP version. Over the next few days, the e-book preorder surfaced on Apple’s bookstore. Print and e-book on Barnes & Noble. Kobo.

I am committing the quietest, softest, weakest book launch imaginable. I have flouted all the online guru’s advice for building interest. I haven’t sent advanced reader copies to influential book bloggers. I haven’t sought out the online communities where my (potential) audience dwells. I haven’t commissioned reviews to decorate the ad campaign I haven’t even planned. I haven’t raised an army of flying monkeys to trumpet the news to the far corners of Oz. My marketing-fu is rubbish.

Nonetheless, here it goes. There is much left to do before I can at least make an announcement via my limited social media.

Tick-tock. Tick-tock.

A Dance with Designers

September 23, 2020 /

Previously on Game of Tomes

In A Clash of Copyeditors, two talented freelance editors improved my Raether’s Enzyme manuscript and I then struggled to merge their edits into a final draft. I bought my own copy of the Chicago Manual of Style and verified that we now use the lower-case internet. There was much rejoicing.

Two is Good. Three is Better. Right?

Clash’s dual-slit copyeditor experiment went well enough that I was keen to try it again with the cover and interior design. I liked Reedsy as a place to connect with freelance professionals but it was too early to put all my eggs in their walled garden. One of my eggs, yes. The other I would entrust to someone else. Someone out there.

Be careful for what you wish for. To that end, I started my search with the following criteria in place and immutable:

  • One stop shop. For the cover, interior, and eBook to be consistent, I wanted one designer (or team) to develop all three. Typography on the cover should inform the interior. On a more concrete level, the dimensions of a paperback’s cover spine depends on the page count of the interior.
  • Genre agility. Raether’s DNA contains thriller, sci-fi, and a dash of superhero story. The designer portfolios I was looking for needed breadth. There are artists and studios out there who can land your cover solidly within the romance, science fiction, or fantasy spaces. I was looking for an artist who could compose from a multi-genre palette.
  • License free. Once I had the completed work, I needed to be free to use it without accounting for additional use fees. You know, in case I sell too many books.
  • I strive to be clear and forthright in my dealings. I prepared a project brief describing scope and challenges as I saw them. The designers I wanted to work with would cite details or ask pertinent questions in the course of formulating their offers.

The project brief I sent to each designer began thus:

Short version

Cover and interior design for eBook and print. 114,000-word manuscript. Mixed genre – a contemporary thriller with elements of science fiction and superhero origin story. Includes text messages, email, simple tables, and a few other stylistic flourishes that preclude direct application of a template.

I am exploring this process for the first time. I may hire more than one designer. In that scenario you would be paid in full and thanked profusely but might not see your contribution to the book go to market.

The long version goes on from there into spoilers territory.

After a long search, I landed on a book design site that I liked. Their portfolio was diverse and included authors that I recognized. The prices were higher than I expected and did not include eBook formatting in the package that was otherwise right for my project. There was space for my brief in the request-a-quote form, so I added it. I clicked submit and waited to hear back via email. The response was disappointing. Boilerplate outlined a cover and interior package that started out $500 more expensive than the package I had asked about. That base figure covered a page count that was much smaller than I knew Raether would need. The quote disagreed with the web site and indifferent to the details I had provided. I chose to go no further.

I approached the next design site with the same brief and more trepidation. Unnecessary trepidation. The designer (interior) had read the brief and asked to see the manuscript to better set the bid. These were folks I could work with. I had my non-Reedsy design team.

All this while, I had encoded most of my criteria into Reedsy’s marketplace search queries and spent many hours reviewing bios and portfolios. After much sifting and sorting I got it down to two candidates. One had a strong, broad portfolio and a background that fit the project well. The other had a distinctive distinctiveness to his work. I wanted to see what he would do with the project. I requested quotes from both. Be careful what you wish for. They were both available. Both were interested in the project and attentive to its requirements. Both were fair and reasonable in their offers. Dangerously reasonable. As in: I could hire both of them for what that first design site was asking. So that’s what I did.

Dosado and Away We Go

Every dance has certain steps. The copyediting dance is relatively simple. The writer presents the editor with a manuscript and any notes that might be helpful. The editor may in time respond with questions about the manuscript’s idiosyncrasies. The editor delivers a version of the manuscript with their recommended changes tracked by Word. The writer happily clicks ‘Accept’ on 95% of the changes and agonizes over whether the remain errors are something super clever and special. The dance partners thank each other and move on.

The book design dance is more involved and iterative. The steps I observed while collaborating with all three teams went like so:

  1. The writer supplies the manuscript, notes about what they are looking for, and examples of relevant cover art.
  2. The designer creates two or more preliminary cover designs.
  3. The writer spends a day thrilled with and fascinated by the designer’s imagination and skill.
  4. The writer agonizes about which design to choose.
  5. The writer picks one design to move forward and writes up their thoughts on the cover.
  6. The designer evolves the cover in response to the writer’s notes and delivers one or more variations of the core cover.
  7. Repeat steps 5 and 6. The designers I worked with offered more than one revision as part of their services. If you need more than three, chances are there’s a communication problem or you don’t really know what you’re looking for.
  8. The writer signs off on the cover design.
  9. The designer takes the manuscript, front matter (copyright, dedication, etc.), back matter (acknowledgments, author bio, etc.) and instructions from the writer and combines them into a print-ready PDF.
  10. The writer reviews the PDF and responds with any notes and corrections.
  11. The designer updates the PDF in response.
  12. Repeat steps 10 and 11 as needed. (Raether needed due to its formatting extravagances.)
  13. The writer signs off on the interior. The page count is now known and fixed.
  14. Optional: Paperback full cover design. Skip if the project is eBook only.
    1. The writer supplies back cover blurb text and ISBN number.
    2. The designer extends the cover design to include the spine and back cover with barcode.
    3. The writer reviews the full cover design and responds with notes.
    4. The designer updates the full cover design.
    5. Repeat steps c and d as needed.
    6. The writer signs off on the full cover.
  15. Optional: eBook interior design. This is like the print interior design, with EPUB files taking the place of the print-ready PDF.

Working with one designer, a manuscript with conventional formatting, and a story with clear genre, this dance is intricate but the choreography is straight-forward. Working with three designers on a more complex manuscript (by novel standards), a mixed genre story, and consulting with my beta readers, is where the dosado comes in. From my perspective, it was more of a square dance than a waltz. I was switching partners, repeating steps, and listening for the next call. The extra work was rewarded with sustained excitement.

The Covers

In the first draft of this post, I went into detail about dance Steps 1 through 8. I described each of the cover candidates, my reactions to them, and which ones I chose to develop and why. That was the right thing to do for a private journal and the wrong thing to do for a blog post. While I had anonymized the designers, I was still exposing details of our collaborative dialog and painting with words works-in-progress that were not intended for a wide audience. To put it lightly: It was unprofessional. To put it honestly: I was betraying the designer’s trust.

Allow me to summarize. Each design team started with the manuscript, some notes, and a link to the educational saga of my own attempt at designing the book. The preliminary designs were exciting and diverse. Each artist found their own themes to emphasize and each of these pictures spoke a thousand words about what I had written. Each was a key with the potential to unlock the interest of readers who will enjoy the book. Studying the designs and writing feedback for the artists sharpened my understanding of what I was looking for. Picking one design from each team to develop forced me to separate what I wanted and liked from what the book needed. Reaching Step 8 was an awesome milestone, repeated three times.

Here are five of the things I learned during this part of the dance:

  • Don’t over-specify the design. What the designers created was far more interesting and original than what I had in my head. I put that creativity at risk by sharing too many of my own thoughts. If the designer’s process includes reading the manuscript, let the story itself make the suggestions.
  • Write good feedback on all the preliminary designs. You’ll only develop one, but what you loved about the others (and what didn’t quite work) will inform the evolution of your preferred cover. Getting your reactions and reasoning down in writing clarifies your thinking.
  • Putting your characters on the cover is hard. I read that without searching out a model and commissioning a photo shoot, you aren’t going to get a great match for features, expressions, or poses. This turned out to be true. Working with glimpses, abstractions, or silhouettes can put your protagonist on the cover without stealing the one of the most important things the reader imagines.
  • Test the designs at thumbnail size. Beautiful, subtle images and typography weaken when the cover is one of many thumbnails the reader is browsing through an online catalog. Unless or until the reader is looking for your book, the cover has to do its work when it’s small.
  • Favor fuel over maps when providing feedback. Inspire change rather than direct it. Request amplification or reduction of emotions instead of dictating new design elements. Identify problems in terms that allow the designer to find the solution. I did make some very specific requests. “Could we see the apostrophe more clearly?” The most nit-picky was: “Could we increase the kerning here?” Picking of nits should be the exception, not the rule.

On to the Interior

Dancing with designers inside the book’s cover is less emotional than the cover design. Absent interior illustrations, it’s all about layout, typography, and getting the fine details right. Some people have passionate opinions about fonts and might argue with their designer over which style of Baskerville to use for the body text. I’m not one of those people. Each design team picked a different set of fonts and all are pleasing to my eye. For a novel with the usual mix of narration and dialog, the first version of the interior may be the final one. Reviewing might catch widows and orphans, which are easily fixed.

Raether features stylings for which there appear to be no industry standards: dialog via text messages, email, and Slack chats. Its scene breaks take the form of headlines culled from the internet. These features presented a creative challenge for the designers. I had solutions for these problems and corresponding Word styles for the manuscript. The trick was to make them clear and pleasing on the printed page. As a general rule, a novel uses one font in its body text. There may be bold face in the chapter headings and occasional italics. After seeing the text messages in the main font, I asked the designers to use a sans serif font, like the ones you’re used to seeing on your devices, for all the electronic communication. This made the transitions between the digital world and the regular narrative clear.

The text messages were not done making trouble. In the manuscript and in each interior design, you see them as on your phone, with the messages from one person on the right and the other on the left. The designers had trouble keeping the messages on their correct sides. My bafflement turned to frustration. How are you getting this wrong? It’s right there in the manuscript! I didn’t actually blow up like that at them. I just made notes off all the places where the errors occurred. The errors were fixed. I cooled down and realized that if they were all having the same problem, it might well be in the manuscript. In the course of formatting the messages, I had allowed Word to spawn sibling styles for right and left side messages. Failure to consolidate those styles meant that while it looked right in the manuscript, the work the designers did to transform the message styles was error-prone. Document your fancy-pants styles and apply them with rigor.

The upside of needing revisions to the interior PDF was that I found seven manuscript errors that had slipped through copyediting. The designers were all kind enough to work those corrections into their revisions.

Popping down to the EPUB

EPUB is the (family of) standards underlying most eBooks. Under the hood, your typical EPUB eBook is a ZIP file containing XML documenting the book’s structure, CSS files describing its stylings, HTML files for all the chapters and sundry sections, and image files for the cover and any interior artwork. Having worked on Microsoft’s XPS documents and early versions of its web browser, this isn’t unfamiliar territory for me. Nonetheless, I sought help to ensure Raether’s eBook offered readers a polished experience.

Two of the three design teams opted out of the EPUB part of the project. To their credit, the Word files for the interior PDFs can be converted to EPUB and Amazon’s corresponding format via tools like calibre and Kindle Create. The process turned out to be mostly automated and otherwise straight-forward.

The third designer signed up for the job and probably wishes he hadn’t. Little did he suspect I would draw him into a vortex powered by my neophyte ignorance and long history in software development. He provided me with .EPUB and .MOBI versions of the book. I downloaded a variety of eBook readers to my PC, iPad, and iPhone to test out the file. I sideloaded the MOBI onto my Kindle Paperwhite. I changed color schemes and font sizes. There were problems. Some of them I attributed to dodgy apps. But on the Kindle, Kindle apps, and Apple’s books, I expected perfection and got bungled drop caps at the beginning of each chapter. The cover image was either clipped or stretched. I freaked out.

The designer was flummoxed. It looked great when he tested in Kindle Previewer 3. I downloaded this program and told it open the file. The other eBook readers had opened the file instantly. Kindle Previewer 3 popped up a little progress window. It wasn’t just opening the file. It was ingesting it. In the progress window, text flashed by. Something about ‘Enhanced Typesetting’. It turns out that drop caps are facilitated by ‘secret sauce’ that Amazon adds to the file as you hand it off to their KDP self-publishing site. Apple and the other big eBook sellers likely do the same. EPUB is an independent standard, but the big players “add value” to provide a more premium experience than the core standard allows. I needed to trust the system(s) to make things right. I apologized to the designer for raising the alarm. Ever the professional and diplomat, he said the project had been a learning experience for both of us.

When the Music Stops

I have three great designs. Each captures an aspect of my story and illuminates it with an artists imagination. Each is right in its own way. I want readers to see all three and pick the one they like best. But that misses the point. There aren’t any readers out there who will pay their good money for my book based on the strength of my name. I tempt myself with the possibility of selling different designs through different channels and tell myself it would be a form of A/B testing. Traditionally published books get different covers in different markets. I have spare ISBN numbers to apply as needed. Could I attract attention with such a stunt? Yes. Would I sow confusion where I need clarity? Probably. Am I trying to rationalize avoiding a hard choice? Definitely.

When the music stops, there can be only one. Somewhere down the line there may be an opportunity to share the other designs via special editions. For launch, I need one cover to share and advertise.

There is one more test to run. One more set of data to collect. I need proof that that each design works. Please stay tuned.

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