Sean L Flynn

An author's blog

Tag: POD

Welcome to the World of Raether’s Enzyme

October 21, 2020 /

Raether’s Enzyme is now a book, a paperback that you can hold and an e-book that you can download to your devices.

  • Amazon (paperback and e-book – including Kindle Unlimited)
  • Your favorite bookstore can order the paperback from Ingram.
    (ISBN: 978-1-7351839-0-9)
  • The paperback can be ordered directly from IngramSpark!

Reaching this milestone required trial, error, work spanning many years, and the advice, encouragement, and support of my friends and family.  Talented editors and artists transformed my manuscript into an experience that surpassed my expectations.

Previous posts on this blog told the story of this book’s creation. The story of its life will be written by readers like you.

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.

Things to Do in Denver While You’re Read

June 19, 2018 /

No, not the movie.  I’m referring to the song that the movie borrowed its title from.

I called up my friend LeRoy on the phone
I said, Buddy, I’m afraid to be alone
I got some weird ideas in my head
About things to do in Denver when you’re dead…

It was exactly like that, except completely different. As readers following these posts in chronological order know, the simply difficult process of adapting the screenplay for Raether’s Enzyme into a novel manuscript reached narrative complete in October 2017. I wasn’t dead, but it was a period of relative quiet. My brain was cooling with subtle ticking noises and spurts of steam. Sizzling drops of cerebrospinal fluid hit the floor.

Friends help you move read your Facebook posts.
Real friends help you move bodies read your first drafts.

Unresolved bugs and story ideas lurking in OneNote invited me to dive into editing and rewrites, but the writings of the Ancients said that I should step back for at least two weeks then approach those tasks with refreshed eyes. My own experience in the software industry also argued that I should wait for feedback from my beta readers before making any big changes to my story’s code. That feedback would reveal a heat map of where the writing and story were strong and weak. The heat map would shape edits and rewrites, steering me towards what needed fixing and away from breaking things the readers already liked.

My courageous beta readers needed time. They had jobs, families, and lives of their own that somehow had priority over reading hundreds of pages my freshly-picked words. After months of working with imaginary people who existed to advance my narrative, the loss of control inherent in handing work off to real people was…grounding. While the beta readers worked, I was alone with some weird ideas in my head.

Doomsday Prepping

In the 20th Century, failure to secure a publishing deal all but doomed a novel. Vanity press was an option, but an expensive one with a low chance of successfully connecting the story to its audience or making money for the author. The new millennium saw the advent of eBooks and Print-On-Demand (POD) services. These disruptive technologies lowered the cost of “vanity publishing” to the point where any author could put their book up for sale in digital form or actually hold a bound copy in their hands for a modest price. These options have advanced to a point where they have challenged the traditional publishers and sparked lively debate as to whether authors of any level of success should submit their manuscripts or self-publish.

So, the arrival of that last rejection letter is no longer doomsday. Preparing for self-publishing is prudent. That’s what I told myself when I prioritized an exploration of self-publishing over working on a query letter, writing synopses, proofreading, and sundry other tasks. A friend had a good experiencing publishing a how-to book via CreateSpace, a POD appendage of Amazon. He assured me that I could hold a proof copy of my story in my hands without committing to publishing on the platform. It was irresistible.

CreateSpace-ing RE Draft 1.0

I was still a bit leery of committing my work to CreateSpace, so I set up the project to “publish” a novel titled RE Draft 1.0.

CreateSpace will walk you through the pre-press process, which has a small number of steps and some of the pitfalls along the way. I reached the point where I had selected the 6”x9” trade paperback format and was ready to upload my manuscript. I hope that magic on their end would reformat the text as necessary. It didn’t. The file was rejected. The site listed a number of general errors regarding content being out of bounds. It said the book would be over 700 pages long. I was stunned.

CreateSpace is not without mercy. It wants to help. It produced its best effort to wrangle the manuscript in the form of a downloadable Word file. From that, I could see where certain graphics embedded in the text broke through the margins. The high page count came in part from the manuscript’s double spacing. There were problems page numbering and chapters starting on the backs of pages that CreateSpace didn’t flag. It was a mess. After another iteration, I broke down an enable Adobe Flash to run on the site, which enabled CreateSpace’s previewer to give me a good look at the book’s contents. A bit more fiddling and an argument over who was responsible for what part of the front matter later, and I had what I thought was a good interior.

Dev Art

With the interior settled, CreateSpace said I was ready to work on the cover. The site has a library of design templates and stock photographs you can combine for a professional-looking but generic effect. I had something more specific in mind, so I picked the Simplicity theme, which allowed me to supply an image file that defines the whole cover.

Those who have read my bio and have worked in the software industry are rolling their eyes. In the early stages of app development, the graphic design team is busy working on the art that will be folded into the product to make it beautiful and useful. To keep the project moving along, the software engineers supply placeholder art. The quality of these placeholders varies from crude scribblings to carefully crafted work that the engineer secretly hopes everyone will fall in love with and ship to the customer. These placeholders are known as ‘developer art’, or ‘dev art’. They are almost always far below the quality required to ship and are rarely seen outside the company. I knew what I was setting out to do was dev art. I knew that in the end, I would hire a professional artist to do a proper cover. But I just had to try.

I’ve seen thousands of book covers in my life. There was I time when I would buy a book if it had cool cover art. I could see the cover for Raether’s Enzyme in my mind. Our protagonist is in the foreground. Her hands are pressed against her solar plexus, trying to contain the luminous vapors of Raether’s enzyme. Her trusty dog stands watch behind her, where the villains of the story loom. It’s all dark and all the characters are backlit, appearing as silhouettes. The title is corrupted by digital noise. This is a techno-thriller.

My search for public domain and stock photos to build this tableau went nowhere slowly. I couldn’t even find a dog of the right breed in the pose I needed. A professional artist can draw people and animals. I was stumped and went back to the stage before the drawing board. What I came up was to combine a picture of a mountain lake here in the Pacific Northwest (setting) with a stylized DNA double-helix (Raether’s enzyme arises from a rare mutation).

I enjoy hiking in the Washington Cascades, so my photo library has a number of picturesque lakes to choose from. The best fit based on lake size and picture angle is Snow Lake. Of the many pictures I’ve taken there over the years, I picked this one as my backdrop.

For the DNA, I went to Google image search. I told Google I wanted a DNA helix that was large and free for commercial use with modifications. It needed to be big so that it could fill the 6”x9” cover without the loss of quality that occurs when you enlarge a photo or bitmap. From the results, I picked the following.

Which no longer appears in the free-to-use results. 🙁

The glowing orange contrasts nicely with the blues and greens of Snow Lake.

I loaded these images into layers in Paint.NET. To help the helix and the title text pop, I inserted a dark translucent layer in front of the lake scene. The result was also less cheerful, which is fine for a thriller.

Given the format (6”x9”) and the page count, CreateSpace will produce a template image with guides to where the art must fit.


Not actual size

I resized the background image to match the template and added the template as a translucent layer in front of the background. It was time to add the title, author, and back cover blurb.

Experiments with various recommended fonts were not satisfying. I wanted the title’s style to reflect the dangerous world between the covers. My search for a menacing (and free) typeface lead me to FontSquirrel. Oh. My. As someone who reveled in inappropriate typography when the Macintosh first unleashed bitmapped fonts on the world, I was in heaven. (FYI: Chicago+bold+shadow+outline is never the right answer to your typographic problem.) I downloaded several candidates. Conspiracy was the best fit.

A few layers more and I had my cover. I’d share it with you now, but… At the time I was satisfied with the cover as a prototype. It was dev art and thus doomed, but it would do for the time. After a few rounds of argument with CreateSpace later, the system green-lit my book for production. I was free to order proof copies. Giddy with optimism and delighted with the under-ten-dollar price, I ordered five copies.

Draft 1.0

What arrived in the mail was disappointing.

I’ve been around desktop publishing since before color was really an option, so I knew that there is always a difference between the colors the computer displays on the screen and the colors the printer can produce. I had naively assumed that CreateSpace would make a quality effort to translate my cover art from RGB to the printer’s CMYK colors with maximum fidelity. I was wrong. I found a handy site that will convert an RGB image to CMYK. All you need to do is pick the right CMYK color profile from their menu. CreateSpace technical support was unable to tell me which profile to use. Grrrrrrr! It took a couple rounds of ordering new proof copies to find one that worked. FWIW, that’s GRACol2006 Coated1 V2.

The interior was a mess as well. This was entirely my fault. I failed to change the text justification from left-justified to full-justified. The book had ragged right margins. That looks so wrong.

The manuscript->book recipe I arrived at is:

  1. Upload manuscript.
  2. Get errors.
  3. Download resized version.
  4. Change Body Text style to single-spaced, full justified, Garamond 12pt.
  5. Change Handwriting style to single-spaced Garamond 12pt.
  6. Resize MAPP/MOPP tables.
  7. Substitute ⁂ for # scene breaks. Add 6pt before and after.
  8. Change Chapter Style to Garamond 16pt.
  9. Check spacing around embedded text messages.
  10. Page headers – remove author/title. Garamond 12pt. Outside corner odd/even.
  11. Chapters begin on odd pages. Delete page break and insert section break as needed.
  12. Map cover art from RGB->CMYK:GRACol2006_Coated1_V2 via https://www.rgb2cmyk.org/.

(Scrivener is a promising option for the next book project. It abstracts the writing from the format, turning my hand-tuning recipe into something resembling a simple ‘Save As…’ operation. There are trade-offs. If you render your Scrivener project as a Word document and hand that off to an editor, all the edits have to be merged back into the project by hand. Or so I suspect. More research is required.)

I am done with my doomsday prepping for now. I can produce bound copies of my story with a modicum of effort. The proof copies preview how various formatting games might play out in the real world. I can offer them to beta readers as a friendlier alternative to a stack of loose pages or an electronic document. And I get the warm, fuzzy joy of holding a copy in my hands and gently stroking the dev art on the cover. Insert purring noise here.

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