Deborah Cooke: Author

Today, we’ll talk about considerations for preparing the pretty part of a printed book – the cover.

Once again, you might want to use a professional designer to create the cover for your book. This is not my area of expertise, so I did just that. Kim Killion had already designed digital covers for The Jewels of Kinfairlie series. She added the spine and the back to give me PDF files for each cover.

There are templates on the Createspace website for covers – as well as interior formatting – which you can download in the appropriate size to get started.

Since Kim was doing the covers, I had to supply her with some additional information. I sent her the back cover copy for each book, as well as a review quote for the back cover for each one. I also told her that I’d be including my linked novella, The Ballad of Rosamunde, as a bonus read in The Snow White Bride, and we talked about mentioning that on the cover. She was able to run a thumbnail of the novella’s cover on the back, which was great.

I also had to tell her the page count of the book, so she could figure out the size of the spine. There is a formula on the Createspace website for making this calculation – and it’s based upon the thickness of the paper that they use – but I had to complete the formatting of the interior before I could provide the page count to Kim.

I also had to provide an ISBN# for each book. There are many options for ISBN#’s and there is probably enough data on the topic for a separate post. (And yes, I have one queued up for February 16.) I chose between the free ISBN# offered by Createspace and a free one available to Canadians from the federal government. You can also buy ISBN#’s from Bowkers. The free ISBN# from Createspace lists Createspace as the publisher of the book. This doesn’t trouble me – although it worries lots of other people – but what did concern me was that the Createspace ISBN# can’t be used with any other POD publisher. I’m not entirely sure that my POD books will stay with Createspace forever – although they might – so I applied for the free ISBN# from the Canadian government. These people are very helpful although the process takes a little bit of time. My books, then, are listed as being published by me, and I have a unique ISBN identifier.

Yup. Now I’m officially a publisher!

It also means that if I choose to move from POD to an actual print run of any book, I can use its assigned ISBN# for the new edition too.

Createspace puts the white box for the ISBN on the back cover, and the bar code – which is generated from the ISBN# supplied.

Once the interior file is uploaded and you’ve checked it, and the cover is uploaded, then on Createspace, you submit the book for review. They approve it – or not – in 48 hours or less. You can then order a proof to ensure that the book looks just the way you want it to look.

Now, because I worked in the printing business, there was no way I was going to forgo a proof even though that option is available. Murphy of Murphy’s Law is alive and well, both in publishing and in the printing business. In this case, the proof is essentially the first POD copy of the book. It turned out that I discovered minor errors in each book and could correct them before the books went “live”. I also got to see the product from Createspace – I was and am very impressed with the finished book.

One thing I was not anticipating, although it makes perfect sense, is that the covers appear to be slightly darker than expected. If you look at the cover for The Beauty Bride on screen, you can see that there is a diamond pattern of navy on navy behind the title. It’s subtle, even here, but in the print edition, it is more subtle.

This makes sense, now that I think about it, because the cover is probably printed on uncoated stock and then laminated. Uncoated paper is slightly more absorbent than coated stock – what we are seeing here is called “dot gain”. Each dot in the image has gotten a teensy bit bigger, because the ink absorbed into the paper and spread a wee bit, which makes the image darker overall. You’d use uncoated paper stock when printing POD because it dries much more quickly than coated stock – which would allow you to bind and finish the book more quickly.

In traditional printing, book covers are printed on coated stock, then set aside to dry for some period of time before they are cut and bound to the book interiors. To print on uncoated stock and then laminate it gives a similar finished appearance, but also a smidgen of dot gain. This also is apparent in reversed type – that’s white type on a coloured background – because (again) the ink spreads into the white zone of the type. Those little serif tips are a little less pointy when this happens, and if the type is small, it might fill in too much to be read easily.

In this particular case, the dot gain is not a problem – this is just a background pattern and it is still there – but for a cover which had important detail in the shadows, I would likely have the designer brighten the art a bit to compensate for the printing process. I also won’t use any small type in reverse type, especially serif fonts or delicate fonts, when the cover is going to POD.

Make sense?