Format Your Own Damned Book Part XII - A Few Words About Interior Illustrations
One thing Create Space does not do all that well is interior illustrations.
I have already mentioned that color interior illustrations are a waste of money. Unless every page in your book has color, your book will cost four times as much as it would with no color illustrations.
Create Space recommends that all illustrations be 300-600 DPI. That is a good recommendation for illustrations that go on the cover. For interior illustrations, it's a bit more complicated than that.
Imagine how your manuscript would look printed on a laser printer or an inkjet printer using no color cartridges. That will give you some idea of what a Create Space interior page will look like.
This is both good and bad. The good part is that if your book is full of screen grabs demonstrating how to use software that has a GUI, the illustrations will look fine even though they are no more than 72 DPI, the normal resolution of screen grabs and web illustrations. Diagrams will probably look OK at 72 DPI.
Artwork should look good at 300 DPI. When I did The Mahabharata in twelve volumes I had over 300 illustrations to include. Some were originally color, but most were black and white. I used as many of the full color illustrations as I could on the front and back covers of the books and repeated them as interior illustrations with the rest. They looked very good, but none were under 300 DPI.
Photos don't look good as interior illustrations, period. These should definitely be 300 DPI or better, but they're going to be printed on the same non-photo quality paper the rest of the pages are on. Black and white photos in regular books are printed on glossy paper that is "tipped in" with the rest of the pages. That's the only way to get good looking photos in a book.
Photos of things will look better than photos of people. I discovered this when preparing high quality interior photos for The Life And Times Of Bhakta Jim.
Do you have an author photo? Put it on the back cover, and make it in color. It will not look nearly as good on an interior page.
I have already mentioned that color interior illustrations are a waste of money. Unless every page in your book has color, your book will cost four times as much as it would with no color illustrations.
Create Space recommends that all illustrations be 300-600 DPI. That is a good recommendation for illustrations that go on the cover. For interior illustrations, it's a bit more complicated than that.
Imagine how your manuscript would look printed on a laser printer or an inkjet printer using no color cartridges. That will give you some idea of what a Create Space interior page will look like.
This is both good and bad. The good part is that if your book is full of screen grabs demonstrating how to use software that has a GUI, the illustrations will look fine even though they are no more than 72 DPI, the normal resolution of screen grabs and web illustrations. Diagrams will probably look OK at 72 DPI.
Artwork should look good at 300 DPI. When I did The Mahabharata in twelve volumes I had over 300 illustrations to include. Some were originally color, but most were black and white. I used as many of the full color illustrations as I could on the front and back covers of the books and repeated them as interior illustrations with the rest. They looked very good, but none were under 300 DPI.
Photos don't look good as interior illustrations, period. These should definitely be 300 DPI or better, but they're going to be printed on the same non-photo quality paper the rest of the pages are on. Black and white photos in regular books are printed on glossy paper that is "tipped in" with the rest of the pages. That's the only way to get good looking photos in a book.
Photos of things will look better than photos of people. I discovered this when preparing high quality interior photos for The Life And Times Of Bhakta Jim.
Do you have an author photo? Put it on the back cover, and make it in color. It will not look nearly as good on an interior page.
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If I have any regrets about leaving the Hare Krishna movement it might be that I never got to give a morning Bhagavatam class. You need to be an initiated devotee to do that and I got out before that
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