Epic Fail

… as my fifteen-year-old would say.[image error]

Well, perhaps I should moderate that. It wasn't an Epic Fail, just a minor one. I was so thrilled to have finished my textbook to go along with the beginning writing course I teach at Frederick Community College. I've been trying to get this book done for Ages. Now, finally, it's done!  Yay!

The class I teach is a continuing education class, which means I've students from age 22 through 75. Naturally, some are more tech-savvy than others, so, I wanted to be sure that the textbook would be available to everyone in whatever form they wanted it.  I decided I would sell it as an Amazon Kindle ebook (since the majority of ebook owners own a Kindle) and make it available through CreateSpace, Amazon's POD arm for those who prefer to have a physical copy in their hand.

Knowing how tedious it was going to be code the book (with its tables, pictures, outlines and bullet points — this is non-fiction, after all) into HTML, I decided to do the POD formatting first. Not a problem! I followed the directions at CreateSpace — they have handy Microsoft Word templates for you to plop your manuscript into, all formatted to the size you want your final book to be. It's really nice, really easy. I put in the jpg pictures, aligned them with the text just as I was directed. No problem. And then I filled out all of their happy little forms, figuring out how much to price the book, writing the description for the Amazon sales page and even a little blurb about me. Easy-ish. I saved my Word document as a pdf as they directed and then set to work on the cover.

Well, that was a little more difficult and I spent an hour or so trying to figure out how to save the picture as a high-quality pdf. I'm thrilled that I finally figured out to download "cutepdf" (freeware, easily available on the internet) so that I could "print" my picture directly to a pdf format. It didn't let me specify that I wanted high-quality pdf, but it's a pdf, I was happy.

All was uploaded to CreateSpace. All was right with the world — until I got an email from them the following day which told me that my jpgs were only 72dpi and needed to be 300dpi in order not to be blurry on the page. What? How do you change the dpi of a jpg? I searched everywhere on the internet and everyone said the same thing — you can't!

Argh! Hours later of trying everything anyone possibly suggested and saving my pictures as jps, as gifs, as png and as bmp, nothing worked. It was still the same dpi. Finally, I found an article that told me that in Power Point 2003, you can save a picture as a TIFF and it will come out in 300 dpi. That's terrific. I have Power Point 2007. It doesn't do that anymore. But I did find out that, even in Paint, you can save a picture as a TIFF and you get 96dpi. So, I substituted my lower resolution pictures for slightly higher ones and re-uploaded the files. I guess anyone who buys my book will just have to deal with slightly blurry pictures.

If anyone knows of another way to increase the dpi on a picture, please, please tell me!

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