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Hi James.Sounds like you got a dodgy colour rendition. I'm hoping you wnet for the free one where you can upload your own pictures and then check them electronically before you commit?
By all means let me have the original Word doc and the jpegs and I'll see if I can work out what's wrong. I'm hoping the first one we did was okay?
Nothing wrong with your template or the Word file Rob. When exported to PDF the gutterings were clear and identical to the second book which printed just fine. The proofs looked good in both the on-line and downloaded versions.The misalignment is not bad and is probably more noticeable when you compare the two volumes. But it does mean you have to bend the book further open to read comfortably.
Yes it was my own cover created at 600 dpi and converted to PDF by GIMP. The cover PDF was fine.
The colour rendering on the outer is disappointing. It looks as if they use a three colour print process instead of a three colour plus black.
I was just wondering what other people's experience was.
I've been happy with mine. I went matt, and the colouring is all good. There are slight variations with alignment, no doubt exacerbated by the fact I chose a different coloured spine, but from all the ones I've seen it is the exception not the norm, and I expected that to some extent with POD. Overall I've been happy with everything except the size - it's just a little taller than I would like.
Hi Andy.Perhaps I'm being too pedantic. It was just that I got Strudwick's Successor and Mulligan's Revenge back at the same time and compared the quality of the two.
I'll try matt next time.
Using Rob W's formula to embed drawings as characters, centred on a line of their own, works well in CreateSpace. But does anyone have any experience of submitting a fully DTP'd page where the text and image are beside each other, and the text follows the contour of an image to flow round it?
I'm revising The Whitedown Chronicles, and adding illustrations. Some are tall, but rather narrow and would work better with text around them.
Using the wrap text options (in Word - I know you use something else, sorry) you can place it where you like. Converting to a PDF then usually works, and Createspace can't muck about with it then. Putting it into Kindle is the problem - the pictures seem to go anywhere at any size, despite what your settings. Don't know how to do that. Could you leave your pictures in line for the Kindle (or remove altogether) and only put the formatted ones into the paperback version?
Hi Rob, I wondered about that. It would mean running two versions of the text file, one with embedded images, and the other with embedded URL links to a set of images at the end of the book.
Easy enough for a reader to hop forward and backward between the text and image, but it breaks the flow as you read, and a pain in the posterior when it comes to minor text changes over two source files.
But you reckon that once PDF's the image is fixed?
Yes, they can't muck about with the PDF - wysiwygI think if you can't get the images in line with the text (and Kindle still muck up the sizes despite that), then leave the narrow ones out in the Kindle version. All the more reason for people to buy the paperback!
I have had varying success putting them in the 'wrap' mode, but the pictures tend to come out anywhere.
Regarding links, probably best not to - even footnotes are taboo on the Kindle because they never come out where you need them.
The only thing that does work is when you put references in at the end. Word (sorry) makes hyperlinks to those references. I've no idea if they work on the Kindle, but they should do.
I've just uploaded The Whitedown Chronicles to Kindle using an Open Document Foundation .docx source file. A bit confusing as Microsoft also support .docx and both are really XML files. But there are small differences between them. The results, viewing the proofing .mobi file were a little mixed. For example some tall, narrow diagrams still allow text to flow beside them, but the diagrams are transferred to the left of the page, instead of the original right side. A few smaller diagrams were still positioned in the text correctly.
The nett effect is fairly good within the restrictions of the mobi format. I have no such issues when using Calibre to create an epub file for Barnes and Noble readers.
The resultant .mobi is 3Mb compared to the 2.7Mb of a docx and 2.2Mb of an exported PDF.
One thing I have learnt from the exercise is that reducing greyscale images to an indexed palette of just black and white gives a superior quality to the printed image.
Yes, a great idea about the images - as yours are pen&ink style, that is the perfect way to do it.I still prefer the PDF format, because Createspace can't muck about with it like they do with other formats. What you can see in your reader is what appears in the book.
Yes. I sent a PDF to CreateSpace and a separate file to KDP. The .docx does seem to generate a mobi that flows better when you change font size in the reader. No occasional random short lines.
Excellent. Good luck with the publishing.
Any of you folk bought a paper book recently? I thought they were zero rated VAT but Amazon 'help' site says 20% and the Amazon sales pages add about 25%.Ignore the above. The advice page is wrong, but the cause of the wrong price is a bug in the Creatspace form. If you use a Createspace ISBN, but select UK as 'where published' then it screws up the UK prices. An intelligent form would have fixed the 'where published' when it identified the ISBN.
But looking closer at the first book the black font on sky blue on the back cover is printed as dark greeny-blue on a lighter greeny-blue sky. The guttering is narrower on left pages than right, despite Rob's template creating them identical. The covers are already curling slightly even before the books are opened.
Given the production costs I had expected better.
Is this a shared experience? I see they were printed in UK by Amazon.co.uk Marston Gate.