Support for Indie Authors discussion
Physical Book Publishing
>
Desperately need help with IngramSpark/Scrivener
date
newest »
newest »
I found that moving it to word and formatting it there with my fonts, titles, etc works much better. If you then save as a PDF, IS takes it much better, I'll probably not use IS as I found that Draft to Digital is much easier to work with. They set up the universal link for my books to all the stores and they are extremely helpful. The drawback it that you need to use their interior formatting for the book. Like Velum, you only have a few selection but they are nice and fit the genres. I know that my print books looked good. You might want to give them a try.
B.A. wrote: "I found that moving it to word and formatting it there with my fonts, titles, etc works much better. If you then save as a PDF, IS takes it much better, I'll probably not use IS as I found that D..."
Thank you very much for your reply and for your advice. I'll keep trying!
When you create a PDF it is important to make sure you make the right type of PDF - where all the fonts are fully embedded. It also needs to be a PDF 1.4 or PDFx file - the accepted version. Known as a "Print Ready"If you need more specific help with this, please feel free to get in contact as part of my work is in formatting and designing for other writers.
Thank you Colin, I did forget that one little tidbit. You do need the embedded fonts, so be aware of the ones that are used most. Just google fonts for books and you will get the ones that are the easiest to read and are used the most. Don't get fancy on them other than titles.
Thank you, Colin and B.A., for your insight. I set the project aside for a couple of days because it was driving me crazy, but I'm back at it today so will try to put your advice to work. If all else fails, I may just ignore the warnings from IngramSpark and order a proof copy to see how it looks.
To be more specific, the colour profile issue comes from the difference of using "RGB" colour and not CMYK profile. The latter is what should be used. I find IS irritating because they are so picky over details.
This is the reason why:
"BLACK/RICH BLACK/DENSITY:
We recommend a rich black with CMYK values =
60% Cyan /
40% Magenta /
40% Yellow /
100% Black.
CMYK total value should not exceed 240%.
Elements should not be built in ‘Registration’
(100% of all colors). *Files sent with densities higher than 240% may be rejected for correction."
The reason it gets upset is because people use B/W and "Grayscale" but if they don't actually set the black to those percentages, IS has a moan.
However, the "guidance" they give really relies on user knowledge. I do book formatting and design, so I am supposed to know about this. And even I find it annoyingly complex.
But bear in mind, if there is anything dissatisfactory in your proof copy they just blame you. Before you do that, when designing your work on your computer screen, I advise you to turn up the notch on ALL you colours. Make them all slightly to bright, slightly too garish because when a book is actually printed, the process fades the colour partly.
A bit like painting a wall. That is why the colour in the tin looks a lot brighter than you expect when you open it. Because it is designed to DRY to the colour you choose.
PDF CONTAINS ICC COLOR PROFILES...
I write in Scrivener, and after researching the topic quite a lot, as well as calling customer support at IS, I realize this might be the issue, but I'm at a loss as how to fix it. Customer support didn't provide much help, just forwarded me a discussion on Scrivener, "Compile for IS, removing embedded color profile." I'd already read this and followed the info in there, but the problem persists. About the only suggestion I found was to purchase Adobe Acrobat Pro which seems like an extreme solution. It sure seems like I should be able to produce a PDF document in Scrivener and use it on IS.
Has anyone else run into this problem and if so, how did you rectify?