Deborah Woehr

I was ecstatic when I finished the final editing Sunday night. Last night involved implementing some final design tweaks and uploading everything onto the Lulu site. Everything was going well until I uploaded my cover. The original cover that has graced the sidebar for several months has really grown on me. I was counting on seeing what it would look like when it came back from the printer.

That’s not going to happen because I used a 72dpi graphic for that banner. Lulu requires that you use 330dpi images. Needless to say, the cover looked terrible. I spent several hours creating a new one from scratch because I couldn’t find the image that matched the original dimensions. This was a good graphics lesson and a disappointing one. I’m not sure if I like the new cover. I’ll save that judgment when I see it around my printed pages.

I was surfing the web yesterday for anything on designing books with InDesign and discovered this script by Dan Rodney, called Make Book Jacket 2.0. It comes with three measurements: picas, inches, and metric. Using the dialog box (see screenshot above), you can preset your book cover’s measurements, plus indicate whether your cover is going to be a hardcover, soft cover, or booklet.

I tried this script with a book cover I had already made. There is some slight distortion, but otherwise it looks good. I’ve yet to test this with Lulu, but I know the cover will export into a PDF. I’ll let you know. If it does, I will consider this script a godsend because it will shave off the time it would take to measure everything precisely.

My theme discovery sparked an artistic inspiration in me last night, compelling me to create this cover. I don’t like the color of my name, and I’m having some difficulty with the header font fitting right in the spine. I’ll have to wait and see how many pages the finished book has before I decide whether to keep the original cover (see sidebar) or use this new one.

What do you think of this new cover? If you’d like to see the full-cover spread, send me an email and I’ll send it to you.

My mind and fingers have been itching to start editing that manuscript since I typed “The End” on Sunday. Last night felt like a mild version of nicotine withdrawals. I know of at least two scenes that I need to revamp or get rid of entirely. It seems that I take a perverse pleasure in the editing process.

At any rate, I wasn’t expecting my manuscript to arrive from Lulu until after Christmas. But I guess they decided to expedite it. I decided to publish my draft in the coil-bound format for two reasons:

1. To see what my cover would look like.
2. To check out the quality of the spiral bound because I’m thinking of using this format for how-to books. More on that next year.

Before I converted the file to the PDF, I added two pages at the end of each chapter to give myself some space for comments/revision notes. That didn’t work out because I’d completely forgotten about the page formatting. I have blank pages at the end of some chapters and none at others. Oh, well.

The cover turned out nicely, except for the smudges. Marti Lawrence had warned me about this, so I wasn’t surprised. Disappointed, but not surprised. Lulu has implemented a new UV coating which is supposed to help make the covers last longer. The downside is that you have to wear gloves in order to handle the book.

Customers who order the book inside North America will have to deal with this problem, while International customers get their books printed from Lightning Source, which still uses the old cover process.

I’ve decided that I’m not going to obsess over this, at least right now. Hopefully, Lulu will improve this situation by the time I’m ready to publish this book next year. In the meantime, I need to worry about polishing it to the best of my ability before I start shopping around for an editor.

I read somewhere that a writer shouldn’t be a designer and vice-versa. Either you’re a writer or an artist, they say. Well, I think that’s a load of crap. Look at the books on your shelf. Many of their designs consist of manipulated images and fonts. With some patience and practice, you can create some nice book covers.

If you want an illustration and have no talent for drawing, then I’d suggest hiring a professional or an artist that is willing to work pro bono in order to build his/her portfolio. Study the books on your shelves and in your genre to determine what kinds of fonts and colors they use, how they lay out the text on both sides of the cover and the spine, and how they manipulate their images.

Do not use cheap “artist” software because it won’t be compatible with Lulu’s printer.

If you don’t own Photoshop, Gimp is the free alternative. I’ve never used it, but I’ve heard that it is very similar. Gimp has a book on Amazon that will take you from a rank beginner to a professional. You can also check out the author’s website at http://gimpbook.com for tutorials, if you don’t want to buy the book.

Start brainstorming ideas for your cover. Then start experimenting with different layouts and designs. The most important aspect of designing your cover is to convey your book’s message to your readers.

Back in June, I tacked two possible covers for Prosperity on this blog to see which one would be received the best by my readers. They gave me their answer. Try this approach and see what happens.

Your book covers (front and back) need to be 1838 x 2275 pixels in size so Lulu can print them correctly. You’ll have the option to create a full cover (front, back, and spine) or the front and back only. I chose the latter option because I didn’t have any special graphics for the spine.

Save the images as a 330 dpi .jpg file. If possible, convert your manuscript into a PDF. If not, Lulu will convert .doc and .rtf files for you. Now, we’re ready for the upload process.

This is a redo of last night’s tryout. I thought I wanted a church theme, but that was a small quibble compared to the fight for survival this town winds up going through.

As you can see, I became a woman obsessed today. The cover above symbolizes the old photo albums that Bud is hiding from Amanda. On the surface, the cover has a somewhat elegant look to it . . . until you look at the woman’s face. Right now, I’m leaning towards this cover because I love the deceptive subtlety of it.

This symbolizes Amanda’s sleepwalking jaunts to the cemetery. The green stuff is supposed to be ghostly orbs, but it doesn’t look very convincing to me. And the title font is bothering me. I’m not sure why, but I’m going to look at this again tomorrow.

Which cover would be more likely to grab your attention if you saw this book sitting on the bookshelf?

I finally broke down and bought the ecover software that I mentioned on On Book Design last month. This decision was made after I tested a free script that produced the same cheesy results as the others I’ve tried. Do you like this better than the first cover?