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.