CreateSpace

I must be insane.  I decided to publish a print version of Summer Horse.  The whole reason I went into digital is to get away from all that formatting.  

So immediately I had problems.  With Impossible Charlie it was tabs.  With Summer Horse it's been the page numbers.  I couldn't reset the page numbers on the template in Word.  I switched to Open Office.  For those new to this blog, I went to Open Office with Impossible Charlie because Word Perfect was less than perfect with the formatting requirement and here I am again.  To be precise, in Word the page numbers showed as Roman Numerals all the way through the book.  That had to change.  But it wouldn't.  It was grayed out.

I got it into Open Office and had to call my computer maven friend, Jon, and after about 90 minutes which started out with "Jon, here's a quick question for you..." we got it solved.  None of these things are ever simple.  You always have to go deep into the bowels of the program and perform special rites of contrition.  As for Word, no clue, I googled it and came up with nuthin'.

That part got solved.  Now I have the question of what illustrations, if any, I should retain.  What won't look like utter dreck in B&W.  If you're saying "Hey, girl, you have the same issue in digital."  Nah.  At some point everyone will have a color reader.  I'm ahead of the crowd.  Half the illustrations are in color, half are in B&W now.  Everyone is half mad at me at the moment.

Then I looked at the cover template for Photoshop.  At first I thought I'm going going to place/paste the original cover on the front and I'll do something plain with the back cover.  I did try that.  I wasn't very happy.  What I'll probably wind up doing is using the background image, which is an image of a real label so it's essentially 3 dimensional, and stretching it across the cover.  Because it's vertically oriented and the 2 pieces of the cover obviously are horizontally oriented.  Portrait v landscape.  Then I will just add all the elements from the original cover onto the template.  It's not a 15 minute job and will probably result in 20 or more layers.

I would love giving it a new cover but if we stick with Nadia G's advice about branding, let's not confuse people.  Summer Horse should still look like Summer Horse. 

When I get the thing built, I'll make all the layers transparent enough to see the template below and that should be fairly interesting for some of you.