Nothing Serious

The cover is done.  I forget where I am on the interior.  Probably done.  I admit I'm distracted by trying to follow too many issues today.

What you can't see is the template I downloaded from CreateSpace is underneath everything, it's just turned off.
I'm trying to think what I can tell you about cover design that I haven't already said.  Each element should have it's own layer.  Barbara Morgenroth front and Barbara Morgenroth spine are separate layers so if I should mess up one, nothing else is effected.

This concept was something hard for me to understand before I started working with Photoshop.  I didn't understand layers because I had never seen them.  It seems in life everything is flat.  If you draw something then color it in, it seems like 1 layer because it's a flat piece of paper.  In reality it's 3 layers--the paper, the drawing and the color.  In Photoshop that becomes apparent.  It's good to have everything segregated and safe.  Then at some point you can merge all the layers down.  I don't advise doing that.  Or go ahead and do it, just make sure you keep a working file that's not merged.  Once you merge and save, that's it, you're not unmerging; the layers are glued together forever.  The problem with that is if you want to go back and change anything, you'll probably have to rebuild the image. 

Dream Horse is ready to be printed.  Murder is scheduled to be printed--I'll use that for a giveaway at GoodReads (is there a more difficult site to navigate than that or is it just me?)

Good thing I did this post.  I realized I needed to put LARGE PRINT on the back cover.  It's not necessary for Amazon, but if I ever decide to go with the Extended Distribution, it would be correct to have that prominently displayed because being large print is definitely a selling point.

CreateSpace Cover Just Murder

No, I mean I only changed the cover for Murder is Exhausting.  So I tweaked it and they said "You do know you have to go through the review process again?"  You have to review it again, it's fine with me.

I couldn't easily (there is a limit how much I'm going to bother with this for me, since I'm one of the few people who will ever see it) find a curly frame to echo the curly outline of the couch, so I went with a curly border.  It's a Photoshop brush, a free download.

Why didn't I drop it down farther?  Barcode goes in the lower right corner of the back cover and you can't design over that.

I thought about which book I'd do next and thought Nothing Serious was probably a good choice.  It had originally been written for the romance market--geez, I'm so not a romance writer--so that never happened.  And I some point I thought I'll self-pub it in large print but digital came along and I gladly gave up paper publishing.  What you don't think about is there is a market for large print books and mainstream publishers ignore it.  The few publishers who do such things are limited.  So it's a vital niche market.  Think about it.

NS is a short book and wouldn't be hugely long with a 16 pt font so I suspect that's my next project.

Update--Quite excited.  Got Nothing Serious through the CreateSpace meatgrinder on the 2nd try.  1st try was a problem with the PDF.  Open Office does it quicker/easier than Word.  But I did the whole document in Word, plus Drop Caps this time.  I guess I spend the afternoon doing the cover.

Dream Horse and Its CreateSpace Junket

Luckily I had a nice bottle of Angry Orchard Hard Apple Cider Ginger Flavor to get me through this one without running screaming outside and throwing myself into the pond.

I'm going to guess and say between me and my computer genius pal, we created about 12 versions of the file both in Word and Open Office, none of which made it through the CreateSpace meatgrinder and yet oddly enough looked perfect on our monitors.  Did I ever get a version that passed in doc?  No.

Here's what I did.  I took the most perfect version, looked at it again, made sure all the chapters started on a right side page, made sure all the numbering was correct, made sure that I could live with whatever little bits might be slightly skewed and I turned it into a PDF.  I uploaded that and CreateSpace became Happy Happy Happy.

Then I swore a lot.  And then uploaded the cover.

 

You are absolutely correct, I didn't put anything about the book on the back cover, just some reviews from BN.

It's not like this is destined to be sold in stores, it'll be at Amazon.  Read about it in the description.

When I did Impossible Charlie through Lightning Source, yes, I did the back cover all perfect, just like a real book.   This was already a big enough hassle, I didn't want to take on more.

Yes, it's a simple cover.  For this purpose, it doesn't need to be more designed than that.  It's about 5000% better than the original cover that Atheneum stuck me with, a grim and dark green and gray thing with terrible artwork.

Here there's beautiful Sparkle who will live on forever--you can't get better subject matter than him. 

Dream Horse Cover For CreateSpace

I have the background color faded so you can see the template which will be removed at the last step.
The apple is also faded so you can see thru it.  I'm not sure I'll leave that as an element because I favor using some of the great reviews off of BN for the book.

I see that CS is offering some generic covers for people to use.   All I can do is beg you not to default to that.  At least try to do your own cover. 

I might use this on the back.  It's the image of an apple put in a heart shape.  Simple clipping mask 

technique.  

 Yes, when the cover is done, I'll post it.

Using A CreateSpace Template

I think you're better off using your own created in Word.  I did do the paperback of Charlie (Dream Horse) in Open Office in 2009 and used the CreateSpace template for Summer Horse but Word is easier.  If you don't have Word and do have OO or Libre Office (why name it that??  Why not Sunshine Office?  Because it's free?  Then Free Office.)

Anyway, just choose the mirror layout, type in your size specifications and you're ready to start pasting in your text.  You will need to be mindful that chapters start on odd pages.  You'll have to add page breaks or blanks at the end of some chapters to make that happen but that's not hard.  You can force what is an odd or even page, so look for that box if that need arises.

What will be a pain is figuring out how to get the numbering right.  I admit I was going nuts until I found this tut.  It will solve everything if you follow it.  It's not complicated but--what do you expect, it's a Microscoff product, it's not intuitive or streamlined.

You need to split the front matter from the text to get the numbering to work properly.  Also not a big deal.  Microscoff will give you no hints where to do this or how find it, but this guy explains it perfectly and slowly.




So go turn your digital books into paper books.

Don't whine that I didn't show you how to build the cover.  In a post I went step by step last year with Summer Horse, do a search you'll find it.  It's easy.

You will want to use their cover template and if you want to do it from scratch, it's darn hard to find the page anymore.  Here it is.  Tell them how many pages and their computer will do all the math for you.

https://www.createspace.com/Help/Book/ArtworkDownload.do