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Mistake #3 – Cover

 

First the Financial Update

Self-published sales to date – 13

Number of full price sales required to offset external cost to date – 391

Adventures in Self Publishing – Mistake #3 – Back to book covers.

Last week I introduced you to the FABULOUS Mark Swan at kid-ethic who kept me sane through all the blunders I made. Have a look at his beautiful covers HERE.

A few things you might find it useful to know.

1. DO NOT try to design a book cover yourself. Find, and pay, an experienced professional.
2. E-book covers are relatively easy to upload. Dangerously easy.
3. Paperback covers are many orders of magnitude more difficult to get right. There are spine widths and bleed and PPI’s and other things sent to confound you.
4. Whatever you do ALWAYS PAY FOR A PRINT PROOF before you order any serious number of books.
5. Print on Demand (POD) means more variability.
6. You’ll be glad of professional help.

e-book

On all the platforms e-books are made really easy for you. Upload a cover image (.jpg accepted by most) and your book cover is ready.

Easy! Or too easy? Dangerously easy.

To get a good-looking book cover, it’s not enough to have the right illustration, information and typeface, you also need it in the form of a good quality image with a size ratio of 1 (width) to 1.6 (height). If you use different dimensions, each platform will either crop or distort the picture.

	e-reader	Width (Pixels)	Height (Pixels)	Pixel density	File size	File type
KOBO	Kobo	1072	1448	300 per inch	<5MB	.png or .jpg
KDP	Kindle	1,600	2,560	625-10,000 /total width	<50MB	.jpg or .TIFF
B&N	NOOK	1688	2588	>1400 /total width	>500kB – <2MB	.png or .jpg

KOBO: Advice Here

KDP: Advice Here

Barnes and Noble: Thank you Sarra for the Advice Here

Paperback

The paperback cover is a bit more complicated. How on earth do you choose the book size?

First thing to learn is it’s called the trim. Multiple pages are printed on rolls of paper and then cut (or trimmed) to the specified size.  Within limits, the larger the book – the fewer the pages and the lower the cost of print-on-demand.

	Inches	mm
A – format	4.4 x 7	111 x 178
B – format (USA)	5 x 8	127 × 203
B – format (UK)	5 x 7.8	129 x 198
A5	5.8 x 8.25	148 x 210
Trade format (USA) American Royal	6 × 9	152 × 229

Many UK trade paperbacks are UK B format, but most self-publishing platforms have a US Bias, so I opted for a single size available across the platforms which was closest to the original  Sandstone Press edition of my book.

Bookshops, for understandable reasons, don’t like buying from their greatest rival, Amazon, so I selected Ingram Spark a printer who could supply Gardners in the UK who in turn supply bookshops.

I selected 5” x 8” trim, black and white on crème paper inside , with a full colour cover in a matt finish.  

With a single trim, I thought I’d only need a single cover design across all platforms.

Think again:

Here’s where I really tried the patience of the saintly Mark Swan at kid-ethic.

For the same book, of the same size, with the same number of pages, I needed a slightly modified design for each platform.

	Spine Width
	mm	inches	Other
KDP	18.92 mm	0.745 in
Barnes & Noble	17.018 mm	0.67 in	NO BARCODE ALLOWED
Ingram Spark	17.12 mm	0.67390 in	Max 600 PPI image

I’m not quite sure what I did wrong with Barnes and Noble, but they wouldn’t let me use the same ISBN (unique identifying number) that I’d used for KDP and Ingram Spark, so I had to release another of my precious numbers. I’ll need 17 full price sales from B&N to cover that – sales to date with B&N – ZERO.

Ho hum.

And I’m still wrestling with Ingram Spark, although a wonderful human being called Clair is helping me and is a welcome change from the infuriating chatbots on other platforms. The Ingram Spark computer says NO every time I load the cover (even through it meets all their stated requirements), and when I took the plunge and ordered a proof, it arrived with unequal borders.

To conclude – the one blunder I didn’t make was to try to design my own book cover. My talent starts and stops  with elaborate doodles and I never considered doing this part myself. However – even if I possessed the talent and experience to get that part right – what I hadn’t realised was quite how much other technical stuff is involved – sizing, colour density, bleed, margins, borders, dots per inch, file size…

What I learned: self publishing doesn’t mean doing everything yourself. Know your limits and pay for professional help. It may save your sanity…

 

You can buy Phosphate Rocks: A Death in Ten Objects from Drake the Bookshop in Stockton UK – the only bookshop who currently have stock of the new design. Also available from Barnes and Noble, Kobo, and You-know-Who.

Pity sales are still sales…

Back to Mistake #2

Forward to Mistake 3a – Q&A with Kidethic