About a month ago, artist Emily Irwin finished work on a new cover for my novel Memory. I replaced the cover on the ebook immediately, and then set about finalizing the print book. I already had the interior layout done, and Emily had already assembled the final cover art on a template provided by Lightning Source, my print-on-demand company. So it should have been easy. Right?

After carefully re-checking everything, I uploaded the files late on February 20th, and waited for my proof to arrive. There was a weekend in the way, and overnight to Maui is never overnight, so it wasn’t until the 26th that I had my proof, and it wasn’t good. The colors on the cover were much darker than they appeared onscreen and away from bright sunlight it was hard to make out what was going on, a situation that wasn’t helped by the matte finish I had ordered instead of the usual glossy finish. The light-colored text was actually hard to read. So after thinking it over for a couple of days, I contacted Emily and asked if she’d be willing to use a brighter color for the text, to lighten the image overall, and to place it on a glossy template.

Emily did all of this, sending me three new versions with different levels of brightness. I decided to use the brightest of all, resubmitted the file, and waited for my new proof. It arrived, and it was good! Quite lovely. But it still had a matte finish, instead of the glossy finish I thought I’d requested. I queried Lightning Source, and it turns out I’d misunderstood the process. The template does not determine the finish. That’s decided by the metadata.

By this point I was not feeling remotely competent. So instead of deciding for myself, I solicited opinions, and the unanimous decision was to keep the matte finish. So a couple days ago I approved the proof “as is”–and already Amazon has listed the print book as available to purchase. This surprised me, because the last time I did a print book through Lightning Source, Barnes & Noble had it up almost overnight while Amazon took two or three weeks–proving once again that in this business things change all the time.

Click here to see the print edition on Amazon.

Right now, if you click “See Inside the Book” you will not see the new edition. I still have to submit the file for that–one of the tasks on my list for today.

Posted on: Wednesday, March 20th, 2013 at 11:14 am
Categories: Publishing.
Tags: Memory, print editions