CompletelyNovel

Question

Gillian Buchanan

Page ranger: +67

29 Jun 15:08

I find the cover creator very restrictive and not sutable for my novel. I am able to produce PDFs in Microsoft Publisher but will that be accepted by the printer? Also, if I’m going down this route where do I find the specifications for the cover? Please provide a link.

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Simon - Bookilicious: +186

30 Jun 10:04

Hello Gillian
I designed the covers for my books in Photoshop, saving the artwork as a high quality JPEG. This can then be uploaded into cover creator. Worked fine for me. I think the specs for your own PDF are on the cover creator stage of the publishing process.
Simon
Great approach, worth mentioning that most graphics applications will output the illustration as an image such as a JPG so you may be able to do that from publisher.
- Oliver 01 Jul 00:25
Thanks Simon.
- Gillian 02 Jul 13:16
1
Oliver - Lord of the reads: +3087

01 Jul 00:37

Hi Gillian,

Making a cover PDF from scratch is a job for an expert. We provide the option in the Book Creator to upload it manually but it is intended for those who have had their cover designed professionally.

I offer a word of caution as it is very easy to set up the document dimensions and colour space incorrectly and these are often not obvious until the book is printed.

If you do want to give it a go then please keep these tips in mind.
- Use CMYK colours for accurate colour representation in printing
- Print a copy out in high definition on gloss paper on your home printer to check the colours. Your monitor can deceive you!
- Flatten and rasterise your PDF to avoid issues with transparencies and incorrect renders of vector objects
- Export your PDF using the PDF/A or PDF/X setting. This will ensure any assets such as fonts and images are embedded in the document
- Make sure you print the PDF to the correct page size. Often PDF printers just print onto an A4 or A3 sheet
A professional piece of software like photoshop will help you do this but it is expensive and time consuming to learn. I use an open source alternative called GIMP but it is even harder to use!

All the size dimensions to set up your cover can be found on the cover page of the Book Creator. Look for the ‘ADVANCED USER – UPLOAD A PDF COVER’ section and click on the information link. We can’t give you the dimensions before uploading your manuscript as the spine size will change with the number of pages.

I would highly recommend Simon’s approach of creating a cover image and uploading it to our cover creator. That way we do all the document sizing, rasterisation and saving to the correct PDF format for you. On top of that if you change the size of your manuscript (and so cover spine) we can resize the cover for you.

Hope that helps.

Oli
Gillian - Page ranger: +67

02 Jul 13:16

Thanks Oliver.