The Woes of Createspace and Formatting


I said I was getting back to editing/writing the second book. That lasted a grand total of two days. I was wooed by the prospect of creating PRINT versions of How to Stop Wildfire through Createspace. Having a physical copy...just sounds too good. So being the type of person I am I delved into the world.

The interface is simple enough. What to do with it is much trickier. Unlike the realm of ebooks, where conversion is easy and you only need a mildly terrible cover that requires minimal effort, print is more demanding. You need a cover that you know...is an actual cover. Front, back and spine. Fancy stuff, right? That just makes everything more complicated. More design. More thought.

The good thing about having to rethink the cover is that I have to rethink the cover. Let's be honest: the cover for How to Stop Wildfire is pretty bad. Having to redesign it is good thing. People do judge works of literature by pictures and if I make it actually interesting to look at there might be more interest coming towards it.

I'm working on the cover. It is moderately high on my to-do list.

What has been occupying my time as of late has been formatting. Okay so I write in pages to convert to epub for ebook stuff. But for print they want pdf or doc. Everyone says pdf is the way to go and word is the best way to format. So copy and past into word. Then I have to get the margins right. They are like six different margins. And what values to use is dependent on the number of pages. Then there is getting the pages into even/odd format so the numbers make sense and it is all 'traditional,' and I spent like six hours screwing around with page numbers and headers and footers and somewhere along the line I lost my mind and somehow it got finished and it is passable and I am barely coherent. Help. HELP.

I'm free. FREE.



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