Lianne Simon

Creating the files

In Creating a DIY book cover with GIMP, I built the file for a book cover for Confessions of a Teenage Hermaphrodite. Before sending it off to the printer, I wanted to make sure it was perfect. It wasn’t.

Doing a poster proof

The file I send my printer is dimensioned 15 inches by 12 inches. A Google Maps search led me to a suburban Atlanta printer who charges $1 for quantity one 14×11 prints from digital.

My cover is only 12.8 inches by 9.25 inches. So I made a copy of my file, trimmed it down to 14×11, and centered the cover on a white background. The fancy color copiers are actually similar to the POD presses.

On the monitor the cover looked great, even when inspecting it close-up. However, when I got my proofs back, some flaws were evident.

1. I had swapped out the eyes in the photo. The lower lids didn’t look right.
2. At full size, the drop shadows didn’t look right.
3. The contrast was insufficient.
4. The photo was blurry.

Although I liked mixing fonts and font colors on the cover, the results, when printed and viewed actual size, weren’t what I expected. After trying various colors and modifying the background several times, I gave up and moved on.

When I started designing my cover, I was going to use a font that reminded me of Celtic runes. So, I started playing with it again. To overcome the issues with color and drop shadow, I eliminated both and went with a simpler layout.

Kern your title

One of the secrets that Cathi Stevenson lists in her Ten Secrets of Professional Book Cover Designers is kerning. Simply put, it’s adjusting the spacing between characters. I’ve marked below where I need to reduce the spacing.

To change the spacing on ‘of a Teenage’, I duplicated the layer three times and removed the excess characters. So my text layers had ‘of”, ‘a’, ‘T’, and ‘eenage.’ The yellow box in the photo indicates that focus is on the ‘eenage’ text layer. The horizontal blue line is a guide I aligned with the top of that box. Since I have ‘snap to guides’ turned on, I can slide ‘eenage’ back and forth along the blue line without getting out of vertical alignment.

I started by adjusting the spacing between ‘T’ and ‘eenage.’ In the Layers/Channels/Paths window, I chained ‘T’ and ‘eenage’ and made sure the rest were unchained. That allowed me to move ‘Teenage’ as a unit while adjusting the spacing between ‘Teenage’ and ‘a.’

Plan B

I ended up changing the design substantially. Again.

CMYK Proofs

The last step in my workflow is RGB to CMYK conversion. GIMP will edit CMYK files, but you may not get the colors you expect.

This time the proofs looked reasonable, but I’m sure I’ll revise the cover again before it’s all over.

Doing your own artwork

Although I signed with a great publisher for my e-book, I opted out of print, deciding to self-publish a paperback edition of my novel. Doing my interior and cover design would allow me artistic control, for better or worse, of the product.

Having more time than cash, I wanted to see how much I could accomplish without spending any money. That meant doing everything myself.

What’s the goal?

One of the first things that struck me, while browsing book covers online, was how many were unreadable when displayed as icons. Not surprising, really, since they were probably designed with the book in mind and not the icon.

Browsing book covers in stores, I came away with a different sense of vision. I suppose the artwork was the same as what was displayed in that little icon online, but the feeling it conveyed, at least to me, was entirely different.

But, realistically, was my book going to be on shelves in stores? Not likely. So, where would people see the cover? Online. And after they had purchased it. People weren’t likely to make their decision to buy based on the back cover.

So, my goal was to come up with a cover that looked great in person and as an icon. That meant keeping it simple.

Something that would have helped, had I known it up front: There are some colors you can get in that pretty little icon that won’t print so well on paper.

Cover concepts

Some of the best pointers on cover design were right here. I read as many posts as I could, trying to hold my impatience in check. I browsed through various sites for stock photos, looking for ideas.

The protagonist in my novel has a genetic disorder that alters facial shape. Although I could edit a photo to simulate the disorder, the fine print in the stock photo licensing pretty much prohibited portraying any of their models as my protagonist. So, stock photos were right out.

Large eyes relative to small nose and mouth. Anime might have worked. Some of it was amazing, but I didn’t draw and couldn’t afford to pay a high-end artist. Then I stumbled across flickr and found some kind people willing to grant me the right to use some of their photos to do my cover. In turn, I would acknowledge them in the front matter of my book.

Image by Youkosilvara

Tools

I had used Photoshop. I loved it, but didn’t own a recent version. And can’t afford it. So, I downloaded GIMP. It was free and it did almost everything I needed to build my cover.

The only drawback is that GIMP doesn’t do CMYK, which is exactly what my printer requires. Fortunately, Smoking Gun Graphics has a free RGB to CMYK converter here.

Getting started

I played around with GIMP and with different cover concepts for months before converting to CMYK. My recommendation is that you get a feel for the RGB-CMYK differences first.

You’ll find that working in JPEG isn’t the best idea. It’s possible to lose image quality every time you save the file. XCF is the native GIMP format I use. TIF is what the converter wants. PNG is great for using on the web.

I loaded the original JPEG file in GIMP and saved it as XCF and then as TIF.

Color manipulation

GIMP provides a number of useful tools for changing hue and saturation, including an automatic color enhancement capability.

If you duplicate the layer first, then you can mellow out the results. Layer | Duplicate Layer, Color | Auto | Color Enhance, Set the layer opacity (alpha) in the Layers, Channels, Paths window until the colors are right, Layer | Merge Down to recombine the two layers.

There’s no space here to cover everything I did. Nothing special. I rotated the image, cropped it, and changed out the eyes with another image that someone had kindly let me use.

Photo courtesy of Look Into My Eyes (Flickr)

I also resized my image to be the proper height for my paperback. Nine inches at 300 pixels per inch plus a 75 pixel margin. That’s 2775 pixels.

 I converted the image from XCF to TIF and converted the TIF to CMYK-TIF to see how the image would look in the product.

Wasn’t that easy?

Building a cover

Once I finished the interior formatting, I knew how many pages were in the book. My printer has an online application that will generate a cover template based on book size and number of pages. It requires an ISBN because it generates a bar code for you.

For GIMP, I use the PDF format of the template. I started GIMP and dropped the template into the empty window. A pop-up shows the file contents and allows you to set the resolution to 300 pixels per inch.

Templates vary from printer to printer, but they should look something like:

The only thing on the template that you’re allowed to move is the bar code. Nothing may be resized.

Placing items on the cover

I started by dropping a PNG copy of the photo into the window. In the Layers, Channels, Paths, etc window, I set the opacity to about 40 so I could see the red and blue lines on the template.

The red lines indicate where text is too close to either the trimmed edge or to the fold between the cover and the spine. This is a mechanical limitation and not an esthetic one. In practice, cover artists use a stricter border for text. So, I added a layer with a more realistic border. I also added a layer that frames the front cover trim size so I could see what the cover would look like by turning the layer on.

Adding Title Text

I tried a number of fonts and layouts for the title text and finally settled on mixing two fonts, the same two I had used on the book’s interior.

Although I liked the placement, there wasn’t enough contrast for the text to be readable when the cover was turned into a small icon. So, I added drop shadows to the text.

Drop shadows on text

GIMP does nice drop shadows, but it’s kind of particular about adding them to text. To avoid complications, I make sure to Select | None, select the move icon in the Toolbox (not the Text icon), select the text layer in the Layers, Channels, Paths, etc window, and then Filters | Light and Shadow | Drop Shadow to add the shadow layer. For my green text, I set the drop shadow color to black; for the black text I set it to white. The default opacity of drop shadow layers is 80. I set them to 60. With the background opacity set to 100, here’s the result:

Don’t be disappointed if it takes a while to get the look you want. I’ve built at least twenty different covers. Some were dreadful.

Spine text

Getting the spine text right takes a little time. Here’s a trick: GIMP has a measuring tool. If you measure the spine, you can properly size the text for it in horizontal mode and then rotate it once you’ve got the size right. The measurement icon is in the toolbox. The measurement results are displayed on the status bar at the bottom of the window.

Once the spine text has been sized and spaced properly, rotate the text layer using Layer | Transform | Rotate 90 counter-clockwise.

The bar code

I wasn’t sure what I wanted on my back cover, except for the bar code. I copied it from the template by selecting the template layer in the Layers window, duplicating the layer using Layer | Duplicate layer, and then cropping the duplicated layer down to just the bar code. Note that you can change the z-order by selecting a layer and clicking on the green arrows at the bottom of the Layers window.

I moved the bar code above the photo in the z-order and then selected the move icon in the Toolbox in order to drag the bar code to where I thought I wanted it.

Back cover

I finally decided to limit the back cover to three items: The publisher name and bar code, a blurb about the book, and a blurb about the author. I divided the back cover into areas, allocating space in the proportion necessary for the three items. To improve the contrast, I added gradients to darken the photo. The gradient tool is in the Toolbox. I created a new layer for each gradient, used the selection tool to select the area in which I wanted to do a gradient, and then used the gradient tool to draw the gradients.

The plan was to add photos and text to each of the three sections. To find out how wide the bar code was, I selected the bar code layer and did a Layer | Scale layer. It shows the width and height in pixels. I used that information when I scaled my other photos to the appropriate height and trimmed them to the same width as the bar code.

I added titles for each of the areas.

Finally, I added the text for the blurbs.

To see what the back cover would look like, I duplicated the front cover window layer, flipped it horizontally using Layer | Transform | Flip Horizontally, and positioned it to show the back cover. At that point I decided to turn off one of the black gradients to lighten the background a bit.

The blurb text is right up against the red lines of the template. It might be good to go back later and increase the margins. It’s one of the things I keep adjusting.

Proofing the cover

Before I could have a proof copy printed, I had to convert to CMYK one last time. So, I wrote out the entire cover in TIF format and converted it. Note how the green text color has changed.

Conclusion

If you have time and no money, GIMP is a great way to go. I’m not sure how much better someone with Photoshop could control the RGB to CMYK color mapping, but it might be worth the cost to pay a professional to do the color adjustments and conversion for you.

Assuming you can get your colors right, it’s possible to do a professional-looking cover yourself, using GIMP. The question is: Can you, the author, also be enough of an artist to design a cover that is as good as your book? I’m sure I’ll go through a few more iterations before I’m happy with mine.

In Part 1 I started with a book in the standard format we all send to agents and formatted it in preparation for print. This article continues with formatting the manuscript for a particular book size.

Choosing a book size

Since I’m self-publishing, it isn’t likely my paperback will be stocked in Barnes and Noble. Potential buyers will probably see an image of the front cover online. When they receive my book, I want them to be pleasantly surprised by the quality.

Most of the books I examined that were similar to mine were 5.25″ x 8″. I also found a few that were 6″ x 9″. My printer charges the same per page for both sizes. Should be a no-brainer, then. But typographers will tell you that the optimal number of characters per line is 66. So, with a larger format, you’re going to end up with a larger font and/or wider margins to get the same number of characters across the page.

Setting the font size and the margins

You can either set the paper size and margins to actual or you can leave the paper size at ‘letter’ and compensate by using larger margins. Find out what your printer wants before you set them.

Since I was using several different page styles, I needed to set my paper size in each of them. I started with the Default page style.

In Part 1, I had set the Page layout to Mirrored. I set the Paper format to User, six inches wide, and nine inches high. I set the margins to what I was told by my printer were his suggested minimums. Note that the margins in the non-mirrored page styles are worded differently.

Font and font size

Fonts vary a bit in character widths, so I didn’t want to try to set font size and my final margin sizes before selecting a font. After considering several, I settled on the old reliable Garamond. The font had to be changed in all of the paragraph styles and in the Drop Caps character style. I looked at some 6″x9″ paperback books and settled on an 11 point font size for the body text.

OpenOffice has a word count tool in the menu at Tools and Word Count. I selected a typical line.

Some typographers will tell you that a line should have between 45 and 75 characters. The ideal of 66 includes spaces. My lines were a little too long. That meant using a larger font size or increasing the margin(s). I chose to increase the margins a little.  Changing the inside margin to .9″ and the outside to .6″ reduced the number of characters in a line to a more acceptable number and allowed for the wider margins I had wanted.

Line spacing

Along with font size, the amount of white space and its distribution affects reading enjoyment. I tried quite a few different combinations and the one thing that seemed to most affect the price of the printed book was the line spacing. Clearly double spacing was more than necessary, but how much was enough?

For each size, I printed out a chapter and read it. As a sanity check, I compared my line spacing to books similar to mine. After playing with several fixed line spacings, I settled on .20″. Line spacing is set in the paragraph styles.

Chapter Titles and Drop Caps

Adjusting the size and positioning of the chapter titles and the size of the first letter in the chapter seemed arbitrary. I changed sizes and positions until I came up with something I liked on the printed page. At this point I expected to get close to a first cut at my design.

Hyphenation

Several sources I consulted indicated that the flow of white space on a page was a good indication of how professional a book design was. I suppose you could do all of your spacing by hand, but turning on hyphenation seemed like a reasonable place to start. Since hyphenation is under the Text Flow tab in the paragraph styles, it has to be enabled for each style where hyphenation is important.

Cleanup

That’s it for the prep work. The rest is cleaning up. White space and orphans. Before doing that, however, make sure you’re happy with your interior design. If you change font, font size, line spacing, etc, you’ll need to do your cleanup again.

White Space

Even with hyphenation, you can still have some lines or areas that stand out because the words are spread out more than the surrounding lines. One advantage of being the author, is you can sometimes find an alternate way to say something that looks better on the printed page.

Orphans

You don’t want chapters to end with a single line on a new page. Same with scenes. Scenes breaks shouldn’t be on the last line of a page or on the first. My own rule was that a scene break not appear on the last two or first two lines of a page.

There are a number of ways to shift text up or down the page. My rule was to always eliminate enough text to shift the scene break or chapter end up. I would start with paragraphs which ended with a single word on their last line, to see if I could cut a word. Sometimes I eliminated entire sentences or paragraphs. I agree that by this point in the process there shouldn’t be any fat to cut, but who of us can’t afford to tighten up our prose?

Proofing

In our exercise room is a ton of paper, stacks of marked up drafts and revisions of my novel. I try to do most of my editing and proofreading online, but there are things I notice on hard-copy that I miss on the screen. When I thought I was finished with my formatting and design, I printed out the entire manuscript again. I made sure to turn on the print driver feature that drew page borders. I printed the pages in duplex mode, even stapled them.

The final step is to output the file as PDF and have my printer send me a single copy of the book. I expect to find more things to change then.

Although I’ve got a great publisher for the e-book edition of Confessions of a Teenage Hermaphrodite, I decided to self-publish the paperback. Since I was already familiar with OpenOffice and unable to afford Adobe InDesign, I decided to invest some time to see if using OpenOffice was feasible.

The first step, always, is make a backup and put it somewhere you can’t mess it up.

Preliminary Cleanup

Editing always seems to inject typographic and formatting errors. So my first step was to insure that I didn’t have any tabs, double spaces, extra hard returns, or other debris in my file. What remained was the standard 12-point Times Roman, letter size, one inch margins, double-spaced document that we all use when we send a manuscript to an agent.

Paragraph Styles – Body Text

I use paragraph styles in my documents, but sometimes editing results in blocks of text that are ‘confused’ about their style. My first step, then was to re-assert a generic paragraph formatting everywhere.

I checked the ‘Text body’ paragraph style to make sure the paragraph indent was set to a reasonable initial value. You can bring up the Styles and Formatting by selecting it in the Format menu or by pressing F11. Don’t use the formatting in the toolbar.

The paragraph indent is under the Indents & Spacing tab.

I also changed the text spacing to 1.5 lines for the time being.

Since I use the ‘Text body’ paragraph style for my body text, I selected the entire document and applied the ‘Text body’ paragraph style by double-clicking on ‘Text body’ in the list of paragraph styles. Once again, don’t change the format using the toolbar. I hate this step because it removes all of the styling I did before sending the document off to agents.

Chapter Titles

I created a new paragraph style called ‘ChapterTitle’ for my chapter titles.

Since I didn’t have an existing style similar to what I wanted, I used the ‘Text body’ paragraph style as a parent. Be sure to unlink the new style from the parent so that changes to the parent don’t mess up the chapter titles.

To begin with, I dropped the chapter titles down 1.5 inches on the page. This is where the drop is adjusted. Don’t use carriage returns. I also set the spacing below the title.

At this point we’re just establishing control over the format, not trying make things look pretty. I set the font larger and changed the Typeface to differentiate the titles from the body text. Under the Alignment tab, I changed the alignment to center.

Once the new paragraph style was defined, I applied it to the chapter titles in the text. Select a chapter title and double-click on ‘ChapterTitle’ in the styles list to apply it. Don’t use the toolbar to change formats. Be sure the chapter title text is on its own line.

Scene Breaks

My scene breaks consisted of four asterisks separated by spaces, and centered. I created a paragraph style using ‘Text body’ as a parent, unlinked it, and set the alignment to center.

Rather than apply the new style to each scene break, I applied it to the first one and then copied it and pasted it over all of the others.

Character Styles – Drop Caps

Since I wanted to eventually do something with the first character of each chapter, I modified the Drop Caps character style.

After I changed the font size, I selected the first character of the first chapter and applied the Drop Caps character style to it. It’s tedious, but I repeated the same process for each chapter.

Page Styles

You’ve probably noticed that chapters always begin on the right side page. In order to accomplish this, I modified the Chapter Titles paragraph style. Under the Text Flow tab, I told OpenOffice to insert a Page break before the Chapter Title using the Right Page page style.

Then I modified the Right Page page style to make sure that a Right Page is followed by a Default style page. So, the first page of each chapter is a Right Page and all the following pages in the chapter are Default page style.

The first page  of a chapter is different from the rest, but the odd and even numbered Default style pages will also be different from each other. I changed the Default page style to support this. Under the Page tab, I changed the page layout to Mirrored. Under the Header tab, I enabled headers and unchecked the ‘Same content left/right’ selection.

The footers are set up the same way.

If I wanted a header or a footer on the first page of each chapter, I’d need to enable the header/footer in the ‘Right Page’ page style.

Setting Page One

My document has several pages of front matter that I haven’t formatted yet. Since I want Chapter One to start on page one, regardless of what’s in front of it, I needed to set the page number. To do this, I placed the cursor just before the chapter title. For me, that’s at the end of the last line on the book’s second title page. I selected the Insert and Manual Break menu item.

Since the Chapter Title paragraph style was already inserting a page break, I immediately deleted the extra one by pressing the forward delete key (not the backspace). So now, the first page of Chapter One is one.

Headers and Footers

Once the pages were numbered properly, I inserted my header and footer text. Initially, I wanted to go with author name at the top outside of the left-hand page, the book title at the top outside of the right-hand page, and page number on the outside of each page (except the first page of each chapter).

With the cursor in the footer of one of the pages, I inserted a page number field.

The page number turned out to be even, so left-justified would put it at the outside of the page.

I scrolled up to the top of page 84 and typed in the author name. Even page, so it would be on the outside.

On the next page, I inserted the page number field into the footer and right justified it. In the header, I inserted the title and right justified it.

Front Matter

Since some of the front matter pages should be on the right when you open the book, I created a FrontMatterRight page style. I could have used the ‘Right Page’ page style, but I didn’t want headers or footers in my front matter. I created a FrontMatterDefault page style to use with it. I also created a FrontMatterSection paragraph style similar to the ChapterTitle paragraph style. I did a paragraph style for the copyright page. The only time I used the toolbar for formatting was the title page.

 Page Size and Margins

I haven’t done much artistic design yet, but the document is set up to easily control the visual elements in a consistent manner. In Part 2, I’ll start formatting the document for a particular book size.