I’m back in that lovely self-publishing shenanigans hole again.
I’ve been trying to get State Machine into print for, oh…three months? August, June, July… Yes. Three months.
I love Rose’s cover art for this book. It’s Rachel sitting by the FDR Memorial before things went pear-shaped. When I approached Rose about this cover, I said that it had something to do with an ancient artifact lost at sea, and sent her a few images of the Antikythera Mechanism. She picked a color palate from them and ran with it.
There’s light, there’s life, there’s water… Man, I love it. And on the first proof I got back from CreateSpace, they did it right. If I hadn’t needed to fix a few misspellings, I’d have run with it.
Second proof? Not so much. Take a look at this nonsense:
Right: First proof—-WOO COLORS!
Left: Second proof. Woo. Colors.
That’s…uh. That’s not so good. If that second proof was part of a shipment and not a one-off, I would have refused it, and not just because of that sickly washed-out green. See the spine?
Top book is first proof.
Bottom book is second proof.
That’s a 1/8″ misalignment between where the spine should sit and where it falls. Good on Proof 1, bad on Proof 2. Keep in mind the same cover format was applied to both proof versions.
I’m well aware there are tradeoffs for the luxury of working with a POD service, but there’s no reason for this degree of discrepancy in cover colors and alignment. Any POD company with a decent program just has to flip a switch and the machines put everything together in a tidy standardized package. CreateSpace is an Amazon company–they have a decent program. So, either the cover for Proof 2 came off of a machine that hadn’t been calibrated, or Jeremy the Intern was dicking around with the settings again.
(I should note that these problems are related to the cover copy only; the interior copy is great for both proofs.)
To their credit, after I went back-and-forth with their customer service folks, CreateSpace is sending me a third proof at no cost. It should be here by Friday. If it looks good, I’ll make State Machine live and order the restock for the store. If it doesn’t, it’s back to the customer service windmill again because I really don’t want to sell crappy books.
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