Publishing, Cover Final Touches

Posted by Jerry Lopper Dec 19, 2007

In the last entry I selected a cover design and began using Lulu's publishing wizard. There are still some cover details to finalize. The cover must convey something about the book and catch people's interest.

One might wonder why I'm using a stock cover rather than a custom design. I like to do things myself and I tend to be frugal; the combination generally result in doing things myself.

Lulu's cover wizard allows me to work on the front cover, spine, and back cover independently. I can pick images for front and back, colors, and text font and colors. With stock covers, the location of title, subtitle, and author are fixed.

After trying several versions of front cover text color and size, I select a bright yellow title complementing the cover's flowers, and a dark green subtitle and author font that matches the green of the prominent tree. Looks good.

For the spine, I color the title and author the same yellow as the front title. For the back cover I pick a solid blue that ties into and complements the blue sky of the front cover. I have to revise the back cover text several times, but finally get a good mixture of an intro to the book, my bio, a tie into my previous book, and a few blurbs (praises) from other people. The back cover text in white looks great.

Lulu requires images with 300 dpi resolution and at least 675 by 820 pixels in size. My existing head-shot images are smaller than that, but I'm able to scan a good professional 8X10 I have and reduce it to the right size with Irfanview ( a free image editor, remember, I'm frugal). The back cover looks good and I'm almost ready to publish. Next, to pick a distribution scheme.