A Second Reader for the Cover Editor

On 18 September I had a cover editor that looked finished. It showed the front, the spine and the back as one flat sheet with the folds drawn in. It warned you about type that ran into the trim. It had been through several rounds with the same agent that built it, and every round it looked better.

So I did what I had not done yet. I handed the whole thing to a different agent that had never seen it, and asked it to find what would ruin a printed book.

01What it was given

Twelve screenshots of the editor, the written record of how it was designed, and the source. Nothing else, and no list of what I was worried about. It was run without anyone watching, and its answer is saved word for word, including the places where it was wrong.

02The worst thing it found

Every picture a writer imported was being shrunk, on arrival, to 512 pixels on its long edge.

That was sound reasoning for what the app did originally. The shelf preview was 136 by 204 points. I had chosen the 512-pixel limit for that small preview. A library full of full-size photographs makes the shelf heavy. But the same picture now goes on a printed cover. A trade-size front board with its bleed is about 9.25 inches tall, and 512 pixels across 9.25 inches is 55 pixels to the inch. The printer specifications recorded in my notes called for 300 pixels per inch. My notes also said Ingram rejected files below 200.

So a cover with an imported picture could look perfect on screen and still be too soft to print sharply.

The check I had built to catch exactly this missed it. It divided the picture's pixels by the width of the box, not by the width of the picture as drawn. A picture is scaled to fill its box, so it is always at least as wide as the box, and a landscape photograph on a portrait board was reported about one and a half times sharper than it was. A warning that errs in the reassuring direction is worse than none.

03Three more that held

The spine type was placed as a fixed fraction of the spine's width. That clears the printer's safe margin only once a book reaches about 154 pages, and Amazon will letter a spine from 79. Between the two, a cover nobody had touched was already wearing a red warning, under a sentence saying the spine was deep enough to letter.

Overset type, meaning a title too big for its box, was measured in screen points with a floor of 6. On the small strip, a thin spine is about ten points wide, and the floor made a perfectly good title look clipped. The strip was lying about what the printed spine would do.

With a text box selected, the Remove button took off the front photograph instead. It now removes what you have selected.

04Where it was wrong, or where I disagreed

It said none of the twelve screenshots showed the red mark for low resolution. That was true and not a fault: the screenshots had been taken before the check existed.

It also suggested cutting two pieces of text. I took both, with one change. I shortened the hardcover paragraph but kept the measurements the writer needs to check with their printer.

Every finding was checked against the source before anything was changed, and the ones about printing all held up when I read the code.

05What I took from it

Reading the review, there is one fault repeated in different clothes. A number that was right for a screen had leaked into an object that gets printed: 512 pixels, a 6-point floor, an 8-point warning dot that nobody sees on a busy picture, a 24-point "keep" distance that is meant to be a measurement of paper.

I had missed it while working on the editor. A separate review caught problems I had missed while working on the editor.

I raised the import limit to 3,000 pixels. Whether an image is large enough still depends on its original size, the printed size and the crop. Pictures already shrunk to 512 have to be imported again. The check now uses the picture's printed size and marks the cover when the resolution is too low. The spine boxes are placed from the safe width, and Spine is dropped from the Add Text menu when the book is too thin to letter.

Thanks for reading.

J.H.

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