Cover Craziness, or the "Joys" of Publishing

Ask anyone who’s ever worked with me, and they will note that I am, to put it bluntly, a perfectionist. Not when I’m writing, actually, especially during a first draft—that’s the one time I shove everything else aside and let the text flow from my brain onto the page. So much so, in fact, that the one time I tried to join in on National Novel Writing Month, the goal of writing X words in Y amount of time drove me bonkers. Writing, for me, is fun. Counting words is not fun, and I just couldn’t do it. But once the first draft is finished, the perfectionist in me reasserts itself, and that applies most of all to the publishing stage.

You may think, Shouldn’t Five Directions Press handle that? Well, sure, except that a handful of other writers and I are Five Directions Press. Each of us contributes to the co-op in her own way, but since I worked in academic publishing for decades and Courtney J. Hall has a degree in graphic design, the two of us handle most of the technicalities involved in getting books into print. (Note that Courtney has no responsibility whatsoever for the incident I’m about to relate. I messed things up all on my own.)

So, how does a perfectionist with decades of experience in publishing manage to muck up her own cover? To be honest, I know what I did but not exactly how, never mind why. I had uploaded the print and e-book files as usual, ordered an author copy to check the formatting, and noticed the text on the spine was off-center. For reasons too boringly technical to relate, I ended up working in InDesign, where I could line things up more easily. Once satisfied, I transferred the edited cover back to Affinity, saved the PDF, uploaded it to Kindle Direct Publishing, checked the spine in the Previewer, was happy with the results, ordered a new author copy just in case, and managed to get everything in not long before Amazon stopped allowing changes (about a week before publication).

That’s when the “fun” began. Author copies used to arrive within days, but now they take a couple of weeks. So it wasn’t until publication day, when I downloaded the ePub through Kindle Unlimited to check it, that I realized the title on the cover said Song of the Silk Maker rather than Song of the Silk Weaver. I checked online, and sure enough, the wrong front cover was showing for both the print and the e-book—that last particularly odd, since I had not changed the e-book version. Somehow, I had managed to swap out the correct front cover (still present in the InDesign file) for a much older version dating from circa 2020. I tracked down and replaced the front cover, re-uploaded the file, and I’m still waiting to see whether the change “took.” It shows correctly in Kindle Direct Publishing and on the Amazon site itself, but until I see the new author copies, I won’t know for sure.

All of which goes to show that even perfectionists can royally mess things up despite their best efforts. And if you happened to receive a print copy with the wrong title, contact me via this site and we’ll work out how to get you a replacement.

Assuming the latest set of author copies ever arrive …

Images: screen shot from author’s computer; face with question mark licensed from Clipart.com.