The Proof - An Amorous Route

Huzzah! I just received my proof from Amazon today. This writing thing is great. You get all these little feel-good moments along the way. The first was when I finished the first draft. The second was the final edit. The third was when I uploaded An Amorous Route on Smashwords. The fourth was my first sale. The fifth and most recent was receiving this proof. 

I have had to learn a lot about formatting and cover design along the way. And I can tell you that you defiantly need a proof before you get your book out into the market.

The main problem I found was with the front cover formatting. I hadn't used a high enough DPI. Yep, I had no idea what that meant either. Apparently dpi means 'dots per inch' or the number of pixels that occupy a square inch. My mistake was using my ebook image that has a small dpi of 97. When you take this to print it comes out all grainy because a printer prints more finely can handle much higher dpi. I had mistakenly though that if I just increase the dpi of my cover image then that would fix the problem.

Misquoting B.A. Baracus, "Wrong Fool". What I needed was a cover image with a dpi of at lease 300. I was way off and there were no shortcuts to fix the problem. I had to spend today going back to the original high resolution images and copy my design from scratch. I was a pain but now I have a high resolution cover that I can reduce if need be or keep to make posters.

So now I need to get back to Amazon with the new high dpi cover and then I should be ready to release 'An Amorous Route' into the market. I'm thinking that it should be out around late September early October. 

Wish me luck.

Scott