Those nice people at Createspace

I believe I already told you that I was turning my eBook A Lucky Break into a version suitable for printing. After a couple of weeks of checking, and editing, and thank you Lydia Lin for your input on typos and spelling errors I finally got it finished and ready for uploading to Createspace. I did it yesterday afternoon. First I totally forgot that the interior of the book had to be loaded as a PDF so it was straight onto www.freepdfconvert.com to change my Word file into a PDF. Ten minutes later (I have dial-up not ADSL, there is no ADSL where I live in Spain) I had a brand new PDF file uploading to Createspace. Go and make a cup of tea and wait patiently. Then it got to the cover. Now I had a cover picture that I used for the eBook and very pleased I was with it too so wanted that as the cover for the print version also. It was created in Paint, that’s right, the free version you get with Windows and very versatile it is, if you have the patience to find out how it works. Back to the plot. I chose Createspace’s THE SPRUCE from cover creator for my cover 5” x 8” with a Sky Blue back cover colour. The Spruce is the cover where you have your own picture, book title and Author all as one and they take care of the back and spine of the book. Their Sky Blue did not match in any way the blue I used for my cover. I went onto Google and looked up the Red, Green and Blue mix for Sky Blue, put that into Paint and guess what it didn’t match at all. Next I went onto the Createspace Forum for advice and quickly got some very good but complicated answers. In the end I sent a message to Customer Support and asked for the make-up of their Sky Blue and this morning I had an email with the numbers and hey presto I have a book cover that matched perfectly. They are nice people at Createspace.

So if you want to create your own book cover using a Createspace colour, I suggest you ask then first what is the Red, Green, Blue mix of your chosen background colour before you start. Incidently if you create your book cover in Paint it will not be big enough for Createspace. Just open the picture in Microsoft Picture Manager (free with Windows again) and enlarge it, there is no loss of definition or pixilation just keep going until your book’s cover is big enough.

Have a great weekend.