The last of Joanna’s self-publishing posts. “At last,” we hear you cry?

This is intended to be the last of my blogs about self-publishing in print. I’ve covered everything else, I hope. Only print covers to go. And this final blog is about doing covers on Draft2Digital, usually called D2D. How to create D2D print covers as arresting as the one shown here, of Rake’s Reward. (My opinion. You may disagree?)

Why not a blog about doing print covers in general?

Good question. But, basically, covers for Amazon KDP and for Ingram Spark can be complicated. I’d say you need knowledge and experience to do them. You may also need to pay for pretty expensive software, like PhotoShop or Adobe InDesign. That being so, it may be a better option overall, in time and money, to hire a cover designer to do it for you. If you decide to do that, you might find it useful to read Sophie’s blog on the designer brief and mine on making covers work for you.

D2D is different. If you’re an author with an author’s attention to detail, you can do a D2D print cover yourself. After all, you already have the front cover from the ebook, don’t you?

Which leaves only the spine and the back cover. Easy, no? (Here’s one I did earlier!)

Well, perhaps not exactly easy, but not too challenging if you approach it step by step. And this blog is going to guide you through the steps you need.

D2D print covers: step 1: before you start designing

Since you’ve already published your ebook, you have all the information I listed in my blog about ebook publishing, don’t you? And you’ve prepared and formatted your print text as described on my print formatting blog, too? For illustration, I’m going to use the stages of producing my wraparound cover for The Duke and the Dubious Damsel. The front cover, my starting point, is shown here.

Here’s what you need for your cover:

1. Front cover (already uploaded from ebook)
2. Back cover blurb (D2D will use the blurb you uploaded along with your print metadata, but you can amend it, as described later)
3. Author bio, if you want that to appear on the back cover (D2D will lift that from any bio you have already uploaded to their site)
4. Publisher logo for the bottom of the spine, if you want to use one. D2D asks for the logo to be in PNG format, 300×300 pixels, 300 dpi, and with a transparent background.

You don’t need to upload the barcode for the back cover. D2D will produce that automatically from the ISBN you uploaded on the metadata page at the start of the print process. The D2D barcode doesn’t include price, but I recommend you don’t do that, anyway. It wouldn’t make sense to include price on a book that’s going to be on sale in many different countries and currencies.

You don’t choose trim size at this point. If you uploaded a formatted pdf of your text, that determined the trim size and D2D will have detected it automatically. If you chose to go with D2D’s formatting, you will have made a trim size choice at that stage. In either case, the number of pages in your book will already have been fixed.

D2D print covers: step 2: what D2D will do automatically

When you click on the third stage of D2D’s print publishing system, you’ll be asked to wait while D2D generates a cover preview from the information you’ve already provided. You won’t have to wait long — it’s remarkable software, I think — and then you’ll see something like this:

Things to note:

1. D2D has chosen a background colour for the spine and the back cover that matches, more or less, one of the colours from the front cover. If you dislike it, you can change it. (On the book shown earlier in this blog, A Penniless Prospect, the first pass of the back cover was a lurid green which I hated. I changed it to dark grey, to match the model’s dark jacket.)
2. D2D has chosen white for the spine and back cover text. It usually chooses either black or white, depending on the colour of the cover. You can change that, too. For example, on A Penniless Prospect, I changed the text colour to the same green as the front cover title. However, D2D will use the same colour for all text on the back cover and the spine. If you want colour variations, you’ll need to employ a cover designer (and pay for their expertise).
3. The back cover blurb is left-justified and the font is very small. Practically illegible, no? No worries. It can be changed.
4. There is no author bio, or image, on this cover. That’s because I’d removed them before I took this screenshot. D2D’s default is to include an author bio and image if you’ve uploaded them. That often results in a back cover that is much too busy, especially if you have a longish  blurb. I recommend that you put the author bio inside the book, in the back matter, rather than on the back cover, but it’s your choice.
5. The cover preview normally has guides and crop lines, but I’d turned them off for this screenshot. I’ll come back to those later.

D2D print covers: step 3: author’s changes

You can play with the D2D cover until you’re happy with the result. Immediately under the cover preview, you’ll get a range of boxes offering choices.
This screenshot shows the results of the choices I made (I’ll come back to Stretch and Extend, so ignore those for now):

Screenshot of amended boxes on D2D’s cover creation page, below the cover spread

1. I changed the text colour, on spine and back cover, to match the colour of the title on the front. To do that, you need to know the hex code of the colour you want—#F3CF7F was the gold colour I’d already used. You insert the new hex colour code in the box where D2D’s text colour is already specified. You can see that I’ve already done so in the screenshot above. Similarly the box for background colour shows the hex code for the blue that D2D chose for me. I reckoned it was an excellent match so I kept it.
2. The box for Back Cover Biography originally contained the author bio I’d uploaded. D2D includes that by default. But you don’t have to keep it. If you don’t want it, just highlight it all and Delete. Or amend and format it, if you prefer. Similarly, if you don’t want the author pic, click the x and it will disappear. Having done both those things, which I generally recommend, you’ll have much more room for the blurb on your back cover. And the blurb can sell the book in a way that an author bio (I believe) cannot.
3. Publisher logo/colophon:
   The screenshot above was taken at the point when I was uploading my publisher logo which looks like this. It’s a PNG file with a transparent background, as D2D requires. This is how it looks in gold as I used on this cover and in green which I used (and discarded) elsewhere. I designed this simple logo. You can design one for yourself, if you like. Christina Hollis, for example, went for a cyclamen leaf which she drew herself. The options are almost limitless. Don’t use a penguin, though. That one’s already taken 😉
4. I went for a glossy rather than matte cover. I admit that the received wisdom is that fiction, especially romance, uses matte covers but I very much like the glossy covers. My design, my own work, so I get what I want, no?

Blurb text on back cover—resize, change fonts, emphasis, whatever…

I found that trial and error was the answer with the text on the back cover. This is the original text that D2D lifted from the metadata page. Above it, you can see icons for the various choices you can make.

They are, left to right—

top line: bold, italic, underline, numbered list, bullet points, drop-down menu for justification (left, right, centre, full)

second line: font choice, font size, undo, redo, full screen.

I centred all my blurb text. As it stood, it was too long, so I made cuts and changes to make it shorter.

I chose a simple font, Garamond, and increased the sizes to make it more legible. (You can have more than one font and/or font size.) In places, I used bold and/or italic.

Then I added line breaks within paragraphs (not paragraph breaks) using shift+return so that the layout was what I wanted. Paragraph breaks will add extra spaces and you don’t always want that.

I kept refreshing by clicking APPLY CHANGES until I thought the wraparound looked right.

The net result looked like this with the guides and crop lines turned off.
Note the JMI logo on the spine. I’m quite proud of that 😉

D2D Print Covers: step 4: final tweaks

Remember I mentioned guides and crop lines on the cover? Here they are:

D2D gives you choices about how far the front cover image should fill the cover space. Right underneath your cover preview, you’ll see D2D’s default stretch which is this:

You have choices on how much you stretch your cover to fill the space. There are two drop down menus on the screenshot above. These are what they offer you. First, stretch:

Second, how far the stretch should extend:

Please do note the warning about not overlapping the purple guide mark. If any crucial elements on the cover—especially text—touch the purple area, D2D will refuse to print your book and email you to ask you to correct it. That happened to me on my first D2D print cover, when I hadn’t noticed my mistake. I’d simply uploaded the ebook cover (shown right) where the title was much too close to the edge.

On an ebook, that doesn’t matter. On a print book, it does.

The obvious solution may seem to be to go with D2D’s default and stretch only to the extended cut. BUT there’s a potential downside to doing that. There is no guarantee that the book will be trimmed exactly between the blue and purple guide marks. If part of the purple guide area remains untrimmed, your cover will have a coloured margin on it which could look ugly. See the front cover example here which, to my mind, looks wrong.

The solution? I like to go for Full Stretch, and To Edge. That way, there’s never an ugly margin. But to guarantee my stretch will work, I now take care to ensure that there’s nothing indispensable under the blue or purple guide marks. D2D warned me that there had to be 0.375″ (three-eighths of an inch) between text or live elements and the cut zone. So I revised the cover image to the one on the right, with more space on right and at the bottom. You’ll see that bits of the hero’s coat and the mistletoe might be trimmed off, but neither the author name nor the title is at risk.

And, after that, the book was fine. I submitted it for printing and it’s selling well, as both ebook and print book. The latter was a surprise to me, since I’d had to price the print book at £11.99 / $13.99. There are definitely readers out there who want books made from trees. Must say that I like to hold a real book in my hand, too.

Over to you. You know you want to…

If you’ve come this far, why not go the whole hog and have a go? A D2D account for your print books won’t cost you anything but time and you may well find the process rewarding. And those readers who love tree-books will love you for it. What’s not to like?

Go on. I dare you…

Joanna