It was late November. I had just finished writing two books for NaNoWriMo1 and I had promised that I was going to take the rest of the month and all of December off of writing to keep myself from completely burning out. I was already really close to burning out as it was, so it was a good idea to take a bit of time off.
But this is me. I don’t do time off very well.
I don’t know why, but I got it in my head that I wanted to turn White Noise into a print book. I have wanted to make a print version of my books just for that aesthetic. I like holding books and I love the smell of a book, so I wanted that for my own works as well. Since I promised that I wouldn’t be doing any more writing, I figured that now was the perfect time to start working on creating something that I always wanted. I’d just finished White Noise and I already designed the spine and back cover back in October, after all, so why not this one?
Luckily, I’d already been playing around in InDesign for a while, so I had a general sense of my way around. I pulled out novels from my shelves and made a pile of them by my desk as I started looking for fonts and tried to remember every gripe my designer friends and classmates had about text on a page. I tried to get rid of any orphans and widows2 that I could find. I adjusted my spacing and rewrote little things so that the lines looked better.
And then I chose my fonts3 and I had to lay everything out all over again. Choose your fonts first.
I went with a 6×9 layout because that was the recommended size by Createspace and, now that I had all of my documents ready, I was able to start uploading all of my documents. It was exciting. I had checked everything and rechecked it. Everything was going to be great. I’d get one proof copy and it would be perfect and that would be all. I uploaded the cover and the interiors and I waited for them to approve it and get to the stage where I could order my first proof. I obsessed over the description for a while, I selected a matte cover finish,4 but there was something wrong.
Here’s a tip about Createspace. For those who are using Createspace for the first time and you’re wondering why your interior file still needs approval, open up the Digital Proofer. There’s a big blue button at the bottom that says Save and Continue. You have to press that before it will approve your interiors.
Once that was sorted, I looked through their digital proofer. From here, you get to see how the spine is aligned and the spine was a little off. Cue making little adjustments to it, uploading it and waiting until Amazon approved the new version before I could actually check it for myself. The biggest downside of this whole process really is this part right here. You have to upload a cover and get it approved by someone on Amazon’s end before you can check the alignment yourself. But a few tries later, I finally get it ready. It’s approved. The spine looks good.
Time to get my first proof copy.