KDP To CreateSpace Print Book Cover – Avoid This Mistake!! Save Time And Money!

This was the cover I created for my Asexual Perspectives Kindle version, using the KDP Cover Creator and an image I had designed for one of my www.Asexualise.com “Asexualise” Asexual T-Shirts, that is available to buy on Amazon.com. It took me a few hours to get this right in the first place – about 3 hours or more, and since the very original cover, I added the “47 Asexual Stories” part, which made the ‘Perspectives’ font smaller and I could not make it larger without it going into other areas of the book cover, due to the restrictions of the text fields on KDP. It took me many more hours to try to make the text bigger and in the end, I had to settle for this as the best it was going to get. So bear these restrictions in mind if you do use the Cover Creator.

You could say that this was my first mistake you should avoid, and you would be right, because of all the time it took me to create the cover and the restrictions it posed to me when I came to amend it, but I did enjoy creating it in the first place, so not all was lost!!

I assumed, since KDP encourages you to click a button and hey presto out pops a printed version (oh, no, no, no, no, no; it doesn’t – see previous post), that it would be easy to replicate my cover using the Cover Creator – in fact I assumed at first thought, that it would almost autogenerate the cover!! Boy was I WRONG!! With a capital W. Not only did it do no such thing, it got worse. The Cover Creator for the KDP print version, did not have the same template that I used for my Kindle version and no matter how many painstaking hours I tried to reproduce the exact same cover, it would not work. This was a tough situation to be in and this is the first part of the major mistake I want you to avoid. Because now I was faced with either wading through more Photoshop videos to try to learn how to create the cover myself using the template that I downloaded, but did not understand, or paying someone to do it for me. One is much more time – one is money! I opted to save myself time and that is what I am trying to help you to do, save time – and money!! Let me tell you more about that!

So I paid a designer $25 to create the print version of my Asexual Perspectives book cover and … wait for it … drum roll please … she had to recreate the Kindle version, because I did not have all of the original source files. Yep! You heard me right! All that time I spent in the cover creator and she had to recreate the Kindle version anyway, before doing the printed version! And she was able to get the “Perspectives” to be the same font size as the word Asexual, so it looks much better. All of those hours.. wasted! Although it wasn’t. Not from a creative perspective, but from a frustration energy point of view and so this is the mistake that I want you to avoid. Because next time, I will just pay her to do both covers in the first place. Or at least the Kindle version so she has the original source files, should I need the print version creating. Although the cover is usually done as the last thing; it is important you remember this firstly and save yourself a whole heap of time and many arrrghhh! Moments.

Oh, and before I forget, did I tell you that I had to go back into the Cover Creator to find out all of the original settings, what font I used for which bit, what size, drop shadow or not, bold or not, the exact colour – so I used the ‘Inspector’, to inspect the elements and get the colours – unless you are into web design, you may not know what this means as it is a hidden element within a site and shows you the specific RGB colour numbers, used to make up the whole colour of a particular element. I could not find the simple # colour for each of the colours.

So there you have it, unless you get a buzz out of creative frustration, which I do sometimes do to certain point, pay a designer to create your cover in the first place.

Asexual Perspectives Kindle and Print Book Cover, now, that the designer recreated.

And after all that, I decided to publish the printed version of my Kindle book, with CreateSpace, not the new KDP system because you cannot buy discounted Author copies with KDP. Or do expanded distribution if you want. See previous post. The expanded distribution added too much cost to the sale price and so I have chosen not to do this at the moment.

Now if I told you there is no such thing in life as mistakes, just lessons we learn from, how would you feel? See, although I call these mistakes, they are still life’s lessons. We cannot know, what we don’t know, until we know it. Once we know it, will we repeat it? That is the big question? That is the possible mistake? But until we learn those all important life lessons, we will keep making those ‘mistakes’. I hope by reading this, you get to achieve a lesson and not a mistake.

And if you want to save yourself some money with the cover, like I did, then go to www.fiverr.com to find yourself a good cover designer, but make sure you can have commercial rights to it and it is copyright free, otherwise you could land yourself in a whole heap of legal trouble!!

Until next time, keep writing, keep being you, never give up and keep embracing your quirky, check out my Asexual Perspectives book, as it is a remarkable book and tells my own personal story, that you can read just from the free Amazon ‘Look inside’ feature. xxxxxxxx