So I posted the first book in the Sine Qua Non Cycle last night, “And Laugh at Digital Butterflies”. The process is I go to Lulu, create my project, use their tools to create an epub and they post it for sale at LuLu.com and after some review, submit it to Barnes & Noble & iBooks(tore). I then take that epub, go to Amazon and jump through their hoops so they can create a Kindle compatible ebook which then takes 12-24 hours usually to go live.
Well, because of the way the background is on the cover (the ones and zeroes), and the different compression methods Lulu and Amazon use, the cover thumbnail looks fine on Lulu but not on Amazon. So I had to bug my artist friend to tweak the cover until we finally decided to take the ones and zeroes out and change the title colour so the thumbnail would look okay. This was a royal pain, as you can imagine and took several hours yesterday with all the back and forth.
When what turned out to be the final cover came, I didn’t proofread it; I submitted it to Amazon and saw that it looked much better and uploaded it and my book was now in the pipeline. What wasn’t readily visible because of the size of the thumbnail was that in the redoing of the title ‘butterflies’ was spelled ‘butterfiles’ – in very small text the ‘i’ and ‘l’ appear similar so that if you don’t look very closely you’ll miss it.
The end result was that this morning, still bleary eyed- I was woken up by my artist who was frantic to tell me he realised that butterflies was spelled wrong.
The good news? Amazon’s turn around time is great and after only about 6 hours the new cover was up… or was it? Well no, it wasn’t and this time it wasn’t me but Amazon (except it WAS me in a way because I should have triple checked). Yesterday while uploading the various covers for preview I noticed I had to load a few of them multiple times for the preview to correctly reflect the new file. Well this morning in my bleary eyed state I know I uploaded the correct file but