May 25th - 2022: Does it fit?

I have continued editing my pdf layouts for the book, both the inside pages and the cover, and have started to upload them onto the BLURB website to see how they look and if they fit correctly.

Unfortunately the website is a bit of a pain and likes to try and change everything that I put onto/upload to it. One of these issues being that the website never seems to be able to accept any file size that I give it, as its either to small, or too big, and that isn't in Megabytes, but in the actual dimensions of the PDF pages of the book itself (and don't get me started on the cover PDF file). Even though, I constantly made the pages in InDesign 9which I have been using to create the book) exactly the right size which BLURB wants them to be so that they can be uploaded and processed correctly.

So, I uploaded the TEST pages and the cover files to the website, and as usual, there was a small error, so the website fixed it for me and I was able to take a look at my preview. Everything was okay with the preview of the book, apart from the cover, see below:

What is being shown is that the file in which I was told to create to then be used as the cover for the book, has not been explained very well or laid out clearly. What I have not understood, is that the file will wrap around the entire book, so the spine will have to be included in the design to make things work. As BLURB would not give me very clear dimensions to use on laying out my page, I took a screen shot of the image above off the website, and then placed it onto a new InDesign document so I could then use that as the template foe my cover. This was very annoying, but at least it helps.

From then onwards I have managed to use my own custom-random-annoying book cover template for InDesign and managed to knock out a few rough edits and versions of the cover, before coming to a final design which I have refined and chosen to go with as the official cover for my book.

Cover shown below: