Tuesday, May 7, 2013

Okay...Not So Bad

All right, all right…I might have been being a little toomuch of a perfectionist.

Spent an hour or so looking over the proofs in the light of day, and they’re really not as bad as my first pass made me think. Yes, my wife dislikes the font I’m using for the cover title, and it’s not as beefy as I’d like, but it’s not terrible. My son thinks I should have used different colors…but he’s two years old, and after careful questioning, what he REALLY wanted was multiple books in a variety of colors (and also, his favorite color is PINK and I failed to make any of the three volumes pink which was a major disappointment for him). And the cover color will probably changed at the printer anyway.

A couple of the images DID turn out looking a little cloudy…but I know that a least a couple of those are my own fault (due to messing with the stupid “picture effects”) and are thus fixable while others seem to be an issue with Kinko’s printer ink (some of the shading on tables and charts has a “fade-in-fade-out” thing going on), which should be correctable with my normal printer. I might also be able to get cleaner illos to replace some of the lower resolution images.

So in actuality, there’s really own one main issue/gripe with the books and that’s the margins (top and bottom) which seem to have somehow expanded through the magic of Kinko’s booklet digitalization process. The actual PDFs (which is what I’ll probably be making available for download, as that’s what people want on their tablets) still look great…quite readable and nicely laid out. It’s only the book version that seems to suck, perhaps due to the need of the printer to have an edge to grip. Or something. See, this is why I hate (or fear) technology…I just don’t know enough about this shit to even say what’s going on.

The margins I’ve got on the book seem to be plenty small and don’t need to be adjusted…it’s more the “booklet creation” process that needs to be adjusted (and my printer can work with me on that. Hell, I suppose I can just cut off the top and bottom edges (which seems to be what TSR did with their booklets “back in the day;” they’re a bit shorter than the normal A5 height of 8.5”.

SO: having noted a few typos that need to be corrected (for example, I see at least one place where I used the old term “necromancer” instead of “sorcerer”), at this point I think I’m about set.

-          Need to put in my order for the custom dice.
-          Need to paste my ISBNs and update my Bowker’s account with the new books
-          Need to make sure all images are tight

All right, all right…I am feeling much more optimistic about this project than I was last night. Some of my enthusiastic giddiness is starting to come back. And that’s a good thing.

: )

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