Proof number two came in from Lulu! (Number one was from CreateSpace)
Still, I’m not happy. This is why it’s so important to get your proofs before you officially publish. My cover looks fantastic on my computer. But somewhere along the way, it keeps getting distorted. I altered the cover a little (again) to see if it would turn out better. I originally envisioned a gray/silver border around the cover, spine, and back images. I’m following each company’s measurements for sizes and bleeds, and it’s just not coming out square. On the Lulu prototype, I instead made the border go around the outer edges with a tiny line to border the spine. Not working. I think I’ll have to do away with the border entirely. Gloss also works much better than matte. Although my moon is still not circular, looks pixeled, and the wording on the back is blurred. I’m not liking Lulu’s white pages. CreateSpace’s cream ones are much better. And there’s a strange bar of purple across the bottom.
Blue! It’s all supposed to be blue.
I have not yet heard back from CreateSpace regarding how to fix the cover issues I had with them.
Think I’ll start from scratch. So don’t want to.
Maybe I need to try Lightning Source.
Anyway……
eBook will be out in one week! December 14th! First chapters of Red Moonglow on Snow available for free on Smashwords.
I held proof2 in my hands and flipped through the pages, my heartbeats all flustered. These are my words. My words together, flowing into a story, a life. It’s just so bizzare to read these scenes I know so well within a bound cover and not my computer screen. Out of body-type of experience.
Of Words and Writing 
Hi Lesleigh. Some tips to possibly help with your cover issues:
– Are you creating your covers using CMYK colouring? This should be a setting in your design software. It might be set to RGB (for web) but print colours are different (CMYK)
– Have you resized any of your cover images? If you have made them bigger than they were originally, you’ll lose definition and they’ll become pixelated.
– Are you using the recommended resolution (pixels per inch) in your design software? This is different to size and will make your images sharper.
– The board could be problematic due to printing limitations – you need a bleed because printing isn’t always exactly central and this stops white space appearing. For similar reasons, you might not be able to get your boarder positioned just right. It will be the limitations of the printer, nothing to do with your image!
Hope this has helped, and good luck!
Thank you for the tips, Sophie! Lulu, Smashwords, or CreateSpace specified using RGB. Though now I can’t remember who or where I’d seen it, and it doesn’t seem to be working. Measurements I’m given for cover size including front, back, spine and bleeds are always in inches, but when uploading, they specify size in pixels, which does not correlate to size in inches. I’ve realized this and that I most likely manually resized to meet the pixel requirements. I’ve eliminated the border entirely: I had originally included it as part of the bleed, but it doesn’t look as horrible as I feared it would without it. Actually looks much cleaner. I’ve rebuilt the cover from scratch. The issue seems to deal with the pdf process. A forum I was on yesterday specified anti-aliasing, which is not an option given in Inkscape’s Save As. So now I have my background and upload it into Adobe’s Photoshop. I played yesterday, adding my text in Adobe instead and then saving as a PDF from there, and the result was much better. I’ll keep playing! Thank you for the comment and the help 🙂