How Your Print Cover Will Look:
It's important that you, the author, understand how print services require a book cover to be set up. Most important, we need to know how Digitz, Awe-Struck's printing company, requires us to set up your cover. The key word is "bleed". Since covers are cut with a real knife, and since this procedure is not particularly accurate, the cutting action can lead to problems. Without the bleed as a safety area the ends of the title can literally be snipped off by the knife. This is why printers require a bleed area around the top, bottom and right side of the cover. If we send them a cover image without this bleed area, they will reject the cover and ask us to put in bleed. The bleed is a color that blends well with one of the predominant colors in the actual cover. Sometimes black works, but often we'll use a complimentary color from the cover image. It just depends on the situation, but the author will leave the choosing of the bleed color to Awe-Struck. It's important you be aware of this so you know what the final cover will look like. Knowing the rules (and how we are constrained by them) will save disappointment later.
To give you an idea of what to expect, below are three covers with bleed. These are covers that Digitz has accepted, and the books are now in print. I have included the three most common situations, and your own cover, regardless of its design, will fit in one of these three categories. The actual bleed width will vary from print run to print run. You may find this odd, given that we are all living in a state of very high technology. But the printing industry hasn't changed much over the years. Perhaps someday printers will dispense with the bleed requirement, but until they do, we have to submit covers according to their rules. We don't make the rules: we simply follow them. If we don't, we get rejected covers.
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Predominant cover color: This cover has a very predominant color, so it's easy to choose the bleed. In a case like this the bleed will blend very well with the rest of the cover. (Why we wouldn't use a color like the purple at the bottom of the image or the gray of the background image is explained in the discussion of the cover directly below.) |
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Too many colors along the edge: Notice that the predominant colors along the edge of this cover image vary considerably. If we would use yellow as the bleed, the top yellow banner would literally bleed into the bleed area. Bad! If we used the tan of the woman's blouse for the bleed, the blouse would bleed into the bleed area. Another bad! If, however, we use the blue from the little girl's shirt in the background, the bleed will look attractive because it echoes a color in the image, but it doesn't bleed into any of the image colors along the edge. Black would also work, IF there weren't black banners along the upper right and lower left. Get the picture, so to speak? <g> |
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A dark image with high contrast: The bleed chosen here is black because the cover image is predominantly black. Notice that choosing the light blue of Connie's name for the bleed would frame the image in a color that would ruin the mood. Choosing the creamy colors of the sunset would also ruin the mood. It's important the image be enclosed in a frame that echoes the mood of the cover. In this particular case, black fills the bill nicely. |
Authors try to be helpful. They suggest we center the cover within the bleed. Digitz says no. Digitz requires the left edge of the cover image to be right up along the edge of the spine. Authors ask us for a textured or feathered bleed area. That's distracting. The bleed area must be a flat color to make it blend as much as possible with the cover's colors. Authors suggest we make the bleed part of the actual image but leave the titlework inside the bleed area. That's a possibility, but that also means another cover version must be made by the cover designer. And that's expensive. Further, that expense would be the author's expense, not Awe-Struck's. We try very hard to make print affordable to the author. Using a cover image with built-in bleed for print, (necessitating a significantly different layout), adds to the overall expense. We try to cover all the bases by requiring just one cover image for both the ebook version and the print version. Ebook covers don't have bleed for obvious reasons. So, for the print cover, we put bleed around the ebook image, and that necessitates a flat color. But a special print cover isn't really necessary. The above three covers aptly illustrate how bleed is handled and why a particular bleed color is chosen for a particular image. It's important to realize that the width of the bleed ends up considerably narrower than what you see above. That's because the printer's knife cuts in quite deeply. So a cover will have a nice outline around the cover's edge, but it probably won't be as wide as you see here.
The vast majority of our authors are thrilled with the bleed color we choose for their book(s). But it's important you realize what bleed really involves so you know what to expect. Digitz dictates the bleed width, Dick will determine the bleed color, and Kathryn will coordinate the bleed color with the color of the back cover layout. Kathryn often uses the bleed color for the spine and back of the book which visually glues the front to the back and spine and ultimately leads to a gorgeous presentation. Although we welcome author feedback, in the final analysis we must adhere to Digitz's guidelines. If we don't, your book won't make it to the print stage. But if we follow Digitz's guidelines, the result will be a beautiful book in print that we can be proud of.