So, the cookbook delays….

So, the cookbook delays. We've been back and forth with LightningSource on the cover -- poor Zak found three different sets of instructions on how to do it, and has only just finally gotten the version correct (Zak, if you get a chance, post the details in the comments for the enlightenment of other unwary souls). We think. Fingers crossed. LightningSource charges an extra $40 every time you do something wrong and have to upload another version, which are costs that poor Steve has been swallowing -- I hope we finally got this one right. And then this morning, he calls to tell me that the interior PDF I sent has an error -- a paragraph on page 97 (the mango lassi recipe) was printing with exclamation points all over it. Argh!

So I took a look at my file, and when I turned on the formatting symbols, sure enough, that paragraph had a bunch of extra bizarre crap in it. So I retyped it, and recreated the entire document as a PDF, and uploaded it to LightningSource, and I'm just going to give Steve the $40 for it, because I was supposed to give him a clean document to begin with, and I'm just glad that it's done. I think. They'll generate a proof and send it to Steve today or tomorrow (they're working 24 hours right now, apparently, Xmas rush), and by Monday, hopefully he'll be able to tell me that it looks good and we're ready to order. On the plus side, once we got to that stage with the SH books, they started shipping pretty much immediately. So we're not quite ready for the sigh-of-relief yet, but soon, soon.

Did I mention that Steve's a student? So he's trying to deal with all these revisions and uploadings and such in the midst of classes, and his day job, and a snowstorm, and with multiple computers in different places which can't necessarily talk to each other -- and all over a dial-up to boot? Oh, and now his main e-mail account is eating all the mail I send it because its spam filter has decided I'm not a real person. Yeesh!

We're just damned lucky that I can basically sit at my computer until this project is done.

1 thought on “So, the cookbook delays….”

  1. There was a sunny moment several lifetimes ago when Mary Anne asked if I wanted to help with the cover for the cookbook (and also to do the cover for Silence and the Word entirely). This sounded like great fun. I happily agreed.

    The weeks have flowed and melded like tallow and storm clouds have piled upon the weary horizon.

    I had assumed that I could simply lay out the cover using tools I know — Painter, Photoshop — and in fact I did this and got a cover everyone was happy with. Then came the time to deliver that cover. I read through the guidelines on Lightning Source’s website and found, in sequence, documents saying “we would like cover images in CMYK TIFF format.” which is what I provided because that was by far the easiest. However, there were also documents saying they wanted the cover in Quark or Pagemaker format. And another that suggested PDF. One said the file should be made according to a simple set of specs. Another said to use the automatic template generator.

    The first file I provided — a 50 meg TIFF file — refused to upload. I FedEx’d a CD to Lightning Source and was told that it did not ‘file’. That made no sense to me. I talked to the very nice fellow whose done the design on Steve’s other books, he told me that he’d always just given them Quark files with a printed proof. I don’t have Quark, nor can I get easy access to it. So, I exported the file as PDF and that seems to have fixed things.

    Silence and the Word should go much more smoothly.

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