A New Review For LIFE CLASS

Lou Graham says: ....A lovely story exploring a group of people who are all from different walks of life but all joined together through their mutual interest in art.

There are lovely sub-story lines between the characters and I enjoyed how each of the chapters focused on one of the leading characters, yet you were not leaving the others behind. It is clear that each person is on a journey, whilst most don’t even realise it.

Well written with humour and emotion. It is a lovely gentle read. This book will engage you and you’ll want to turn the pages to reach the very satisfying ending.

http://lougrahamiiblog.wordpress.com/2012/08/29/life-class-gilli-alan/

I am halfway through preparing my book, TORN, for publication as a paperback, with Create Space. As you may or may not know, I enjoy art and design. I created my last two covers (LIFE CLASS with the aid of my son, TOM) and so felt I would like to have a go at it again.

In creating a cover for the paperback version of TORN, I have gone back to first principles and re-thought the whole thing. Create Space offer various templates, but these are limiting. If, like me, you want to do your own thing, creating a cover from scratch is a complicated process. It is not enough to come up with an image - as I did for e-publishing TORN and LIFE CLASS. Using the art programme on the computer you have to precisely calculate your sizes - front as well as back cover - incorporating a margin for trim and an extra margin for bleed. You also have to incorporate the spine width, which is a variable size according the number of pages. All this was a fairly tall order for someone like me, who is desperately untechie and wasn't even allowed to sit her Maths GCE. Add all that to the fact I was running in and out of the sitting room to keep tabs on team GB's progress in the Olympics!

However, by Friday night I though I'd cracked it. I'd produced a draft piece of artwork with front and back cover joined together. All I needed to do was finesse the final images (see above) and repeat the process.

Since then I've suffered failure after failure. I have my front cover. I have my back cover and spine. But I cannot stitch the two together. I create a template. I import my image and the template immediately shrinks, leaving not enough space to fit the second part of the puzzle - the front cover. I guess this is a sizing issue, and somewhere along the line I have got a calculation badly wrong. But I have checked and re-checked over and over again.

There is absolutely no guarantee that once I have succeeded in creating a single piece of art work, that Create Space will accept it, but until I have something to upload I can't check.

I've posted the covers images I've created for any comments. At the moment I'm in need of a bit of good cheer. I feel like I've been wasting my time - even more so than usual, as I have actually been working hard and actually trying to achieve something.