I've approved the proof for The Wormton Lamb

I had a pleasant surprise on Friday when I return from work. The proof for The Wormton Lamb had arrived. Here is, resplendent in its new cover design. I've been checking it through over the weekend and on Sunday night was delighted to be able to send Lightning Source a message accepting this proof.

I had a couple of e-mails from Lightning Source today confirming the dispatch of two separate orders of copies of The Wormton Lamb. A carton of 20 will soon be arriving at my door as well as a solitary copy but I must ordered for some reason months ago. It serves to remind me how long this process has taken and what a milestone I have reached.

All I have to do is publicise it so -- tell your friends!

Corrupted file at Lightning Source

Last night, I checked into the customer area on the Lightning Source website to check the status of my uploaded files for The Horsepower Whisperer and The Wormton Lamb. The proof was ready for The Wormton Lamb but today I had a message from my customer rep to tell me that the text file for The Horsepower Whisperer was corrupted on pages 5 and 6. These pages are the ones that feature the maps at the beginning of my books. They consist of layered drawings and if any part of the pdf was likely to become corrupt this was it. However, all my files at home look okay so I can only assume that the CD that went to Lightning Source in the states was damaged in some way.

I would've uploaded a new file for The Horsepower Whisperer and ordered a proof for The Wormton Lamb tonight but the Lightning Source website is being maintained at the moment.

I regenerated a text file pdf for The Horsepower Whisperer just to make sure there were no problems but notice something odd in the process. Each text block must be divisible by four. It's something to do with Lightning Source's printing processes. Checking my new pdf for The Horsepower Whisperer in Adobe Reader for my text block file came to 423 pages whereas before it was 424

To cut a long story short, I noticed that the Open Office Writer file featured a jump in page numbers close to the end of the block. It seemed to be related to a changing header format. Deleting any page breaks removed the jump in page numbers but also caused the header format to flow from the text right to the end of the document where I really wanted completely blank pages without any header or footer.

In the end, I got around this problem by adding a new page to the Open Office Writer file. When I exported this, the resulting pdf had the correct page count.

I have an open mind about what causes this. The Open Office Writer software that I am now using is a later version than the ones I used to generate my original textblock files. I believe this is causing formatting changes and I'm optimistic that if I was generating a textblock from scratch again, then none of these problems would arise. It does show, though, that generating the pdf for uploading onto Lightning Source's system is the trickiest interface of all between what I'm doing and what the printer needs.

Tomorrow, when the Lightning Source site is available again after maintenance, I'll have another go at uploading my text block. This didn't work before because I was uploading a revised text block as well as the new cover file. With just the text block to upload, there shouldn't be any problems with file size.

Needless to say, both for cover files that Becky produced have been accepted without any problems.

Excitement mounts

As you can probably imagine, I am very excited by the prospect of seeing my new covers in real life.

Lightning Source got back to me today to confirm my instructions. They just wanted to check that I really wanted to revise the files for The Horsepower Whisperer. Those for The Wormton Lamb we obviously a resubmission but as The Horsepower Whisperer was already in production they wanted to make sure that I wanted to revise it before they leapt into action.

I'm glad they did this. I find there's never any harm in checking and I can only assume that they have found this out as well.

Now that they have my confirmation, I can already see from my customer account area on their website that The Wormton Lamb as its new cover and a proof copy is already available for ordering. The Horsepower Whisperer, which has new files that both the text block and the front cover, is still in pre-media.

The immediate timetable works out something like this. I should be able to order proofs of the revised books early next week so might have received them by next weekend. Assuming that they come up to standard -- and I'm really hope they do after all the hard work that is being put into them -- I will then approve the new proofs. New copies of The Horsepower Whisperer will then be available immediately. The Wormton Lamb is due for release at Easter but before then I need to order a batch of books for pre-release publicity purposes. I will also need to do a few fiddly things like upload new cover images on Amazon.

The mystery of the IO message solved

The files for my revised nook covers would not load via the Lightning Source site becasue they were too big. They feature more layers than before so this must have increased the file size.

The solution was simple enough. All I had to was send a CD to my customer rep and she's forwarded them to the states. I can now log into my customer account area on the Lightning Source website and track their progress. In a few days I should be able to confirm that the files have been accepted and will order proof copies of both titles.

Uploading the new cover for The Wormton Lamb

I've had a few problems with uploading the new cover for The Wormton Lamb. First of all I couldn't log into the Lightning Source website. It seems MacAfee didn't recognise it as a secure site and I had to create an exception report to gain entry into the customer area with my log in name and password. As I'd used the Lightning Source site before when uploading files for both The Horsepower Whisperer and The Wormton Lamb so had no qualms about this.

When it came to uploading the pdf file for the new cover, the process was interrupted three times. Each repeat attempt completed less of the process, I started at 17% and ended up at 2%. A pop up box gave the following message.

"An error has occurred processing your upload: An IO error occurred. Please try again or contact technical support for assistance."

So, I'll have to do that tomorrow. This is the first time I've tried uploading a new file with my new computer.

The last time I uploaded a revision I got charged twice but my customer rep sorted that out. I hope I don't get charged twice again.