If you want to publish print on demand books, there are few options. The most widely used is Createspace, a company which is now owned by Amazon.com. Createspace is great; I’ve been using it for years and years without complaint. Recently though, things have changed.
For a while, it seemed like a crapshoot whether a cover would be accepted or if it would be kicked back for edits. The process isn’t instantaneous, it requires about a day’s wait between when you upload the cover and when you find out if it “meets the specifications.” The trouble was that I could make no changes to a rejected cover, and frequently, it would be approved by someone else.
They have templates, and I figured that as long as I was using it, I should be fine. I redesigned all my covers to put an outline around the painted letters, and I reuploaded the files. This time, they were repeatedly rejected, and I was about to lose it, but then I realized I made a mistake.
I was using the wrong, or an outdated template. Big news to everyone: white paper and creme paper have different thicknesses, and that difference creates a different spine width, which creates a different overall cover size. When I figured out that I had either downloaded the wrong cover templates (which I will say had been accepted for printing in the past), or the paper Createspace has changed and new templates were published.
In any case, the great Covergate 2018 is over, all my books have the tweaked cover, and from now until forever, I’ll double check that I’m using the most recent cover template possible.
Whew.