I received the Amazon KDP Print Previews for my Dark Nebula Contact and Isolation books this past week. There was some back and forth with my designer because the original Photoshop file he sent me didn’t import cleanly into Affinity Publisher. The problem was, I didn’t notice it until after the first print preview arrived and only after I stared at it a while.

In my case, he had some shadow and gloss effects in the Photoshop file and since they weren’t flattened, Affinity Publisher couldn’t handle them. No warnings and no messages. The results were less than flattering typography. Here’s what the fonts looked like. The top image is from the bad cover and the bottom is from the good cover. See the difference?

So, lesson learned. Make sure you preview your books with a fine tooth comb and compare them to all the original assets you receive from your designer. You should tweak even the smallest issue until you’re happy.

Anyhow, a few back and forth emails and another KDP print submission for this and my novella and voila, these beauties were the result.

For those of you that care, yes, that’s my amazing little laptop that I write everything on now days. I started writing on my iPad, but after things got a bit too much I returned to writing on Tachyon, my MacBook.

If you’re interested in pre-ordering Dark Nebula: Isolation you can jump over to Amazon and order your eBook today. The price will only be $0.99 until a few days after its release. If you’re interested in print, that version will be available on December 4th alongside the eBook. You’ll also be able to order hand signed versions here on my website if you’re interested. More details on that as things get closer.

Update: I wanted to add a picture to show people what the wrap around for each book looked like (click the thumbnail for a larger image). You can see that the Contact book is actually a novella so it’s quite a bit smaller requiring some tweaks to the text on the spine. It has texture on the back but being so dark, this picture doesn’t do it justice. For the Isolation cover, I had the designer wrap Jupiter onto the spine and the back for effect. It turned out really nice. The back structure is similar with each book except for the blurb obviously. I put a black and white image of myself with a short bio and the logo for my little publishing house, WideAsleep Publishing.