Saturday 22 February 2014

Gradually updating our covers

Here at Manifold Press we like to try to stay on the move, to keep working on the quality of our product. When we started out, for example, there was no agreed standard cover format for e-books, and so – as with so many other things – we originally went our own way. Now, however, Amazon have introduced a standard higher-definition format, which we're using as the excuse for going back to the beginning and re-making all our covers with a new font and a slightly altered logo; these will gradually be rolled out on all platforms and across all formats, starting on 1 March.

On the whole, we've been very lucky indeed and have managed to acquire better versions of almost all our original cover images. In two cases, however, that hasn't been possible because the pictures we wanted to use just weren't available in the right size; the covers for Chris Quinton's FOOL'S ERRAND and Julie Bozza's THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW OF DEATH have therefore been recreated – to the best of our ability - from very similar images.

There has been a knock-on effect of changing the cover dimensions, however; it meant that it was necessary to change the dimensions of the pages as well. Without wanting to get too technical, we had been using an 11 x 18 cm page which is not quite the same aspect ratio as the new covers; therefore we've taken this opportunity to move to a 14 x 21 cm page instead, and also to go to a slightly larger text font. Clearly this only affects those readers who prefer to buy the .pdf versions of our books; the .epub and .mobi versions will still have new covers, but the text itself will be unaffected by the other changes.

However you may notice that the page-counts for each book given on our website and on our partner websites will alter slightly when the new covers go up, since these are taken from the .pdf versions. Obviously the actual difference will vary from title to title, but on average the page-count will now be around 7% fewer than before. We'd like to reassure everybody that there's nothing missing from the new versions of any of our books – all the text is still there, but now it's just a bit better organised than it was previously. We don't imagine anyone will mind too much about all this, but we like to make sure we keep everybody informed whenever we make a significant change to the way we do things.

4 comments:

  1. Looks good to me - and I'll be part of it all soon! (runs off to pre-pre-antepenultimate chapter again... )

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  2. No worries! All I can say is that your .mobi is always very 'clean' (can't say it's always the case with some others ....!)
    I've always loved your covers and always will, you've set 'your very own' high standard with very classy covers from the very begining! In other words, it's like a trademark, in my opinion. *^_^*

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    1. Thank you - classy and individual is definitely what we were going for, but we did receive some adverse comment in the early days. Glad we've put all that behind us now, though, and more people 'get' what we're trying to do.

      Also very pleased to know that you think our .mobi files are of decent quality - that's always been our intention, but unless we get feedback like yours we don't always know whether we're doing the right thing or not!

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