frustration

I tried once yesterday evening, and again today a bit before 4 p.m., but in both cases I failed to get any help from the local printing center re: the printing of my book in dead-tree form. Why? Because yesterday and this afternoon, the place was closed. No sign up displaying a reason why. Just closed. For New Year's, maybe? I don't know. All I know is I'm feeling a bit frustrated. Meanwhile, I keep trying to upload my book data (ms + cover design) on the Kindle site to make print-on-demand books available to my adoring public (of currently 2 people), but some Kindle staffer keeps rejecting my cover art while providing weirdly obscure reasons as to why: "Reduce the size of your spine text in your cover file. Spine text needs at least 0.0625" (1.6 mm) space on either side so that it doesn't wrap onto the front or back cover." This doesn't seem to tell me how wide the spine is actually supposed to be. Anyway, I took my best guess and have uploaded the design a third time. Maybe the third time'll be a charm.

For self-publishers, there are actually online spine-width calculators. You enter the thickness of the paper involved and say what number of pages the book is, and that's enough to give you a spine width. I went with standard 20-pound copy paper, 88 pages' worth, and came back with 0.157 inches, or 4 mm. To be sure, I made the entire spine no more than 3 mm wide, and the text on the spine is now maybe 2.5 mm wide, so it's barely even there. If I'm rejected again, I might just black out the spine entirely since all the info on it is somewhere else on the book. Meantime, I'm waiting for either that third rejection or a thumbs-up from Kindle, meaning my dead-tree POD book will be on display soon.

More on this when I have some.