It’s finally here!
…And I finally got the print quality to as good as it can be.
 
 

FK1cover

This is the NEW cover of "Fabled Kingdom" book 1. It's 212 pages of black and white, and has chapters 1-7 (of 21 in total). It's 6"x9", and can be purchased in the Store section. There is an older version of this cover floating around out there, but that's no longer available.

FK1back

This is the back cover. The spine is about the width of my forefinger.

FK1book1

From chapter 2, near the end where Celsia escapes from Salinger with Quillon and her grandmother.

FK1book2

In chapter 3, we come across a faun and a mysterious plaque while travelling the Silver Path.

FK1book3

Out of the woods at the beginning of Chapter 5! Cheers to everyone!

FK1book4

In Chapter 6, we discover an impenetrable black wall of... something.

FK1book5

Further along in Chapter 6, an ancient city is discovered.

FK1close1

A close-up showing the black and white line quality of the printing. Breaking through the mysterious wall in Chapter 6.

FK1close2

Another close-up showing the printing quality. From Chapter 3, after they have escaped Salinger by sacrificing Celsia's grandmother.

FK1close3

Another close-up showing the print quality, this time of the wolf in Chapter 1, which Celsia encounters. It looks beautiful.

FK1close4

Last close-up showing the black and white line quality of the printing. Stumbling across a mysterious castle in Chapter 6!

Previous

More on the Printing Process

I didn’t expect so many problems with the printing, but in retrospect, I can see where the problems came in. I used Lulu and Amazon to do my printing, and both turned out very good once I got the settings right. The interiors are high quality black and white art, which are identical in both books. Below, I talk about what went wrong with both printers.

Lulu:

I’ve been printing with Lulu for years, and I messed this one up by accidently choosing the wrong paper settings. Lulu has changes its interface every now and then without telling you, and I accidently clicked the “white” paper setting for the 6″x9″ size without realising that there is NO good quality white paper setting for that size. The end result is that I got an inferior paper quality, which shocked me. In the end, I changed it to a cream colour page, which is high quality and is what differs the Lulu book from the Amazon book.

Amazon Createspace:

Oh boy. It’s my first time printing with Createspace, and it took a while to get right. I think CS has the best print quality out of all the printers out there, but the entire process is a black box. The best thing about CS is that human beings actually handle the printing process, but that’s also the biggest problem. The human handling your files can tweak your files without you knowing what they did, so the end results can mean that your colour cover could look different from one test print to the next. The good news is that once it’s been approved, the settings stay the same, so your next book will look EXACTLY as the previous one, right down to where they cut the paper (usually a few mm off… eh, can’t be helped. Lulu has the same problem).

Anyway, the mistake I made is a very important one. I can sum it up as: NEVER SUBMIT GREYSCALE FILES TO CREATESPACE. It seems that if you submit 600 dpi greyscale files to CS, they will automatically downgrade it to 300 dpi without telling you. In the end, I got around this problem by turning my greyscale files into black-and-white dot art through the photoshop “halftone” function. At least no one can do anything to black and white files, so that’s why the Lulu and Amazon books look identical in its print results.

The other good thing about CS is its Kindle Matchbook Program. Right now, if you buy a print copy of book 1, you can get the ebook version for 99 cents. An excellent thing.