Creating a book-cover file

[wtb32141]

I have written several books. I had Michigan’s Sheridan Books print and bind into a hardback book the first book I wrote. I paid a lady a little over $1,000 to design the cover. I now have another book that I want to get printed and bound. I want to design the cover myself. Every book cover consists of 3 parts: (1) the front cover, (2) the back cover, and (3) the text that goes on the spine. I have finished designing the front cover. I now must design parts 2 and 3, and then assemble the parts into 1 file. The spine is the hard part for (1) it’s narrow (¾ of an inch) and (2) the text runs vertically. All 3 parts must be in 1 document.

The book’s size is 8.5 inches by 11 inches. The spine is ¾ of an inch wide. So the document’s size must be 17.75 inches by 11 inches.

My plan is as follows: Do the spine first by (1) typing the text horizontally and then (2) rotating that text 90 degrees clockwise. Then do the front cover. And last add the back-cover items (text and barcode).

I’m using LibreOffice Draw to do the cover, and I’m a novice with Draw.

Perhaps one of you is a graphic designer. If so, then please offer any suggestions that may ease my pain and frustration in completing this task.

[woodsmoke]

Hi

Welcome to the distro and forums that are better than toast and jam!

You ask an interesting question and I will attempt to provide an answer.

Firstly...

I am a published author who has had books published by others and also have self published.

i started out "old school" with literally type setting and then producing the text that was then typeset by the printer.

I then went full bore computer with a Commodore 64 using the GEOS operating system and printed the originals on a generic laser pinter and then literally did paste up and "adjusting the gutter" on each successive sheet for the "four up" with the before hand carrying the sheets to the printer who then photo - offset them and printed them.

I have also just "sent the text" and the book company did everything. These were science books not novels.

The last big gig was complete self publishing and selling the .pdfs within a kind of "wholesale / distributor" operation which did not produce much money at all because science books were not what most people were wanting.

I'm now finishing a book that I will sell through Amazon.

And, I'm also producing a "dystopian future" novel which I will completely self publish, a few chapters of which and they are VERY first draft are in my "blog" here. NOBODY looks at the blogs but thought I'd mention it. lol

I'm not bragging... the above is to REASSURE YOU ... to let you know that I know exactly what you want to do.

Secondly:

From your post: You evidently know "what" you want to do and kind of "how" to do what you want and you just need the name of an appropriate app.

Quite simply, I don't think that Draw is all that easy to use and it is not really designed for what you want to do, it being a kind of generalized app.

There are two applications for your specific need and they are Scribus and GIMP.

a) the best option is the actual desktop publisher for Linux / Ubuntu which is Scribus which comes with templates!

AND...FROM YOUR QUESTION...I think that you will take to it very quickly kind of like a TUX penguin to water!

b) another is the very powerful graphics program GIMP but it will require more "ground work" whereas Scribus has templates!

Scribus

I will not go into details because you should use what little I post to 'fiddle" with it and determine if it will fill your needs and then you can get back as to yay or nay.

How to get Scribus AND templates

Scribus is in the repos. ... make sure that you install EVERYTHING that might be even remotely associated with Scribus, but most importantly the templates.

a simple description , kind of a hurry up, of what you want to do

Open Scribus / it will pop a menu window named "new document" / click the tab "new from template" / within that select "brochure" /

i see: " 3 folds wave style" , br2 , Brochure 1 and covers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

I would "recommend" clicking "br2" so click it.

You will see a sheet that has three panels, a left a middle and a right.

You should be able to resize the panels so that the middle is the spine and the others are the front and back.

Scribus allows rotation of text so doing that for the spine is no biggie.

You then need merely to enter the text where you need it and insert the artwork.

AS AN EXAMPLE when you open the file the center box has a smaller box that says "welcome back next year."

Right click and select sample text and english and an "ipsum lorem" with appear.

You could repace the text, and format the text. Do that by right clicking the text and click the edit text box and a big interactive box with the text in it will appear which has all of the normal text editing features.

I would NOT resize THE TEXT here but wait until you have rotated and adjusted and placed the box on the spine.

Notice again that if you right click there is a box that is ticked blue that says locked. Click the box to "unblue" it.

Right click again and click the properties atttibute at the bottom and a box will pop that shows the properties of the box.

Find the "rotation" box and cliick the "arrow" to start rotation. Depending on where the INTERACTIVE box is you will see the TEXT box rotate in real time around the top left corner as a pivot point to the left so that the first word in a sentence is down and the top of the word is to the left.

Go to the Y position and click the "UP" arrow and the text box will move downward in real time.

Go to the X position and click the appropriate arrow to move the text box left or right.

You can then use the corners of the text box to drag it to whatever size you want

A little back and forth "fiddling" should get things done pretty quickly.

I would NOW resize the ACTUAL text so that everything looks right.

ANOTHER OPTION...if you are going to be doing a lot of stuff consider doing the original text in a word processor and append the text.

You do not know this being new to the app but Scribus really has come a VERY long way...depending on what one may do in the future, if you take a look at file and export there is EPS which you probably know is Encapsulated Post Script.

If one looks it up at Wikipedia one will see that Scribus and Gimp both export to it and it may be in the future when you are churning out a book a week and have suprpassed Stephen King that your publisher might want EPS.

EPs at Wikipedia

Here is the wikipedia for Scribus

Here is Wikipedia for Scribus

Here is a MUCH MORE DETAILED version of what I said above for just making a single page but it gets into color variations, etc.

Detailed version of above for a single page including background, text and an image

The easy way to find all of the different directions is to just do a Duck Duck Go or Google search with "Scribus handbook" and you will see a lot of sets of instructions.

Just sayin' that Scribus can do a lot and do it very easily when one gets into the swing of how it does things.

GIMP

Another way to do it would to make a file "from scratch" using GIMP.

GIMP has some templates in file / new / choose templates but there is nothing like what you want.

You would need to make the original file the size of what you need to cover the whole book,
then create a new layer to match that
and then make three "boxes" the first of which is the front cover and place it on that layer
SOME FOLKS would just work with that one layer and make a box for the spine and then the back cover and then place them.
But, others would make a new layer for each box the front, the spine and the back
That would be up to you.
There is also an "addon" for GIMP which makes it look somewhat like Photoshop if you have already worked with Photoshop
However, if not then no biggie but learning GIMPs idiosyncracies is no harder than learning the same for any other app.

Calibre and Sigil

Calibre is an application for ARRANGING, STORING, etc. and also SOMEWHAT producing E-BOOKS...

SIGIL is an app to produce e-books...

these are not within the purview of this discussion but I just thought that i would mention them.

SIGIL

Calibre

My recommendation?

To put it quite simply, the really hard part about this is 'fiddling" with getting the text placed exactly how you want it and to LOOK how you want.

However, I do not know what you want to do with the "rest of the sheet" below the text and the image. For that I would look at the information in the link for producing a "single page" because it has all of that.

Scribus and the br2 template seems to be what you want. It will just take some fiddling.

BUT...when you have the first one you also have the next one with simple replacement of text and images.

Again, if you have any questions, please come back to ask and if we get into a regular discussion i will do something that I have actually NEVER DONE...lol... I will learn how to 'watch this topic" so that I can answer more promptly.

OTHERS READING THIS if you have ANY advice at all that may add to or CONTRADICT what I have posted, please so post since, after all I am just a hardware kinda guy.

woodlikesthatyouaredoingthissmoke