The promotional postcards for Catscapades have arrived. They are beautiful. The magnets with the cover photo on them have arrived. But there is a problem with the book file. We have worked with this printer several times before, but never on a book with color photos. Catscapades, True Cat Tales has 46 color photos of cats and kittens. And there seem to be problems with the way the files we sent the printer were set up.
I don’t do the page layout for my books and I don’t work in PageMaker or any other design program. Thus, I don’t understand the various programs that different printers use for receiving book files. But I guess the folks at the printing company forgot to tell us to turn off some of the options in the particular program they use to accept book files and our photos were coming out fuzzy. The resolution was way low. They’ve sent us back to the drawing board twice so far with different instructions for fixing the problem. Hopefully, we have it right now. We’ve never had this happen with this printer, but we’ve never using color photos in a book before. So I guess it is a little different process in the transfer of the files.
It’s making me nervous, I can tell you. But I’m always nervous about what might happen while a book is at the printer and how it will come out.
I’ve been disappointed only once. And that was when a group of employees at my printing company of choice, including the people I’d been working with, broke off from the main company, bought some inferior machines and started their own company. (This was not the company I am currently working with.) This project was a 360-page local history filled with black and white photos.
About the time I expected shipment of the books, they contacted me to say that the first printing of the book was a failure as all of the photos turned out black. When I received the 3,000 books, I was not happy with the quality of the photos, still. They were flat and dull with little depth. Disappointing. Not only that, as I pulled books from the boxes to deliver and ship, I began to notice defects—creases on the covers, pages cut ragged, corners of pages turned under, etc. We decided to do what every author/publisher should do upon receiving a shipment of books—we went through every box of books and checked every book.
Well over half of the books had major or minor flaws. I called the company head. He ended up coming out here from Kansas (or wherever it was) to look at the books and to discuss compensation.
I ended up getting money back for the books that we agreed were a total loss—books that actually had to be trashed. And I got a slight discount on books that were slightly damaged—books that I would donate. I still had additional books that were not perfect, but that could be sold at a reduced price. And the issue of the awful print job on the photos was pushed under the rug. The representative (actually the owner of the company) would not acknowledge that there was anything wrong with them.
Not only that, but two boxes of these books were damaged beyond recognition when a forklift ran through them. So the trucking company paid for that loss.
I guess anyone who produces any number of titles is going to have a nightmare experience with a printer at some point. And I hope that ours is in our past. Cross fingers for us, would you, with regard to Catscapades, True Cat Tales.
And be sure to order your copy at the prepublication price now. http://www.matilijapress.com/catscapades.html.
The cover girl on this book is Lily. She was born in an abandoned Volkswagen and raised with 14 other kittens in the attic of an old home. The three mother cats were wild. No one could touch them. And no one spent any time with the kittens. So how did Lily turn out to be such an affectionate, friendly “greeter” cat? We can only guess. Read her story and about 40 others in this delightful book of stories. As an aside–we considered Lily a rescue because how in the world were those people going to find homes for 15 kittens. Turns out the kittens were gone–had all gone to homes–in one day! How? In two words, Craig’s List.