Cover preview issues - Draft2Digital

Al X. · Jul 30, 2017

As the title suggests, I seem to be having some cover preview issues with some of the sites reached by D2D. The cover and Word manuscripts, both Kindle compliant, have been uploaded to D2D, and look fine in the generated MOBI and EPUB previews, but the cover looks wonky as viewed on a PC from Barnes & Noble and Kobo, and a couple others, as it scrolls across two pages. Scribd looks normal. Rescaling the window to minimum width seems to fix the issue in a couple cases.

D2D support suggested to rescale the images to a smaller size (one would think rescaling would be automatic) but it didn't seem to fix the issue, and this is after several days.

Anyone have insight in to the problem? Or is this a standard issue? A cross check of other books reveals normal looking covers.

WriterBN · Jul 31, 2017

I don't use Word for e-books, but I've heard it can do odd things with inserted images.

In HTML, I insert the cover image within a SVG wrapper (actually, Sigil does this automatically). The width and height of the image are specified in pixels, but the wrapper is set to width=100%.

What was the size (in pixels) of the image that you inserted in Word?

Al X. · Jul 31, 2017

Just to be clear, I'm talking about the cover, not an inserted image, which is uploaded separately similar to the KDP and Smashwords process. It is a jpeg, 3900x6255, Kindle compliant.

WriterBN · Aug 1, 2017

For uploading to D2D or anywhere except KDP, you need an internal cover file. It's easy to do this in an ePub file, which is what I submit. I assume Word would be similar, but I've never tried it.

At any rate, that's a pretty large file. I routinely use 1800 x 2700 pixels, and haven't had any issues.

Al X. · Aug 1, 2017

No, when you upload to KDP, D2D or Smashwords using Word, you submit the cover separately. I suppose I could look in to getting an EPUB editor and doing it that way. I've never done it before.

Filigree · Aug 4, 2017

When I was looking at D2D a few years ago, they recommended a cover art image of 2400x1600 pixels. If I'm going to self-pub through them, should I use 2700x1800? Resizing isn't a problem.

Al X. · Aug 4, 2017

Filigree said:
When I was looking at D2D a few years ago, they recommended a cover art image of 2400x1600 pixels. If I'm going to self-pub through them, should I use 2700x1800? Resizing isn't a problem.

I'm still trying to get a handle on this issue. My latest is a very small resize, well under 2400x1600 and so far I'm seeing the same issues on a couple sites, but it could be that the preview image hadn't updated yet.

Al X. · Nov 8, 2017

As an update, I'm still a little bit unsure about how the covers working with D2D, but there are some other formatting issues that are confounding. I'm starting to lean more towards Smashwords as an outlet. Despite their inability to parse a Word TOC, the end product seems to look a little better. I put a couple books on Smashwords in 2015, but pulled them so I could go Select with Amazon. I just put a couple newer ones on Smashwords, and decided that the whole TOC generation process isn't all that bad, and the Kindle compliant Word file works as-is otherwise. With D2D, I had to reformat all my books to replace to add an extra carriage return to every section break.

Cover preview issues - Draft2Digital

Mildly Disturbing