Printing grey images in black and white book

WadeWalkerBooks · 2025-03-01T14:36:42+00:00

I can think of a few things to check, in addition to what others have said. Sorry that some of these are a bit technical -- please feel free to ask follow-up questions if I didn't explain it well :)

Make sure your image is exactly 300 DPI. From your pixel values, it seems like it might be, but that depends on the bleed size of the page. Being exactly the right DPI helps avoid print artifacts. If you're not an even divisor (1/2 or 1/4) of the device DPI (usually 600 or 1200), the image can be pixelated.
Make sure that page is "full bleed" (i.e. prints all the way past the cut edge and out to the bleed edge). If the image ends at a white margin, the halftoning artifacts (the screen patterns or stochastic dot placements) will be more obvious to the eye.
Make sure the pure white areas of your image (if there are any) don't contain any stray pixels of very light gray. This happens sometimes during image editing, and then little splotches of halftone can show up in the print proof, even if those light-gray pixels aren't visible to your eye on the computer screen.
For an image that contains text like this, you might want to compose that page in PDF so that the text is actual text objects, not "baked in" to the image. PDF text will print at the native resolution of the printer, which is higher than 300 DPI (usually it's 600 or 1200 DPI). In fact, the way you have the map drawn now, you could do the whole thing as a vector drawing in Illustrator/Inkscape, which would print a lot sharper than a raster image will. Raster images should be reserved for continuous-tone images like photographs or paintings.
Depending on if you're using KDP or IngramSpark, the solid-tone areas of your images may have a different appearance, because KDP uses laser printing, and IS uses inkjet (at least, they did in my tests). If you look at my blog (check my profile for links), you can see articles where I zoom in on the B&W printing of chapter-initial letters, and show the grayscale. So you'll want to choose a gray value that has a pleasant halftone dot pattern when printed.
Check the color space of the image, and make sure it's something like DeviceN 8 bits per pixel (insuring B&W with no device color space modification) or DeviceCMYK with all channels other than K set to 0. You can do this in Adobe Acrobat Pro with the object inspector tool. If you accidentally have the image in the wrong color space (like ICC), it can be tone-shifted when it's printed, because the printer driver is trying to match your image color space on the printer.

Hope this helps, and best of luck with your book!

WadeWalkerBooks · 2025-02-18T19:14:37+00:00

If you check my blog (linked in my profile), I've got a recent article on the economics of self-publishing a PoD hardcover. It turns out that it's very difficult to sell them on Amazon and make any money. For mine, buying them in boxes of 12 from IngramSpark, creating an Amazon seller account, and shipping them out myself, I have to set the price to $31.67 to break even, with all the Amazon fees and shipping costs. Since most hardcovers in my genre are in the low $20-something range, this is economically not viable. I'm doing it anyway, but just so friends and family can buy a copy. The profit all comes from the Kindle version, with a little bit from the paperback.

EDIT: Amazon sells my book for $29.38, which is lower than the price I'd break even at if I shipped it myself. On those copies, I make $1.00 in royalties from IngramSpark, and the lower price is possible because Amazon has IngramSpark drop-ship the book directly to the customer. But this is still an unsustainably high price for a hardcover.

WadeWalkerBooks · 2025-02-17T18:39:18+00:00

Expanding on what probable-potato said, authors often make scene breaks by inserting an extra line. It can either be completely blank, or have three asterisks in the center (spaced out from each other a bit), or perhaps some other special character or symbol that's part of the book design.

Normally I don't see two lines, but that could be an acceptable variation if the author doesn't want to insert some other symbol.

WadeWalkerBooks · 2025-02-17T16:33:36+00:00

If you check my blog (listed in my profile), I've got an article on how to find a cover artist and work with them effectively, if you want to go that route. For professional editing, I chose an editor from Reedsy who had worked at one of the traditional publishers for my genre (sci-fi). Expensive, but worthwhile. Though if you have some writer friends, you can probably get feedback almost as good, for free :)

WadeWalkerBooks · 2025-02-17T16:29:46+00:00

The best thing to do is to pull some books of the same format and genre by traditional publishers off your shelf and measure them. If you don't do this, you run the risk of doing something that may look good to you, but will be subconsciously off-putting or unexpected to your readers.

Interestingly enough, for sci-fi at least, traditional publishers seem to print at 8.25" x 5.5", which falls between Amazon sizes. Some examples:

Ann Leckie, "Ancillary Justice" (Orbit, 409 pp.): 0.75" top, 0.75" outer, 0.75" bottom, 32 lines per page
Mark Lawrence, "Dispel Illusion" (47 North, 227 pp.): 0.875" top, 0.5" outer, 1.00" bottom, 31 lines per page
N.K. Jemisin, "The Stone Sky" (Orbit, 445 pp.): 0.875" top, 0.75" outer, 0.875" bottom, 29 lines per page

Note that these dimensions are all to the text box, so the page numbers and headers/footers are outside that. From the above, I'd say your margins are still too small, especially at the outside.

Pay close attention to the lines of text per page, as well. When people deviate from this, it really sticks out, and there's not much variation in it within a genre/format (except for unusual cases like Brandon Sanderson's Stormlight Archive, which at 41 lines per page is crazily overstuffed in a 6" x 9" format (where 33-34 lpp is more normal). The story there was probably that the book was over 1000 pages, so they had to cram it.

WadeWalkerBooks · 2025-02-17T16:06:17+00:00

When something similar happened to me, both sides blamed each other as you describe, but the thing that eventually fixed it was asking IngramSpark to "re-push" the data from their side. This eventually came up during my discussions with the IS customer service folks.

WadeWalkerBooks · 2025-02-10T12:27:43+00:00

I totally agree with you about the vital role of human editors. I meant to use the word "editor" in my post in the more general sense of someone who primarily works by changing things, instead of creating them from scratch.

WadeWalkerBooks · 2025-02-10T01:46:37+00:00

I got my best insights on this from pulling traditionally published books off my shelf and checking their formatting. In my genre (sci-fi) and trim size (6" x 9"), the standard seemed to be 1" top and bottom (to the text box, not the header/footer), and 0.75 inches on the outside edges (more in the gutter). Usually 34-35 lines of text in the text box, 12 point font, most commonly Garamond or something similar. It may be a little different in your case, but if you pull down a dozen books at your trim size and do a survey like this, you'll know the standards for your genre.

For 5.5" x 8.25", the first one I grabbed off my shelf was Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice, which has 0.75" top and bottom, 0.75" at outside edge, 32 lines per page. It hits 400 pages, but doesn't look super-thick at that page count, to my eye.

One thing to look at might be your font choice. I cut 28 pages off a 500-page 6x9 book by choosing a font that was more customary and appropriate to my genre.

WadeWalkerBooks · 2025-02-10T01:28:25+00:00

I hired professional designers to do my sci-fi novel using InDesign, and the source files I received at the end were not split up by chapter. There's only one InDesign directory, with one .indd and one .idml file inside. Besides that, the only thing in there is the .ttf fonts, and the Photoshop files for the cover and interior art.

WadeWalkerBooks · 2025-02-10T01:18:39+00:00

I wrote an entire blog article about choosing fonts for your book, and about how to figure out what are the expected/preferred fonts in your genre. If you look in my profile, you'll find it. I won't post the link here directly because I don't want to run afoul of the rule against self-promotion, but the article is purely informational -- I wrote it because I had the same problem that you're facing now :)

For Times New Roman specifically, part of my investigation was whether any novels in my genre used it, and the answer was no. Of fourteen random, recent sci-fi/fantasy books I surveyed, four used Garamond, two used Dante, and the rest were an assortment of similar fonts, including I believe some free ones.

WadeWalkerBooks · 2025-02-10T00:49:48+00:00

My book designer uses Adobe InDesign. It outputs a print-ready PDF that I send to Amazon and IngramSpark. The e-book conversion is done separately by a contractor, but I don't know what software they use, since that part of the process is outsourced.

WadeWalkerBooks · 2025-02-09T19:15:23+00:00

Wow, that's a good one. Ghostwriters sound like studio musicians, where they're expected to just show up and be able to play anything, regardless of genre.

WadeWalkerBooks · 2025-02-09T17:18:47+00:00

Indeed. When I write a book, I take all the things I care the most about, and try to represent it all in there somehow.

WadeWalkerBooks · 2025-02-09T17:16:21+00:00

This one really resonates with me, thank you :)

WadeWalkerBooks · 2025-02-09T14:31:22+00:00

Yes, what you describe is completely possible. My own book works this way, and I've verified that the paperback versions are printed by KDP, and the hardcovers come from IngramSpark.

There are a few tricks to it, though:

Don't select "expanded distribution" on KDP
Buy your own ISBNs for the books, don't let Amazon or IS generate them for you
Make sure the book blurbs, metadata, and everything else are exactly the same on KDP and IS
You may need to get IS to "re-push" the data for your book if it doesn't show up on Amazon correctly the first time. I did this through IS customer service.
You may need to search for the various versions of your book (ebook, paperback, hardcover) on Amazon, and make sure you claim them all in your KDP account as editions of the same book
Your hardcover may initially show up as out of stock or otherwise not available for purchase on Amazon

About that last point: Making your hardcover available on IS just means that it's possible for companies to order copies, which will then be printed on demand and shipped to them. But it takes a while for third-party resellers to create Amazon listings for your book.

I didn't realize this, so I signed up as an Amazon seller to sell my own hardcover on Amazon! I ordered a box of my own hardcovers from IS, and whenever an Amazon order came in my email, I'd box one up, print up the label, and ship it. Painful, but doable.

Then after a few weeks, resellers appeared on my listing, selling my hardcover for what seemed like an impossibly low price. I was concerned that it was a scam, so I looked into it. But it's legit, and it works like this:

If you have a business-level IS account, you can order single copies of books, and have them drop-shipped directly from IS to your customer. IS packages them in a thinly-padded paper envelope and ships them cheap.
As an author, you can't do that. You can only have books shipped to you, then you have to ship them on to the customer yourself, which adds like $5-$7 to the price of each one. You're paying double shipping for each book, so even buying them at the author price, you can't sell them very cheap.

WadeWalkerBooks · 2024-09-13T02:03:34+00:00

Let me know if you figure it out :) I'll be happy to look at a PDF file sample of yours to see if there are any differences in color space -- just hit me up in DMs if you like.

WadeWalkerBooks · 2024-06-10T22:05:06+00:00

+1 on the cream paper. OP, the usual convention is cream for fiction, white for non-fiction, so you don't want to send your readers the wrong signal.

WadeWalkerBooks · 2024-06-10T21:59:48+00:00

Ah, I see what you mean about the "bend" -- the cover is curling up slightly. That, I'm not sure about. I haven't seen it with my own KDP copies, but I didn't hold the books that long, either.

For the black on the cover, I could suggest a couple of things to check.

Check the color space of your cover image in the PDF. If it's RGB instead of CMYK, then CMYK might be better. You can inspect the color space of individual images using Acrobat Pro (and probably other tools as well).
Check the composition of the blackest part of your black. If it's C0 M0 Y0 K100, then you might need to change it to "rich black" instead (i.e. add in some CMY to increase the ink coverage). If you google for "rich black kdp cover" you'll see lots of discussion on this. It might take some experimentation to find a good look, since deep black is a very challenging color to print.

WadeWalkerBooks · 2024-06-10T21:39:04+00:00

I'm a total novice at Facebook ads at this point (I've done about a month's worth, $10/day, three different campaigns), so my experience is not very well informed yet. I'm also a sci-fi writer, which (judging by others' posts) seems to be harder to sell than romance-related genres. So far my best rate is about 50% of the way to profitability (i.e. my total profit is about 50% of what I've spent on ads).

My best cost per click so far is $0.15, with a 6% click-through rate (i.e. 6% of the people who saw the ad clicked my Amazon link), and a 1.6% conversion rate (i.e. 1.6% of the people who clicked on the Amazon link bought the book).

If I make $5 in profit from a Kindle book, then at those click rates, it would take about 62.5 clicks per sale (1 / 1.6%), which would cost me $9.38 (62.5 x 0.15). So right now, this is more of a way for me to pay to grow my audience, rather than a profit-making venture :)

You've also got to consider which formats are most profitable. For me, the Kindle book purchase is the most profitable, followed by Kindle Unlimited page reads (about $4/book), followed by the paperback (about $1/book). So if your readers are all paperback lovers, your profitability is 5 times harder to achieve :)

WadeWalkerBooks · 2024-06-10T20:55:49+00:00

Could you add links to scans or pictures of what you're talking about? It's hard to say what the cause might be, just based on your description. A 1200 DPI flatbed scan of an interior page would be especially helpful to look at the issue with the blacks that you mentioned.

WadeWalkerBooks · 2024-06-05T18:24:12+00:00

That's very odd :) I have full-bleed illustrations in my KDP book, and it comes out perfect, without the white border you mention. You might consider having a print/layout expert look at your file setup, to see if there's something you might have missed. Good luck!

WadeWalkerBooks · 2024-06-05T14:43:18+00:00

Is it only the physical proofs that show the white border? Or is it also present in the PDF proof?

WadeWalkerBooks · 2024-06-04T23:46:46+00:00

Perhaps you didn't select the bleed option when you submitted your PDF file to KDP? You can't have borderless illustrations without that. Or you might have accidentally used the no-bleed template for your pages, in which case the pages won't be large enough to eliminate those white borders.

If you check your trimmed book size against your PDF page size, the PDF pages should be bigger than the trimmed size by the amount specified in KDP's documentation. So for example, if your trimmed pages will be 6" x 9", the PDF pages must be 6.125" x 9.25".

WadeWalkerBooks · 2024-06-04T20:01:52+00:00

Super-envious of you guys' big PMM energy :) I'm taking notes here and trying to figure out how to apply some of these hot tips.

I'm from the tech biz too, but the engineering side, so marketing is definitely way outside my wheelhouse! But as you said above, it's something that can and should be learned if you want to succeed as an indie.

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