On This Day in Family History - July 3

 

The third book in the Cloud of Witnesses series is available now on Amazon, in Kindle and paperback versions. There will be one more book in this series, which will focus on the Burford/Gibson branch of the family tree. That genealogy goes back a long way, so it might be a little while before that book gets finished. (Full disclosure -- I'm getting kind of burned out on this particular series of books. After the last one is finished I'm hoping to actually WRITE another book, which may or may not have pictures in it. Stay tuned...)

This is the paperback cover (the one above is the Kindle version cover). The reason they are different is that the process for making a cover for a paperback book is WAY different. The Kindle version will accept just about any photograph for the cover of a digital book. But the Kindle Direct Publishing website is very picky about what photographs can be used for the cover of a paperback book. It has to be 300 dpi (dots per inch) -- which is very high resolution. And for some reason I end up having to use a different method each time to get a picture that they will accept. This time I actually scanned a couple of pictures at what my scanner called 600 dpi, and even 1200 dpi. (They didn't turn out too good, because the originals were not really able to translate to that high definition.) Even so -- when I tried to apply them to the book cover, the KDP website told me the pictures were less than 300 dpi !! One suggestion they make is to scale down the picture (which I guess must increase the resolution). So for this one, I ended up scaling down a picture -- which was 8 x 10 inches in the original hard copy that I scanned -- to basically snapshot-sized before they would accept it as fit for the book cover. So I'm really not happy with the way this one looks, but I worked all day trying to find a way to use a bigger picture, like I have done on the other books -- to no avail. Oh, well. I always recommend that you get the Kindle version anyway, because the pictures are in color (they're black and white in the paperback) and you can enlarge and screenshot them on your Kindle device. (You can get the Kindle app for your phone or computer -- you don't even have to buy the actual Kindle device.)