CreateSpace is a free self-publishing print-on-demand service/platform. It’s also Amazon owned so the experience of making your book(s) available for sale worldwide through Amazon is effortless if you use it.
If you haven’t heard about CreateSpace, you can find out more here. Needless to say, being able to self-publish graphic novels, making the printed versions available worldwide is a game-changer for indie creators!
Having said all that, while it is a godsend for indie publishers, it does come with a learning curve as there’s not many guides to cover publishing of graphic novels.
But fear not, I’ll be writing articles covering everything I’ve learned about the subject in a series of posts! Starting with this one.
This part is about deciding on the print dimensions and preparing templates for artwork. This is important as you don’t want to get too far down the line of creating your artwork and finishing your lettering only to discover that you’ve used the wrong dimensions — I’ve made this mistake, and it’s painful...
Warning! If you decide to use this as a process, please bare in mind that everything I do is work in progress. These guidelines and templates are a good starting point, but test everything out yourself to make sure it works for you.
Artwork templates
Okay, let’s get straight into this.
A US comic book is 6.625 inches wide by 10.25 inches high. The closest equivalent size in CreateSpace is 7 inches by 10 inches.
When writing graphic novels, you could actually use any size you want, but I like sticking to standards where I can unless there’s a good reason not to.
Anyway, 7 inches by 10 inches seems close enough to the traditional size. But since graphic novels tend to have images bleeding to the edge of the page, we really need to make sure we’re clear what size we’re working to so that the artwork has enough bleed to fit and that we don’t lose too much artwork when the pages get trimmed.
In my case, it was important to find the right balance between the two formats so I could easily switch between the two without much pain.
My template
I’ve arrived at my template after much trial and error. It’s tailored to fit my production method which is based on scripts which run and “publish” my pages ready for printing. This is so I don’t need to use programs like InDesign at all in my process. I’ll go over this process in a later post.
You can, of course, still use this template even if you’re not running automated scripts like myself.
My first assumption with this template is that all my projects will have images bleeding to the edge of the page. In reality, many books that I’ve published don’t need to go to the edges, but I find it easier to work on this assumption as it helps me create those aforementioned automation scripts. It also keeps things nice and easy for my production process.
As mentioned previously (but I wanted reiterate it here): the template I use is a mash up of both aforementioned sizes. So while I publish in CreateSpace now, I could in future decide to publish in the more “traditional” US format without much hassle.
Anyway, below is the template I’ve started using for all my artwork. This is the template I send to all artists I work with, so there are no “surprises” when I get pages back for the production process.
Don’t worry if you’re lost, I’ll walk you through it from the centre out:
Live area
All panel borders, important artwork and lettering will go inside the live area. Any artwork outside this area, i.e. in the bleed, could get cropped in the final print. If you visit the CreateSpace page on the subject, you’ll see a guide to what the live area should be depending on the number of pages that your book has.
I usually have page counts up to 200 pages, and I found the live region in my template to be fine for my purposes.
Bleed
As mentioned above, artwork in this area could be subject to cropping and the actual trim size of the comic will be somewhere within this region. The blue boundary is the closest approximation of the CreateSpace trim size.
Don’t be fooled into thinking that the final book trim from CreateSpace will be consistent from book to book. Pages “slip” as they zoom through the printers. This means there is often a big difference in what ends up as the final page from book to book and page to page. So to reiterate this again, the crop would be somewhere in the bleed area but the blue borders is a very rough approximation.
If you include the thick blue lines at the top and bottom of the page as the bleed, you’ll get the US comic size so. As we’re interested in CreateSpace publishing, these two blue borders will be the first casualty as we‘ll be cropping those before sending the final PDF to the printing press.
Note: An artist should apply artwork over the entire page (yes, that includes over the blue bands at the top and bottom of the page). It’s good to keep yourself open to the US format should you choose it later.
How to use this template?
If you do decide to use this template, you should download or copy the image directly from the browser, open up in Photoshop and resize it. You also need to bump up the resolution to 300dpi.
Here are the image size settings I use (In Photoshop: Image > Image Size):
Notice that I’ve oversized the image. It’s a good idea to do your artwork on an oversized canvas to retain as much quality as possible before you shrink it down. This is especially the case if you use this template as you might need to shrink the pages to slightly different dimensions.
If your computer is too slow to go to 14 inches wide, then go to at least 10 inches wide instead. But don’t work on the exact page size. Always go slightly larger — that’s my opinion anyway. Other views do exist.
Lettering and production
Once the artwork is finished and you’re ready to letter or resize the page for printing, you’ll resize the image to 7 inches width, by 10.565 inches height. If you’ve kept to 300dpi for your artwork, your final image size in pixels would be 2100 px width by 3170 px height. This is perfect for ComiXology.
Side note: When resizing the image, remember to avoid the JPG format! It’s lossy, which means that each time you save, you lose valuable information from the image. This is bad and will cause you problems, especially if you want your comic published to ComiXology! I always remind my artists to avoid JPG at all stages of the artworking process unless it’s to send images to me to review.
Stick to TIFF format instead.
So you have an image that is sized to 7 inches x 10.565 inches, however as discussed earlier, that includes those blue areas on the top and bottom of the page. Since we’re publishing to CreateSpace, we don’t need those areas, meaning the final dimensions will be 7 inches x 10.25 inches.
There’s more to discuss on this subject, but I think I’ve covered what I wanted to in this part. In this article I wanted to outline the method I use to ensure my artwork is produced in the correct format and with the right dimensions with CreateSpace publishing in mind.
In the next part, I’ll describe how I resize the pages properly and ensure I have the right sizes with the correct amount of bleed. Getting this wrong means you’ll have your pages rejected by CreateSpace.
But while you’re here, if you found this useful, please consider following me on twitter or tumblr and drop me a message. If I’ve got anything wrong, or if you have a better alternative, then please also let me know!
I’m Iqbal Ali, I write comics among other things. You can check out my work on midlfrenzy.com. My Amazon page can be found here.
