[gmw]

Do readers notice/care-about the file size of the short stories they download?

Smashwords (at the behest of the people they distribute to) recommend a cover size at least 1400 wide. My own standard size is 1500x2400. It felt a bit strange having an epub where half the compressed size was the cover, but, for a novel, I figured that was okay. In my first published short story the cover came to 83% of the compressed file size, but the whole thing was only 106kB so I figured no one was going to quibble. However ...

I put together a cover for the next short story I want to publish, but the image turns out to be quite a large JPEG file. Even when saving at a quality of 50 it comes out at 460kB. A big part of the reason for this is that the background is a brick wall with lots of texture (but a plain colour). Blow it up to 100% and the texture looks great :-) ... but, of course, it's only going to be noticed by people reading on hi-res tablets and so on.

I can despeckle and smooth etc. to reduce the texture (my first experiment with this dropped the image file size by half), but it doesn't look at as good. With more work I can probably do better (both file size and appearance). But ... is it worth it? Am I wasting my time? If the readers won't care about a half-meg file then I may as well leave it asis.

This is a short story of only 4300 words, the epub is probably going to come out around 460kB with the cover I have now - the image barely compresses and the text is barely relevant - hell, I could embed the text using steganography and just upload the image (if people had smarter readers).

ETA: When I say the "text is barely relevant" I mean in terms of the file size ... the point of this post is that only that small 4300 words is actually relevant to the reading experience.