Quote:
Originally Posted by JSWolf
I fully believe that you've seen silly/stupid things I have not.
Have you ever shown your clients a properly done version vs. whatever it is they want to do that they should not do?
|
It's funny that you ask that. Right this minute, I have a really angry, upset customer (who has paid me under $200USD, by the way). He's convinced that we somehow rooked him.
The lad, whom we will call, say, Igor, was the book designer/co-creator/author (?) on a children's book. The book was sized for print at 8x10", or, to those of us paying attention, an aspect ratio of 1:1.25 (the height is 1.25x the width, right?).
He said he couldn't get the book to "look right" when he tried to make an eBook. This 46-page print book has a 1.6GIG (yes, you read that right, gigabyte) InDesign file, for some crackbrained reason. (Do not get me started about the incredibly bad file-size hygiene that print designers have, especially those with Macs. It's boggling.)
So, he has some print edits he wants, which we make and then he wants us to make the ebooks, which we do--in FIXED LAYOUT, as it's an illustrated children's book.
He replies, when he gets it, that this is the same "result" that he had, using Kindle Create. (sigh). His pages don't "fill the screen." I explain, nicely, about aspect ratios and how the only want to make an image fill the screen, on a book, is to distort it, if the image is a 1:1.25 and the screen is a 1:1.6, right? And then I tell him also that there isn't any One Size To Fill Them All, around images and pages and eBooks, much less in Kindle alone. I
If I'd KNOWN that his issue was, the pages not filling the screen, I'd have never accepted the job. I mean...who wants to distort the admittedly decent illustrations? But that's the bottom line here--we either distort them, or he's going to do (whatever).
Now I'm getting angry threatening emails, telling me he's going to "report me" or "file a complaint" (with
whom, one wonders?) and that he's upset that I have
refused to CALL HIM (under $200, remember) and explain
exactly what we did. I'm like...what? I'm under no obligation to tell you what we did, step-by-step and train you in our workflow.
He sends me an image, from some other website, that shows how this one book's cover "fills the screen." It's a simple novel, with a cover designed to FIT the Kindle Fire tablet screen. By now, I'm grinding my teeth and I download the same godd*mn novel, and I take screencaps of the cover on 3 different devices--my Fire 10", my Oasis and my Samsung Note 9--and of course, the cover only "fills" the screne on the Fire 10". Somebody deliberately designed that cover to appease the author, let's face it. when s/he looked at it, on Kindle Previewer 3, in Fire mode (tablet). They bet that s/he wouldn't look at it in eReader mode, or Phone mode, and patently, s/he didn't.
I've sent him the images, showing him how this "perfect" image, isn't. I keep waiting for Igor to GET IT. Oh, did I mention, he also wants his money back? After what is now, IDK, 2-3 hours of emails, in addition to the actual book work?
Under $200. This is life as a commercial bookmaker/eBookmaker today. I have customers, Jon,
that can't click links. I'm not kidding. They use one of those .rr. ISPs, which apparently controls you even when you don't
wish to be. I have customers that can't open PDFs. Can't find the address or search bar, in "The Google."
Most of my bookmakers and ebookmakers work for me because they sh*tcanned working with customers directly. Couldn't take it, so it's worth it to them to earn less per book, so that they don't have to deal with them. Even then, they burn out. Our CSRs have an
extraordinarily high burn out rate. I won't tell you how many have had that job and then left to do something less stressful, like being a Flight Attendant.
People think that some of what I post here or at KDP is funny, and admittedly, I try to relate the situations humorously, to burn them off myself--but I've aged a quarter-century over the last dozen years. The thousandth time you have to tell someone "eBooks don't have pages," your brain melts.
Hitch