What is a "concept"?

Quite simply, a bookcover treatment begins with up to four concepts which is a fancy name for mockups. The discussion of concepts gets us aligned better with your vision for the book and more importantly, its desired audience. Although we may experiment some with the font treatment of the concept book covers, the most important aspects to determine are the color scheme and the artwork which will be used. The following slides show the evolution of one of our covers towards its final look.

What are "print-ready files"?

In the 21st century, the printing industry runs entirely on Portable Document Format (.PDF) files for both the cover treatment and the interior (a.k.a. "bookblock"). Our process uses Adobe Acrobat Professional V8.1 to produce the most widely accepted CMYK PDF color standard, known as PDF/x-1a:2001. This specially tagged and constructed PDF file is vastly different from PDFs created by shareware tools or even Office 2007 products. It matches exactly the requirements for both Print-on-Demand houses such as Lightning Source Inc. and offset printing runs.