Reviews and Comments on SotWDS

... SotWDS being "Surge of the Wine-Dark Sea" (link is to the announcement where there are links to the various places to get it).

Reviews
Tenkar has provided a mini-review of the book at Tenkar's Tavern. In addition to a positive reaction, he poses a question that needs an answer: will there be prints of the artwork? The answer is that it depends on the individual artist. This book, in terms of what I do for the artists, is kind of like a set-spike combination in volleyball: I did the "set," but the artist should decide how to direct the actual spike that's permitted by any additional visibility. Keep in mind that I interact with most of these guys on a narrow wavelength - their relatively traditional fantasy work. Most of them operate on a much broader aesthetic spectrum, and the way they present themselves as artists shouldn't be limited by the sort of "inventory" that I would select from their portfolios. If there's an artist whose work you like, I'd rather that you find that artist's actual broad-spectrum portfolio rather than relying on the much narrower constraints I used for the book.

Comments by Artists
I'm really pleased about the positive reactions the artists themselves have had to the book.
Johnathan Bingham has this:.

So if you're a fan of OSR art, I highly reccommend going out and buying a copy. It's even better than pie!

Stefan Poag has this, where Johnathan and JD Jarvis (also one of the artists in the book) weigh in with comments.

Of the full-time professionals, Christopher Burdett (credits on Buffy and Firefly) and Paul Jaquays (Judges Guild, TSR, HALO, etc.) both weighed in to praise the book via email, and Christopher mentioned that he's planning on blogging about it shortly - his blog is here. Nothing about it yet, though.

The response has been really fantastic, and it has been a great privilege to work with all of these guys. The talent contained in this book is utterly staggering.

My favorite exchange of comments, though, was on Knights & Knaves:
Axemental: "... This will go perfectly under my coffee table to be pulled out before I DM a game for inspiration."
The Red Priest: "Why not just fix the table leg? :)"

Making a cover on lulu

10:57AM, USA Central Time
I am now in the "cover designer" on lulu, which is a great big rectangle of technicolor vomit set underneath a bewildering array of buttons labeled with meaningless hieroglyphs. They are helpfully labeled with words indicating that anything I'm likely to do here will take me down a branching pathway of irretrievable mistakes, altered data, and sorrow. At the top, the very top ... in parentheses, it says, "Kid ... do you want to use the old cover designer or the advanced one-page cover designer?"

Okay, it doesn't say "Kid," but I'm already into the sort of Alice's Restaurant mode of confronting a senseless and ridiculous system of external control. And it's going to get worse. Because what I have here is a one-page cover. I'm not even allowed to wrestle with the technicolor vomit using the hieroglyph buttons and sheer willpower - I have to go and confront the ADVANCED cover generator. The technicolor vomit and the hieroglyphic buttons are obviously considered to be standard fare.

The advanced cover designer probably asks questions about which door tells the truth, which one lies ... and has an invincible demi-lich in it. Yeah, you know what I'm talking about.

Here we go.

"Are you sure you want to navigate away from this page?"
Hell no, I'm on my way to the advanced cover designer with liches and stuff when I navigate away from this page. No, I don't want to navigate away from this page, but I have to. I hit "yes."

11:02AM USA Central Time.
I confront the advanced cover designer.
It is a blank rectangle. It says:
"The file you upload must be a PDF, JPG, GIF, or PNG. See below for exact dimensions. "

No technicolor-vomit slimes crawling in the rectangle.
No hieroglyphs.

It's quiet .... too quiet. This is exactly where you decide to search for secret doors and the ceiling falls in on you.

11:06 USA Central Time
And then ... written beneath the innocuous-looking rectangle ... comes the Gygaxian Riddle.

One-piece cover requirements:

• Your file must be a PDF, JPG, GIF, or PNG
• Spine width: 31 Postscript points wide (0.431") (129 px)
• Spine begins 657 Postscript points (9.13") (2738 px) from the left.
• Total cover width: 1345 X 900 Postscript points (18.68" X 12.50") (5604px X 3750px)
• If using an image, its resolution should be set to 300dpi

Here it is. WTF is a postscript point? Can we not use inches or millimeters, or cubits? Postscript isn't a system of measurement, it's something you write at the end of a letter when you forgot to say something or if you're trying to downplay it, like, "P.S. You are going to have trouble with this part of the process."

P.S., yes, I know it actually gave me the dimensions in inches, I'm just complaining. The actual problem is to verify inches in the dimensions of a pdf. Time to open up Photoshop and take a look at the pdf in a graphics program.

This is going to take a while.

A is also for "Continuing the Publication Process on Lulu"

So sue me, my abcedarian skills are questionable. In part one of this quick series about posting a resource onto lulu, which really did begin with the letter "A," I got as far as the point where lulu has now created a print-ready file of the interior of the art book (Surge of the Wine-Dark Sea), I checked it, and hit "Save and Continue." You have to read the comments to see the whole progression step-by-step, because I didn't want to put up a whole new post for each step.

Now we are at the part where fear grips me.

10:49AM USA Central Time
It's time to make the cover. Normally, that's not a big deal. I simply use the "old" cover designer on lulu, which is an interface which makes a lot of sense to me. Upload a jpeg for the front cover. Upload a jpeg for the back cover. Remove the text that lulu puts on there.

Not so in this case, because I've got a really nice one-piece cover from Jim Kramer, but I am not familiar with using a one-piece cover. My baby interface that I normally use won't do this; I have to venture into the world of stuff I'm not familiar with.