I’m trying to use the cover generator so that this exhibit gallery (Unseen Labor – Simple Book Publishing) will have a cover for the PDF exports I’ve generated. I’ve edited the cover image so that it meets the pixel and aspect ratio requirements, filled in all the relevant fields, but keep getting the same error: “File is empty. Please upload something more substantial.” I’ve got a bit of ticking clock to get this sorted out because the exhibit is getting some unexpected (and welcome) publicity. Am I missing some crucial step in my rush to get this taken care of?
What a cool project!
I don’t know about the specific error you’re getting, but for a report type thing that we published that needed a cover page, I created a front matter page and set it to not show on the web, and the front matter type as “before cover page.” I just manually added the cover photo I wanted into the body of the post. It’s not a full page cover, but it could work in a pinch!
Thanks, Allison!
I ended up figuring it out through lots of trial and error (essentially, what happened each time I tweaked a field and tried to generate again). When I removed the ISBN and left that field blank, the cover generator worked! So, I think it was getting hung up on creating a barcode for a print PDF cover (?). But, that is an excellent idea so that the downloadable PDFs have covers. I’m going to give that a try!
Incidentally, we have all pages set to export, but no matter what we do, it’s skipping some of the front matter. We ended up moving content around because we just could not figure out what was happening.