My wife Emily wrote Braving Uncertainty, an exposure coloring book about OCD and related disorders. Nick Purvis, my old team lead at Corvisa, made the illustrations. I typeset it.
Each subject had a text page followed by an illustration, leaving the drawing a page of its own to be colored.
I assembled the book with a Makefile. LaTeX handled the text, ImageMagick prepared the artwork, and pdfcpu combined the pages and built up the cover. The cover and interior were separate outputs: the interior stayed the same for paperback and hardcover, while the cover needed different dimensions. Draft copies carried a watermark and guide lines that the final files omitted.
The revisions were the small, physical details of a book: placing the title, adjusting the cover, preparing the ISBN artwork, refining the copyright page, and changing the draft lines.
While those revisions were underway, I ordered hardcover copies through Lulu. The first copies had a wide white margin on every page, the cover included, and some things were not aligned where they should have been. I wanted every page, the cover too, to run right to the edge. That was never a requirement of Emily’s. It was something I wanted.
Getting there took several orders. I had built the cover myself rather than use Lulu’s designer, and that route leaves the spine width, the bleed, and the hardcover wrap to the file you send: Lulu previews the margins and trim but does not adjust the file. Each copy taught me a little more of the exact format they expected. I do not remember which change was the one that finally reached the edge, only that a copy did.