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  1. #1
    Professional Artist Tiana's Avatar
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    A map like that is much too big for a novel.

    Consider that an average novel is 6x9 inches. Let's say you do a 2 page spread, so you can work with a total area of 12x9 inches. Since it's for print, it should be 300 pixels = one inch wide. So it would be 3600x1800 inches.

    The best way to figure if this will work for your novel is to zoom out so that you're looking at it the same size it would be in your novel. Is it still legible? Is the vital information showing?

    When you make a novel map, it should first and foremost tell you what places are in the story. The whole world doesn't matter if the story takes place in the Capital of Kingspass and the surrounding valley and mountain pass and you name a total of 8 surrounding landmarks. You'd put only those landmarks. Lord of the Rings has a region that shows the journey, Game of Thrones has two continents because they do visit another continent. Both of these settings have presumably larger worlds, but the story isn't concerned with EVERYTHING on the world.

    That world map is for you.

    You transform it by drawing it again, this time with the purpose and scale in mind. Redo it all. What you made will be only useful for reference and 80%-90% of it is too much detail for a novel map. I suspect the majority of what you've included is far beyond what you need for your actual book. For the record, the map you made would print at around 70 inches wide on the long end, which is why it's killing your computer. If you genuinely wanted a 40x70 print of your world map, the way to handle it is vector. Even with a pretty good computer, I stop doing raster at about 24x36 (standard poster size).

    This size is only useful for your reference, and it's too big for your computer to handle. Downscale it by like... 50% if you want to keep going on that file to finish it, and you're still going to have a standard poster print size.

    I looked at your post history.

    I saw you made this map. https://www.cartographersguild.com/a...9&d=1560444648

    So I'm going to use this for reference.

    That map's terrain content is suitable for placing in a book, but the text is much too small. It needs to be 3-4x bigger.

    It's also too dark to print well. A map for a book should be drawn in black and white with high contrast. But the amount of terrain content would work well.

    Think of what a reader wants. They're not sitting there with a ruler being "aha this is exactly 24 kilometers away!" they're looking to see "ah, the city of Highgarden is in the eastern mountains, okay, and the party travels along these mountains to get to Riverwarden, at the mouth of River Serpentine, close to the sea and the break in the mountains where the war takes place is here. So the hills to the far east, that's where the orc army came from..."

    If you want more content on a book map than this, you should probably make more than one map. I prefer to have no more than 20-30 labels on a single novel sized book page map.
    Last edited by Tiana; 05-26-2024 at 01:57 AM.

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