Category Archives: Cover design

Book covers

14 Friday Sep 2012

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I’ve not been much of a blogger lately, or much of a writer. End of summer is always such a transition, and not one that I do well. But we’re finally starting to settle into the new routine. This week I meant to do lots of writing, but instead I did lots of cover designing. I know that I’m not enough of a designer to make a living at design, but it really is awfully fun.

Well, sometimes it’s fun, I suppose. The first cover of Thought never made me very happy. But I went to a meeting of the Orlando Independent Writers this week and a fellow author inspired me to do a redesign. I didn’t even stick to my own cover principles with that cover. I do know what I was thinking with the decisions I made, but, eh, better to stick with cover rules. So, new cover for Thought, first cover for Time (unfinished, since I have no quote for it yet), minor re-design on Ghosts for consistency. Let’s see how they look at small sizes!

Updated: Immediate changes. Rejected the first round, let’s try a second!  

Revised Cover

01 Friday Jun 2012

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Barring the unforeseen — which is always sort of risky, but we can assume — A Gift of Thought should have no problem making my mental June 12th publication date.

I suppose I’m nervous about that barring the unforeseen, now. I’m still in the midst of edits and revisions, but I’m having fun with them. I spent a while today giving Dillon a little more attitude in one chapter. I might even have gone so far as to give him an eye roll. By the time I was done, I was more charmed by him than ever and that’s saying a lot, because I love Dillon.

Apart from the people who read it on fictionpress, another ten people are reading it now. Based on past experience, I might get feedback from three or four, five at most. I’ll go with whatever I have by next Tuesday, but I’ve made some terrific changes already, so I’m definitely not feeling as if I need to wait for reader commentary to publish.

Good thing, too. I glanced at my traffic stats on fictionpress today (as I took the story down) and over 630 people had supposedly read the last chapter. Exactly three had bothered to take the time to say something nice. Three. I’d figure that if you made the effort to go to the last chapter, you probably read the preceding 80,000 words so the fact that 627 people had spent hours reading but didn’t care enough even to say ‘thanks for the free read’ was…disheartening, I guess.

Writing is fun, but before I started putting the words on paper, I was perfectly happy making up the stories in my head and it was a whole lot easier. The only reason for me to put the words on paper is to share them with other people, and the only reason to share them is if other people enjoy them. It’s tough not to view silence as apathy.

Ah, well. Maybe Natalya’s story will just live in my head for a while.

Cover design for Thought

31 Thursday May 2012

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Powerpoint is making me a little crazy today. For some reason, when I save my file as a jpg, it’s reducing the quality by too much. But the settings shouldn’t be the problem. This image had appropriate dimensions, but it doesn’t anymore and I don’t know why.

A Gift of Thought

06 Friday Apr 2012

Posted by in Cover design, Self-publishing

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Have I finished writing the book? No. Should I really do that? Yes. But meanwhile, here’s my current winner on the cover.

I’ll want to add a blurb, once I finish writing the book and someone says something meaningful about it, but I think this cover walks a fine balance between connecting the book with A Gift of Ghosts, using color to emphasize the lightness, but also making it clear that this book is rather more of a thriller. The image is actually Union Station in Washington which — if you’re reading along on fiction press — you’ll know is a location used in the story. But even without knowing that, the columns say DC and a lot of the book is set there. And I liked the skew of the columns — it fits the fact that it’s a weird little story!

Hmm, it occurs to me that I don’t know how easy it is to find me on fiction press. I mean, it’s easy for me. But easy for anyone else? Well, here’s a link if you feel like reading a rough draft in slow-motion: A Gift of Thought. If you do read it, leaving me reviews honestly does motivate me to write faster. Yes, it’s a terrible external locus of validation problem but part of the fun of writing is knowing that other people are having fun reading!

Once I finish writing, I’ll take the story down, so if you’re reading this post in May or so and the link doesn’t work, that’s why.

Cover note: a small border around the background photo is really essential to give it proper definition. Without the border, the photo sort of floats and looks unfinished. The border’s not even noticeable except in its absence.

Minor tweaks

07 Wednesday Dec 2011

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Tweaks. A few font changes, including playing with the shadow effect on the title to make it pop. I’m hoping to get it readable in a thumbnail, but since that’s hard to judge in Powerpoint, I have to look at it online to be sure. Is this boring anyone else yet?

Getting close

07 Wednesday Dec 2011

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I have the one big revision to do and I’m going to tackle that tomorrow. Then I’ll start the read aloud, which ought to be fun. Then a copyright page, then deciding whether to learn how to create a real TOC for the Kindle. It seems as if it might be a good idea but I don’t know whether anyone cares. Still, learning is useful.

Today was playing with cover files, though. I believe my preference is number 3. Maybe, anyway. I wish I didn’t start to get so insane about the fonts. Powerpoint just doesn’t have the right tools for them.

Credit where due

07 Wednesday Dec 2011

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I just spent a frustrating hour searching for the image that I used on the Ghosts cover. I think I’ve basically decided that it is the real and final cover (maybe some tweaking), and so even though the image was public domain, I wanted to credit the photographer and the website on the copyright page. Argh. Of course, I bookmarked the site, but then I lost all my bookmarks.

For future and current reference: Lightning Strike by Adam Weeden is the original image.

Cover 4 (sort of)

28 Monday Nov 2011

Posted by in Cover design, Writing

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Decisions, decisions.

I was looking at my Kindle books, trying to choose what to read, and started really noticing the covers. I realized that I could pick out most of the self-published books from the trade books by the size. Not that it was a glaring difference, but it was a difference. Even though this book will never be a trade paperback, It should probably use the trade paperback trim size, which meant changing the page format on Powerpoint from the standard to a 8 by 5.25 layout.

I also decided that the cover really didn’t pop enough. I love the gray and the subtlety, but subtlety is not necessarily the most compelling selling factor. So I spent a half hour or so tweaking. I’m not sure I feel like it’s an improvement though. It’s brighter, but less balanced. I think I might need to start playing with the typography again. I did change the colors and move my name down to the power-corner. But I think I’ll post it for a while and see how I feel about it after I’ve been looking at it for several days.

I posted the first chapter for critiques at Critique Circle and that’s been fascinating. It’s fun to find out what changes other people would make. I was an editor for long enough to know that there are always words that can be changed, sentences that can be improved and so on, and that no work is ever perfect, and a lot of that feedback is quite useful. If it wasn’t going to take months and months, it might be fun to go through this process on each and every chapter. But I think that’s the same level of obsessiveness that used to inspire me to spend days on a presentation that other people would pull together in a couple of hours, and I’m not sure it’s actually a sensible use of my time. Do I really want to spend years on one book when I could be writing story after story and getting better with each one instead? And phrased that way, the answer is really obvious. At least to me. So on to Sylvie! I love, love, love the scene I wrote last night.

Cover design number three

12 Saturday Nov 2011

Posted by in Cover design, Writing

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Somehow, I’m going to have to figure out how to get other people’s opinions on my cover designs. I need to do a poll or something, in a place where I can get more than a response or two. I guess that probably means Facebook, but eh, that gets complicated, too.

This, however, is cover design number 3, and yes, I am starting to enjoy the cover creation process a little too much. I made it in Powerpoint, using a public domain photograph of lightning. I cropped and rotated the photo, so I could keep the palm trees and put the lightning on the left, and then tweaked. I think I enhanced the brightness by +20, and did something to the contrast, then nudged the color to the cooler side. I wanted to bring the green of the palm trees out and make the lightning look a little more magical than it did.

I then spent an endless time playing with the text and the fonts. Powerpoint does not exactly have the best font tools, and I didn’t go absolutely insane in the way I would have if I were a real designer. (To wit, the G in Ghosts is too far away from the H, in my opinion, but in Powerpoint, I would have needed to make them separate text blocks to nudge them together, and I was not quite willing to go that far. Six text blocks were quite enough.)

I took a quote from a review on fictionpress that was from someone who reviewed only at Chapter 33, figuring that review was for the whole thing, not just a piece of it. I didn’t want to be misleading by using a review that was just for a chapter. Maybe if and when I actually get ready to publish, I’ll ask a couple people for reviews that I could put on the front page. It’s not possible to read the quote on the thumbnail, I don’t think, which is a pity. But I suppose I can use a bigger image that then gets turned into a thumbnail? I’ll have to figure that one out.

I’m still trying to refrain from revising until December, but I have definite ideas about some big changes toward the ending. I think I’m going to try not to go crazy on most of it, though. These are just words 300,000-360,000, and if I get too obsessed with achieving perfection, it’ll join my first novel (oh, book of many names) in spending the next decade on my hard drive.

I really like this cover, though. I think for me, it’s definitely jumped ahead of both 1 and 2.

And a second draft, too

30 Sunday Oct 2011

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And a second draft, too. The first one looks absolutely nothing like the cover of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, but there’s some book it resembles, I’m sure of it. I’ll find it someday and feel stupid for not remembering. But I realized while looking at it that it’s wrong, anyway — it’s too dark, too serious. So I tried making it more colorful and I kind of like this one. The blur makes me think of Akira talking about what the energy of the house looks like. I suppose it would be better if I found a house picture and blurred that. Hmm, maybe with some Spanish moss in the background? But using Powerpoint for design is not so easy. (Not to mention that I’m not a designer.) But this, or something close to it, might do. 
There’s a terrible catch-22 with cover design which is that if I want to sell the book, it makes sense to pay for a good designer, but obviously, I can’t do that while I’m an unemployed graduate student. Or shouldn’t, anyway. I need to remind myself that I’m not at a million words yet. Worrying about cover design is approximately 700,000 words in my future. Two days away from NaNoWriMo, and I should decide what to write!