Now, I have little to no artistic ability, and less skill and
experience in graphic design. So, given that the first hurdle a
little-known author faces in a potential reader's mind is the book
cover, that's clearly a problem.
My approach, once I realised that I needed a cover at all, was to
look for suitable images that I could license to use. I found Dollar
Photo Club, and began trawling through the images, using various
search terms to ease the search. I was lucky to find something (a
model, in a situation) which I felt would work quite well. Then I
put a little thought into the font to use for the title, and put
something together in the free GIMP
(GNU Image Manipulation Program), which many people argue matches and
in some areas exceeds the power of Adobe Photoshop. I personally
find the user interface diabolical – thank heavens for kindly
people on Youtube! So the end result was this, which I thought quite
good, considering.
Basically, I just cropped the full image to fit the page, and
added the title, author, and image copyright texts.
However, my first rude awakening came at the one day course by the
Australian Society for Authors
Book Marketing and Publicity, where I was given some frank feedback:
- It looked amateurish
- It was too flat, too two-dimensional
- It didn't really indicate what the story was: it could be
about wild party-girls.
- It was probably good enough for an ebook.
So, I added the tagline for the book onto the cover, and spoke to
people with some artistic and design skills, to learn what “too
flat” meant. The general consensus was to bring in the sides of
the original image (just sacrificing some fog) to give some depth.
This would also have the main character look a bit hemmed-in and
oppressed, which fitted nicely with the book. Opinions differed
about where to place the tagline – centred or off-centre – and I
realised I'd need to prepare multiple variants and then show them to
people to see if a general preference emerged.
So, after a day of learning more about the GIMP, here is my 2nd
version:
I messed up her right boot, and need to fix that, but before I did
that I had the opportunity to get some more feedback, this time from
the Marrickville
Writers Group. Again, I got
lots of good feedback, and a definite consensus emerged as to what
more needed to be done.
The writers group
suggested modifying the model to suggest futuristic stuff, and magic, but that idea, though good in
general, didn't fit the story.
Other ideas were to use the title as
the focus and move the image into the background, perhaps even use
the model just as a silhouette, with the rest of the image used more
as a texture. (Note that the images shown here are quick rough sketches and doodles from Lyn and Joe in the Marrickville Writers Group, who kindly let me share their sketches on my blog.)
Wilder ideas were to use a blocky futuristic font with some decoration of the letters to suggest growth or wildness attacking or over-riding the solidity of the font.
The upshot of this was that I realised that my poor skills were quite
inadequate to execute these ideas. And the idea of learning how to
use the GIMP well enough to do them was almost as daunting.
A couple of people also suggested something
which I had been considering myself: getting a professional to work on
it. In the meantime, having something concrete and which I was
moderately happy with would be a big help in providing a brief to
real book cover designers. Options include crowdsourcing (like
fiverr)
or Goodreads cover specialists (there's a discussion here
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/2193464-book-covers)
or Kindle Groups designers.
Aesthetics aside. But let me leave the huge topic of aesthetics
aside and consider what goes into a cover. Perhaps a little list is
the best way to do this:
- Cover image
- Title
- Font: for the title, and the font for the rest of the text
- Author name
- “Tag-line”
- Series name and number, if appropriate
- Spine design
- Back cover design
- Back cover blurb – a short blurb, or a longer synopsis?
- Space for the barcode and ISBN
- Bio for yourself, and author photo
- Text and design for “ears” (the inside flaps if there
will be a separate wrap-around cover)
I'll try to cover each of those topics briefly, below.
Cover image. This is crucial, as is the title. The cover
is what you hope will catch the reader's eye, and interest. It needs
to suggest what the book is about, and all the elements need to be
harmonious. It's the first big hurdle you need to overcome in your
quest to guide people to buying your book.
Title. What can I say about this? If the “elevator pitch” is a 25 word
encapsulation of what your book is about, and the tag-line is an
eight word hint, then the title is your novel distilled down to its essence, its heart. The
approach you take for a
title for fiction books is
quite different to non-fiction: for the former, you want to rely on
connotations and echoes, and for non-fiction you want to highlight
what's unique about your book.
Font. The choice of font for the title is extremely important, too: although more so for fiction than non-fiction, I feel. I hadn't thought very much about this for my first attempt: I chose a cursive font because to me it suggested natural-ness (an echo of the
“wild”), with a drop shadow so it could be read against the background.
But one of the members of the Marrickville Writers Group with some cover design experience (hi, Lyn!)
mentioned that drop shadow fonts for a title suggest the Mystery genre to readers (so, I should avoid that). There was general agreement that my choice of font for the title was wrong because it came across as too girly nor did it convey the futuristic angle.
The title font may benefit from
being very eye-catching and highly decorative. The font for the rest
needs to be more legible. Nor do you want a fruit salad of different
fonts. That said, here is a
site where you can get fonts for your cover:
http://www.fontsquirrel.com/.
An extra good thing about that site is that they also tag fonts, so
you can search for things like “futuristic”:
http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/list/tag/futuristic.
Author name. Obviously
you need to put the author's name there. But what name? Consider a
pseudonym; consider variants of your name. My family actually
suggested to me that “Luke Kendall” doesn't really roll off the
tongue, whereas “Luke J. Kendall” is easier to say. And does the
middle initial get put down with or without a period? A quick scan
confirmed that, yes, the period is in.
“Tag-line”. I'm
no expert on this: I bet Google would help you find good articles on
how to do this. I'm pretty happy with what I came up with. The
function of the tag-line is to help cue the potential reader in to
the subject of the book. Since people had pointed out that “Wild
Thing” could just as well refer to a wild party girl, adding the
tag-line solved that particular problem.
Series name and number.
One of my pet hates is not
being able to easily find the order of books in a continuing series
(Hi, Kim Harrison). Having to resort to Wikipedia and then using a
permanent marker to add the number is not something I feel I should
have to do. So, since I'm planning a whole series of books, I needed
to add that somewhere. Oh, and then what to call the collection:
Series, chronicles, report, archives, … in the end, I felt
“dossier” best fit the subject matter.
Spine. If
you're going to have a printed edition, then
you need a design for the spine, and it needs to wrap around and fit
with the front and back cover designs. As well, you will need to
know how wide the spine will be, so that means you need to know how
many pages, and
the paper thickness.
Fortunately, since I plan to
use CreateSpace (https://www.createspace.com/Products/Book/),
they make it easy by providing a calculator, once you've chosen the
paper type: be aware, that cream and white paper have slightly
different thicknesses!
Back cover design. If
you have a printed edition, naturally. Have a look at some published
books to see what goes here. Also, what goes here will be different
if the cover will be loose and separate (this, with wrap-around
“ears” where readers will expect to find the blurb, and perhaps
the author bio), or if the cover will be more like a paper-back
(integral to the book, no inside flaps). Also note that CreateSpace
can't print on the inside of the cover, at present. So if you want
your bio, it'll need to go on the back cover.
Back cover blurb. This
is hurdle #3: if the potential reader likes the cover image and
title, there's a good chance that the next thing checked out will be
the blurb. So it pays to wordsmith this until it's as near perfect
as you can make it. I think a similar effort to what's needed for
writing poetry goes into this, since every word counts. Don't go
overboard with this: the text will need to be very legible,
regardless of the back cover beneath it, so it will need to be
reasonably large, and thus reasonably short. Also, don't think that
a synopsis is the same as the blurb: write a separate synopsis, don't
just add to the blurb. Nor should you give away too much:
you'll spoil the pleasure
for the reader if you do more than provide them hints as to some of
the twists. You certainly should notbe
summarising your story. Yes, it's a fine art!
Barcode.
Yep, you need to get an ISBN and a barcode for the ISBN, so leave
space for them. If a book seller can't catalogue your book, there's
no chance they'll add it to their inventory. Book retailers have
enough problems: don't make more for them.
Bio.
Readers are often
interested in knowing a little about the author. Write something
that gets across who you are: your personality. You may also want to
include a nice photo of yourself.
Ears or flaps. You'll need some text if you plan on a printed book with a dust jacket, since the inside flaps is where readers will expect a blurb, or a longer synopsis if you wish. Have a look and see what other authors do.
Cover design. You
have a wide range of options here. What I started with was a source
of licensable images. I did some google searching and found
Dollar Photoclub
which suited my needs nicely. I was careful to read the license
terms, to be sure I could use the images for a book cover design and
for general promotion of my book, if I paid for licenses for the
images (which were very reasonable, I thought). (I'm told you can
also find free images, but the difficulty in being sure that they
really are free is not worth the trouble, in my opinion.) Dollar
Photo club also tags images, so you can search the large set of
images by keywords, and then browse through the resulting images that
match: that's a real help!
Other options are pre-made book
covers: you browse through and buy the one you want, and they remove
it so no one else will end up with the same cover design as yours
(which is a danger when you rely on stock images). I'm sure there
are several of these sites: I had a bit of a look at
http://thebookcoverdesigner.com/product-category/premade-book-covers/
and
http://www.thecovercollection.com/premadeebook-kindle-covers-fiction.
These options are very
cheap, and although you could get lucky and find something exactly
right for your book, they generally won't look as good as a special
design made just for your book.
Kindle Direct Publishing also
have their own cover design “tool” where you can add the title
etc. as well as an image. If your design skills are good enough, you
might be able to get a reasonable design that way.
Another option is crowdsourcing
(like fiverr),
where you provide a brief
for the work you want done and then people will vie for the work. I
gather with fiverr, you specify the amount you want to spend, and the
“bidders” will work to that. Obviously, if you set your price
low, you will get fewer people vying for the work.
If you yourself have good design
skills, you can do it yourself: but be aware that there are nuances
to book cover design that you will need to learn: different genres
have different expected styles, and if you design a cover that
doesn't fit that, your book may well be overlooked or disregarded.
Even the style of font and font effects matter. It's a specialist
art. Here are a couple of articles you may find useful:
14 Tips for Good Kindle Cover Design/
and
What Does Your Cover Say About Your Book/
if you want to take that
route. Note that the first
of those two links is someone who will also design a cover for you.
My own experience.
So the upshot of making my own best attempt at a cover and learning a little about the topic
was that I realised I should find someone better than myself to create the cover for my book.
Soon after coming to realise this, and primed by my heightened
awareness of the subject of cover design, I noticed in passing on
Twitter the covers for the series Norma Jean's School of Witchery by @RoseMontague, and thought “Wow,
they're good”. I contacted her to ask who designed them and Rose
very kindly put me in touch with Mirella Santana of Brazil, on
Facebook as https://www.facebook.com/mirellasantana.digitalartist
and at http://mirellasantana.deviantart.com/,
and I was hooked.
I contacted Mirella and outlined
what I wanted, and since she was interested, proceeded to prepare a
brief.
Writing a design-brief.
I should point out that I
don't know the right way to do this; what I provided Mirella was an
early blurb for my book, a slightly longer synopsis, my bio, a short
background section for the world of the story, my attempts at my own
cover (along with a summary of their flaws), the cover details:
Title: Wild Thing
Tag line:
She's not what they planned
Subtitle:
The Leeth Dossier: vol 1
Author: Luke
J Kendall
as well as a list of ideas related to incidents in
the story that might form a suitable starting point for the cover
design, including a list of the key characters and the roles they
play. I was able to point Mirella at the model whose photos I'd
found, since she was a surprisingly good match to my own mental image
of my main character, and there was a good number of possibly
suitable images of her available.
After a while, Mirella provided
me with some samples; and we went back and forth a little bit via
Facebook, discussing them, as well as providing the extra information
needed (like the physical dimensions of the printed book, including
the number of pages). I made a few suggestions (in the initial image, the position of the dog and the monster suggested the main character might be a werewolf; and might even change into the monster too, rather than being threatened by it. Mirella's solution to that
problem was much better than my suggestions, incidentally.
Later, I provided updated text
for the back cover. Mirella added the period in “Luke J. Kendall”
since I hadn't been aware of that
convention; she also highlighted some of the text for the back cover
for those readers who just want to skim the synopsis for interesting
tidbits, rather than read it all.
Mirella
also pointed me at a site where we could transfer large files to one
another (https://www.wetransfer.com/),
and I simply used Paypal to pay her for all her excellent work.
The whole process was enjoyable and pleasant; I did try hard to be
responsive, and tried to answer all her questions promptly. I can
certainly recommend Mirella: I think I was very lucky to find her.
My situation was complicated
by the fact that I was in the middle of working on splitting the book
into two, and dreaming up the right “something” that might make
the first half a compelling book in itself. At least the title still
worked: but pretty much all the rest of the text on the cover had to
change.
So what does the cover look like? Well, I had Mirella design two variants: one with and one without the dog. Here they are, side by side, just the front cover parts:
(Incidentally, adding the image with the dog took almost two hours: looks like a bug in Blogger. The only way to make the with-dog image to appear at all was to first add it to a Picasa/Google Photos album, and then add it to the blog from there. Go figure!)
OR
OR
So, I think it's appropriate to show you Mirella's design and finish with a poll (thanks to Matt Koble's post about How to Embed a Poll on a Blogger Post), since there is still one question open about the cover:
do more people prefer the with-dog version, or the without-dog version? Please vote (unless I've already asked you in person)!
Do you prefer the design with the dog, or without?
And one last thing: Mirella said that if people had questions about the
book cover design, she would be willing to answer them. Perhaps we
could do them right here on this blog; but if you'd rather contact me
to ask Mirella, that's fine, too.
