Sunday 24 August 2014


Book Covers – DIY and Advice


We shouldn't do it, but we all do. Books are judged by their covers.

Imagine you’re walking through a book store. You go to the section dedicated your favourite genre. You’ll probably end up picking up a book by an author with whom you’re familiar, or the next in a nail-biting series. Because you’re a creature of habit. Especially when it comes to books. But imagine you didn’t see a book by an author with whom you’re familiar, and the nail-biting series you’ve been reading came to a predictable but heartwarming end. Necessity has forced you to break your habitual-buying pattern. So you scan your eyes across the shelves. You’re doing this quickly, probably while you think about what you’re going to cook for the evening meal, what’s on at the movies, or whether or not the supermarket on the way home stocks those stand-and-stack taco shells that somewhat save your ornate dining table on Mexican night from your eight-year-old. You scan, taking in colours, text, pictures, and various uses of Photoshop filters. You’re judging books by their covers.

If you’re reading this, you’re probably an aspiring indie-author, unknown, or, God forbid, “undiscovered”. The first battle you have is trying to convince someone to pick up your book, or click on it from a long list on an Amazon search. You’ve written a great blurb, the first sentence of your first chapter grabs your reader by their short and curlies, but in order to showcase these to a potential reader, you have to get them to pick yours out of a list of many books.

The term book cover is misleading term. It makes it sound like all it’s doing is stopping the rain from smudging the text. Think of a book cover as a marketing image. It’s hopefully brightest light among a whole room of lights, all competing for the same wandering, habitual moth. You want yours to burn the brightest. You want that moth to bounce off your bulb, hopefully many times.

Does this mean throwing money at it? Not necessarily. But it helps, especially if you’re not technically minded. But neither was I.

Here’s how I did mine:

I looked at others in the genre: My novel is a coming-of-age psychological drama titled The Goldfish and the Earthquake. Some book covers try to tell a story, others can be ambiguous, but you need to think about the genre in which you’re publishing. Take a look at successful books in your genre (100+ reviews on Amazon is usually a good indicator). Look at their layout, where the title is, author name, etc. Look at the colour usage. Think about why it would entice a reader to look at the blurb or to download a sample.
Coming-of-age psychological thriller is a niche genre. There weren’t many to look at. But it’s a drama, at heart. And I wanted to play on the ambiguity of the title, draw people in that way (only time will tell if I’m to be successful), so I went for the minimalist approach, used by many purporting their genre fiction as literary.

Come up with a central image: do a search on Amazon for eBooks and look at the size of the thumbnail displayed for each book. Book covers need to be simple. Effective ones use a central image with the name of the author and title as a header or footer respectively, or vice versa. Think about a central image that will represent your story well, will tell the reader straightaway what they might find inside. Writing an erotic vampire story? Have a close-up of an attractive lady’s prosthetic fang with blood dripping from it. Writing a financial-collapse thriller? Have a picture of the New York Stock Exchange, flames licking at it. Mine, by the way, is a goldfish swimming in a swimming pool, which I decided was an intriguing image.

Get a good photograph and/or use instructional videos on YouTube: get a good photograph and fifty percent of your work is done. All you’ll need is photo-editing software such as Photoshop or for free you can download Gimp. (I’ll post the link at the bottom of the blog.) Gimp and Photoshop are both scary to the layman. Click on any tab at the top of the screen and you’ll get a long list of what sound like words in Klingon. Whatever you want to do with Gimp or Photoshop, use YouTube instructional videos. I didn’t have a picture of a goldfish swimming in a swimming pool, and I thought it would be pretty hard to find one or take one myself. So I needed to know how to create a water effect in Gimp – which I could easily overlay a royalty-free image of a goldfish over the top of it. There are many videos for this purpose. Think about you want to do, whether it be create a simple effect on a photograph or have blood dripping down a fang, and YouTube it.

Use a specific font, not just the ones that come with your operating system: many fonts can be downloaded for free. (Again, I’ll post links at the bottom). There’s a plethora of texts to choose from, most of them, it has to be said, isn’t what you’re looking for, but there are some gems, you just need to know which ones are suitable. Go back and look at the fonts used in books of the same genre. Some may blend in as part of the whole theme of the book cover, others may jar; you want yours to do the former. You want the font to give some indicator of what genre the book is in, as well. I came across a great blog on this that I’ll post a link to at the bottom. But whichever one you use, make sure it’s big. You want that text readable on that thumbnail on that long list. For your author name, you want to use the same font for each book. You’re creating a brand, and when you make your next cover, you want previous readers to know that the M J Ducksworth that’s written at the bottom of this new book cover is the same M J Ducksworth that wrote that other lovely book they've read. You are a brand now.

Tweak stuff in Gimp or Photoshop to make sure you’re happy: when you’ve got it ninety-percent there, tweak filters in Gimp or Photoshop, play around with various fonts, look to put certain effects on your image that will enhance the theme – again, YouTube is your friend.

To summarise: my first book cover took me hours. And it was awful. My sister described it as looking like a children’s book cover. Which is a massive insult to all children’s books. Here it is:



But I got better. I watched videos, I played around with the software, and I feel quite confident that my result is a good one. It looks smart and professional, and it suits the ambiguity of the title, I feel.



Of course, you can forget everything you’ve read and have a professional design your cover. You could spend hundreds of dollars, get a great cover, only to find out your book is a flop. Or your book could be wildly successful. You could become the next John Locke. The chances of the latter happening are slim, but you can become a moderately successful semi-professional indie-author with a good DIY cover. That is realistic.

I started the blog with a cliché - kind of, though I used the antithesis of it – so I’ll end with one: if I can do it, so can you (design the cover, that is, the jury’s still out on the success of my book).


The Goldfish and the Earthquake is available now on Kindle at Amazon:

Links:


Next post will be on submitting to Kindle Direct Publishing and other platforms.

As always, thanks for reading. If you have any helpful tips or you just want to tell me I'm rubbish, leave a comment below.

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