Cover Talk

I finally finished the last round of full editing, which is also my last read-through. Seriously, despite how many times I've read this thing, I STILL get worked up over scenes and characters and, and, and--

Now, Victoria will read over the whole thing and check to see if I missed anything (and she's a hundred times faster at reading than I am). I'll also look through Julia's notes to make sure there's nothing I didn't miss.

We're still making good time on this, which is awesome. I want to have the book ready for ereader purchase by the end of this upcoming week!

Holy cow.

But, anyway, in the meantime, let's talk about this nifty cover. You can read more about it in the FAQ section, but I think it'd be fun to go more into it here.

As I mentioned, this cover was made in Photoshop CS2, which is available for free download now if any of y'all need a decent painter or photo editing program. (It's not really my favorite, especially since I use a tablet that's not a Wacom, so the pen sensitivity is pretty weak, but it gets the job done.)

When I first envisioned this cover, I did a "sketch", I suppose, or a rough draft. The final cover has a photo that we took ourselves, but the initial cover had an image that I borrowed from Wikimedia Commons. It's pretty awful, but here's what it looked like:

Okay, so this is pretty embarrassing. Not gonna lie. I took about an hour to throw all these things together, testing stuff here and there, just to figure out more or less what it looked like. The balance and composition, for one, sucked. Yes, it sucked. "Shadow" was still in a sketching phase, not yet refined, and--gah. It's just ugly.

One of the important things about self-pub is creating an attractive cover. Readers can identify covers made on a budget, and budget covers are often associated with budget quality of the story as well. That's not good.

So, many indie authors hire cover artists. I mean, this is pretty cool because it creates a whole niche market for self-employed artists as well. For us, however, we don't really have $500-1,000 to drop on a quality cover.

I certainly don't consider myself a professional artist, but I have some strengths that I took advantage of and made that the focal point of the cover. Like photography, a cover should have elements that make the eye dance, not elements that clash for attention. I kept that in mind as I revised the above awful sketch, and then created this:

So, this was better.

Still not best.

Negative space in an image should tell a story -- this negative space was just...well, negative space. It didn't add anything to the cover. It just felt like too much cover and not enough text, I guess?

But the steps continued to bring me closer to the end. When we embarked on our trip to Pittsburgh, Victoria's place of origin, we used a day to take pictures for cover fodder. As soon as we finally had a moment where we weren't doing something (while the Pens were playing, and losing, horribly), I threw the new photo into the cover layout.

Our image, however, was taken on a very cloudy day (as Pittsburgh days tend to be), and we got some fantastic cloud formulations.

After some tweaks and resizing, we finally ended up with what's now the official cover.

And I've already got some freaken awesome ideas for the second book.