Episode 4 of Many Hands Make Write Work - Book Cover

Hi guys!

Thank you for sticking with me through this project as I am hard at completing work on my upcoming novel, Dissemble.  

If you are just joining me and you want to read what I've talked about so far, by all means, click here so you can catch up. Also, you can join my mailing list to learn about my upcoming books, contests, events, and more.

The creation of the book cover is probably my favorite part of doing a writing project because it's where I am really comfortable, outside of the actual writing of course lol.

I actually have a graphic background and in the past, I have done web sites and other graphic projects. 

So when I decide to start working on a cover, of course by now I know exactly how the story is going to go.  This is very important because the cover should convey the overall feel/theme/tone of the entire story. 

A bad cover can make or break a sale, meaning that I could potentially miss reaching the type of readers that may have enjoyed my book if they could have simply gotten past the cover. 

Last time we spoke about the blurb(book description) and its importance but a great cover is what will ultimately get a reader to pick up a book in the first place to read the blurb.

I start by finding a few images from stock photo web sites, usually Shutterstock or some other website devoted to thousands of suitable graphics for whatever project you are working on.    Some of the photos are very inexpensive to purchase, and often times I will need more than one depending on what I am going for.

The reason for this is because I will end up using four or five different photos, layering them, trimming around objects to overlay over others and things like that. 

For instance, these were the photos I used to make my last book cover for "The Doctor."  

Looking at the cover, it appears as if I managed to find a good cover but believe it or not it's all broken up! 

Let me show you: 

I knew I needed a woman trapped/locked up...

I knew I needed a strong-looking, metal door for her to be trapped behind...

I knew I needed an electronic keypad to keep her locked up, which I hand-made with simple squares and numbers and added a 'glow' effect around it...

And I wanted to put all of, or overlay, the graphics on top of an ominous-looking hallway as a sinister backdrop, which I altered the hue and saturation rate to achieve a very popular teal color that many suspense and thriller book covers are known for. 

Hue will change the color of an object to just about any color in the rainbow you can imagine. 

Saturation will make the strength of colors in the photo very, very vibrant to the point of being neon almost.  Or taking away the strength of saturation can take all of the colors away so that it appears as black and white or grayscale.

Pretty cool, huh? :-) 

While it does take some time to actually put the pictures together as I arrange the different overlays, titles, etc. the longest, most tedious part of doing a cover is finding just the right photos.  

And the same thing goes for the font, which is a style of lettering, that makes up the book's title, author name, and tagline if applicable.  

You wouldn't use a flowery-looking font on a horror book or a bloodstained font on a science fiction novel. 

Each book genre has certain fonts that are appropriate for proper use so I often try to find the best ones for thriller books.  As for specific recommendations, the fonts which work great in this genre are Univers, Gotham, Helvetica, and Bebas Neue.

The best way that I learned to do this was to look at other books like mine and study their covers. What colors did they use, fonts? Did they use the right type of pictures based on their blurb and so on.

Most people use a variety of different graphic programs and I actually use a very simple (and old)one called Fireworks 8. 

Fireworks was part of the Macromedia(now Adobe)company.  I have just recently graduated to a more sophisticated program called Affinity Photo since I plan to help other authors with their book covers. Even though I've always been a writer at heart, my traditional job role was that of an executive administrative assistant and an office manager. I actually do virtual assistance work when I am not writing, which includes creating book covers for others - this is a new service I am offering and I am very excited to be doing so!

Next time, I will be talking about the ever-important marketing and promotion of the book while it's in pre-order status.  Stay tuned for episode five and I'll see you then!

Erica ;-)