Emily Irwin has created a new cover for my novel Memory and I love it.

Click the image below to see a larger version in a new window:

Emily is a graphic artist currently working and living in Montreal, but she grew up here on Maui and went to high school with my kids. She first read Memory in high school and has read it several times since. My daughter knew I wanted a new cover, and suggested I connect with Emily–which I did.

Emily listened to my very vague cover ideas, and created a series of thumbnail sketches incorporating my ideas and some of her own, and then, as a whim, she added one more concept, much more abstract and fantastical than the others. That was the image both my daughter and I immediately gravitated toward, and the end result is the cover above. I’m very pleased, and I hope this cover will give new life to the book.

Emily’s cover will be going live on the ebook over the next few days, and will be featured on a new print edition of Memory, coming soon.

Dreamsnake is the classic novel by Vonda N. McIntyre that won the Nebula, Hugo, Locus, and Pacific Northwest Booksellers’ Award, and is presently available in ebook form at Book View Café.

Recently Vonda asked if someone wanted to re-do the text on the ebook cover. She was very happy with the cover photo of a cobra by Tanith Tyrr, but wanted an update on the font.

It had been a while since I’d played with Photoshop, so I volunteered. The first image at right is the cover as it was, at the size used for display at Book View Café’s website. The text is silver/gray. The font is Mistral. Vonda wanted an easier-to-read text in white to increase the contrast.

Being literal-minded, I started out doing exactly what was requested: changing the font face and color, but leaving everything else the same. I also added a tiny line of color between the image and the black panel. The result can be seen at right. The title font is “Matura MT Script Capitals”. I don’t have a big selection of fonts on my computer. I chose this one because it was big, thick, sharp-edged and interesting. The font used for the author name is Mona Lisa Solid ITC TT, which I chose because it uses very tall letters that can be packed close together. I thought the result was interesting, but I wasn’t happy with it. I felt the text was too crowded. To fit everything in one vertical line, I had to make Vonda’s name too small to truly read.

So I decided to try a half-frame: put the title across the top and let the author’s name have the left column. Of course this left less room for the image of the snake. I decided to keep the image the same width and just crop off the bottom. In doing so I had to eliminate the curve of the snake’s body. I had some doubts about that, but I did it anyway, and I was pleased with the result. The title font was dramatic, the author’s font, “Trajan Pro,” was distinctly different but complementary, and both were very easy to read even at small size.

I sent both versions to Vonda.

She agreed with me that the second version was better, but she really wanted that beautiful, curvy snake’s back to be part of the picture. To get the full height of the snake photo, we had to sacrifice width, so the left-hand black panel became wider.

Vonda also wanted something lighter for the title font and gave me a list of suggestions. I’d already tried almost all of them and thought they were too light in weight to make effective title fonts. But then I plugged “Handwriting – Dakota” in, played with it a bit, and really liked the result. The “D” is of course a much larger font size than the other letters. It’s at normal weight, while all the smaller letters are set in a faux-bold that Photoshop allows you to do. Strangely enough, the weights balanced quite nicely. And with their bright white against black, the fonts are very legible, even at small size. This was the final version of the cover, at least for this round!

Dreamsnake is available in epub, mobi, and PDF formats at Book View Café.

Just had to share this detail illustration from the print cover of Hepen the Watcher. On the front cover, the ax is clutched in the hands of my anti-hero protagonist. I like to include a decorative element on the back cover, and the ax seemed ideal, so I tried to separate the layers in the Photoshop master file, and pull the ax out. That didn’t work as well as I’d hoped, so I went back to the artist, Sarah Adams, and asked if she could pull out the detail of the ax, and isolate it for use on the back cover–which is exactly what she did, and overnight too.

The shame is that I can’t show you the full-resolution image because the file is too big. But trust me, it’s awesome. And if you ever need some illustration work, give Sarah Adams a tweet at @sarahadams23

I’ve got an e-ARC (Advance Reader Copy) of Hepen the Watcher with a placeholder cover that looks like this:

The final cover art by Sarah Adams is getting closer to completion. Thanks for your patience!

Find a synopsis and sample chapters here on my website.

Back in late November I wrote a post titled Re-Thinking Cover Art: The Dread Hammer with the subtitle:

The option to change your mind is one of the great advantages of indie publishing.

I had changed my mind about both the cover style that I wanted for the book, and the use of a pen name. See the earlier post for my reasoning, but in the meantime, take a look at the new cover, with art by Sarah Adams:

I’m pleased.

The last question remaining before I re-issue the book goes to copyright. Since I originally published under an open pseudonym, I’m trying to understand what to put on the copyright page. I haven’t been able to find any resources on the web or in The Copyright Handbook. The writers I’ve seen who have re-published under a different name tend to do it as “Author Name 1 publishing as Author Name 2,” which I don’t want to do. I have a query in to the US copyright office, and will try again today to call them. But if anyone out there has experienced this or can point me toward a useful resource, I’d appreciate it.

The experimenting continues. I’ve put together new ebook covers for my two single short stories. Here are the original versions:

And here are the new versions:

What do you think?

I upgraded the cover on Hooks just to make it match. The real subject of this experiment is In The Tide. Several writers have seen increased book sales by getting the pricing on the first book in a series down to “free.” Personally, I’m not a fan of “free” for a quality novel, but I thought it would be interesting to see if there would be any increase in readership if I could offer a related short story for free. Since In The Tide is something of a precursor story to The Nanotech Succession, (ideas for the series were developed in it, though it’s not part of the series’ story world), it’s my best candidate.

The short story with it’s new cover has been uploaded to both Amazon and Barnes & Noble. The next step is to try to figure out how to get the price down to “free.”

A decision to re-think the cover art for my novel The Dread Hammer led to a three-part series on my experiences with cover art, from the point of view of an indie publisher.

Here are links rounding up all three parts:

Re-Thinking Cover Art: The Dread Hammer

Re-Thinking Cover Art: The Cover Concept

Re-Thinking Cover Art: Using Stock Photos

Bonus:
Cover Art Reveal: The Dread Hammer

Stock photos are the cover art solution for many indie publishers.

With royalty free stock photos, you pay a one-time fee for the right to use a proffered image–but you don’t have exclusive use. Anyone else can pay for the right to use the image too, so it’s possible you’ll see your cool cover idea repeated somewhere else. Personally, I think the odds of this are pretty long, so it’s not something I worry about.

Royalty-free stock is traditionally considered cheap—“just a few dollars” is what you’ll usually hear. I’m here to tell you it ain’t necessarily so. If you’re purchasing a standard image at a low-cost agency and you’re only doing an ebook, then yes, you could probably get what you need for $25 or less.

But if you need a photo in print resolution, the price jumps, and if you want to buy rights to a premium photo, the price jumps again, into the $100+ range. From the point-of-view of the photographer selling the rights, this doesn’t sound like much, but for struggling authors gambling that a particular cover design will work, it’s a real investment. And often, just one image won’t do. A good cover might need to combine multiple images, with the cost rising with each addition.

The most expensive image I’ve flirted with was over $400 at Getty Images. Thankfully, the design idea I was toying with didn’t work out.

The great thing about most stock sites is that you can download a low-resolution, watermarked image that can be used to try-out a design idea. The really bad thing about some stock sites is that you can’t make your purchases in cash. You have to buy sets of “credits” and of course you will always end up buying extra credits to cover the required amount . . . and eventually these credits will expire and the stock site will have just taken an extra skim of your money. It’s a very consumer-unfriendly system.

Did I mention that I loathe stock photo websites?

The pricing system is only part of it. The frustration of searching for just the right image is far worse.

I’ve wasted untold hours looking for images to illustrate an idea I’ve got in my head. Often these searches end in complete failure. I know other people who’ve done well with stock photo images, but for all the time invested I’ve had only two real successes: the background image in the cover of my YA science fiction novel Skye Object 3270a was purchased from a stock site, as were the two images I combined for the cover of my story collection Goddesses & Other Stories.

One huge problem with most image searches is that a search might result in 60,000 matches, but many of the same images will then be shown time after time, on page after page, making the effort to browse seem futile.

A second huge problem is that so many of the photos of people feature models so polished they look plastic, mugging for the camera in bizarrely tasteless ways. This might work for the lowest level of advertising, but it’s probably useless for your book cover.

So yes, stock photos can be used to make great covers, but if I have the opportunity of working with an artist, I’ll take that path every time.

Next: cover art reveal >>

In the last post I talked about the current cover for my fantasy novel The Dread Hammer and why I’m now in the process of replacing that cover. This time I wanted to talk a little more about the actual process of coming up with a cover concept.

As the publisher of this book, I feel it’s my responsibility to give the artist some guidance on the cover. Unfortunately, I’m not an artist, but we do what we can, we do what we must.

My strategy is this: I develop some sort of a concept in my head. Sometimes, (rarely), I already know what I want. Other times, I go to Amazon or Goodreads, and look at hundreds of covers, picking out relevant ones with some aspect that appeals to me. This is how I came up with an initial concept for the new Dread Hammer cover.

One option I never consider is a complex, highly detailed scene, such as an alien cityscape. There are three reasons for this. First, it would be impossible for me to visualize such a scene well enough to describe it to the artist, and also, I couldn’t afford to pay her for the amount of work involved. Finally, since my books are primarily sold online, the detail and artistry would be lost within the thumbnail. So I make it a point to use large, fairly simple concepts.

Once I have a concept in mind, I go out on the Internet and try to find images that convey some piece of that concept. Sometimes these images are from stock photo sites, sometimes they’re from Google image searches. All of them are placeholders. Using Photoshop, I cut out the parts I want and paste them together, twisting, bending, stretching, and re-coloring as it strikes my fancy. It’s the electronic version of pasting together magazine photos like kids do in school. I’m not a visual thinker, so I really need to see things laid out to decide if an idea is going to work or not. None of these images will appear in the final product, so copyright is safe.

The huge drawback of this method is finding relevant images to work with. I have abandoned concepts because I can’t find the right images and so have no way of illustrating the idea in my head. But we do what we can.

In the past, I haven’t gone looking for a lot of feedback during this developmental phase, but this time around I’ve been showing these mockups to people, and the feedback has been enlightening–and frightening. Everyone has a different opinion on what works and what doesn’t. Opinions from people who’ve read the book are entirely different from people who haven’t.

Amusingly, the most consistent point of contention is the weapon to show on the cover. Since it’s stated in the back cover copy and in the first few pages of the book, I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that the Dread Hammer is a god, not a weapon, while our violent protagonist, Smoke, uses a sword by choice. Naturally, I want to include a bloody sword on the cover, but several people want to see a war hammer instead, since it matches the title. Oh, conundrum!

Soon, I’m sure, I’ll come up with an acceptable idea. Then the concept gets handed off to the artist who will take my sorry little mockup as a jumping-off point to create an original piece of art . . . and then we get to do it all over again for the sequel, Hepen the Watcher.

Next time: Using “royalty free” stock photos.

Next: using stock photos >>

The option to change your mind is one of the great advantages of indie publishing.

Of all the steps involved in turning a polished manuscript into a book, the hardest by far is cover design. The purpose of a cover is to catch the attention of people who might read and enjoy the book. To my mind a cover should convey the “flavor” of the story, along with something of the setting and genre in an intriguing fashion that will draw in readers who might like the book but have never heard of you or it.

The Dread Hammer is a fantasy novel, but it’s hard for me to say what sort of fantasy it is. Despite swords and magic, it’s not like traditional heroic fantasy, or sword & sorcery, or a quest novel, or urban fantasy, or any subgenre that I’m aware of. It’s darkly humorous, unconventional, and, at 65,000 words, it’s very short compared to most fantasy novels. I consider it “quirky,” so I decided to put a quirky cover on it.

The image I had in mind was of the main character in an active pose, done in a style of art commonly seen in computer games. I wanted this style because it was different (for a book cover), and a little campy. I hoped it would communicate the quirky nature of the book while being eye-catching enough to pull in the curious.

I can’t draw to save my soul, but I do know enough Photoshop to be dangerous, so my method of developing a cover concept is to scour the web for relevant images, slap them together in Photoshop, and amend until I’m sort-of happy with the layout. In the case of The Dread Hammer I put together an extremely rough guide for my artist Sarah Adams, and she gave me back an entirely original digital painting that was exactly what I was looking for. Click the image to see a larger version. This is an impressive piece of work.

But now, seven months after publication, I’m reassessing my initial concept. This is the great advantage of indie publishing. The book is mine, and if I want to change my mind and try different things, I can. So I’m making two big changes: the cover, and my name.

A number of people have persuaded me that publishing under a pen name was never a good idea, so I’m going to re-issue the book under my own name—easy enough.

But changing the cover—that’s hard. What’s wrong with the existing cover? There’s nothing at all wrong with the art itself. I think Sarah did a wonderful job. But sales are slow. I’m not reaching my potential audience, so I’ve begun to think of new ways to frame and present the book—especially important because the sequel, Hepen the Watcher, will soon be ready to follow.

So what do I think is not working with the existing cover? I have no hard data at all, not even anecdotal data, except this one thing: several people have mentioned that the book looks YA—as if it’s aimed at the young-adult market. It’s not. It has adult themes involving family dynamics, personal choice, and personal obligation. It’s also got some fairly graphic sex and lots of very graphic violence. As the tagline says, it’s a “fairytale of love, war, murder, marriage, and fate.”

Besides the YA issue, I’ve come to feel the current cover makes it hard to take the book seriously. This is a guess on my part. No one has told me this. And yes, the story is darkly humorous—but I want it to be taken seriously as literature that is worth one’s time to read.

So I’ve gone back to Photoshop and started patching together new cover concepts. My current goals:

1. Emphasizing the idea of a classic “fairytale”
2. Establishing a general genre setting
2. Creating a visual tension through the intrusion of graphic violence in an idyllic setting

This still leaves an abundance of questions! Which character, if any, should go on the cover? What style should be used? And believe it or not, the biggest question so far has been what weapon to display!

Next: the cover concept >>