In my earlier attempts at books, I tried to create covers myself. Now this may come as a shock to you, but I’m not a graphic designer, typesetter, photographer or artist. I know, it surprised me too, but the process of learning book cover composition, legality and availability of fonts, photoshopping etc was fascinating and well worth the effort on my part as knowing what is involved helped my understanding, plus my desire to become vaguely competent in every profession in the World. Some attempts, like my Selected Poems, I don’t think are even too awful.
One of the ‘blatantly obvious but I’d never thought about it before’ discoveries, early on, was that a great picture or image doesn’t make a great cover. It’s the integration of title and author with the picture that matters, so you actually want big blank or bland areas in your photograph, and need to think about the end result with text as you frame. I didn’t use any posh camera or lens, just my phone, and quickly discovered the best thing is to take a dozen slightly different angles and not worry about which ones to use until the very end. The ones I’ve used in various places aren’t what I would think of as the best pictures. One of the big advantages of using my own photos is the lack of copyright issues, so I now have a bank of pictures I may experiment with on the short stories I put up on the site.
Now I’m not a total virgin when it comes to knowing what does and doesn’t work on terms of book sales, having worked in Waterstone’s for many years, but that was many years ago, fashions change, and there are particularly requirements for e-books, where things like thumbnail versions of images become really important.
I went through a number of possible images (I shall send some out in my newsletter at some point for people to see the journey) and decided that if I’m going do this properly, I probably need professional help (insert your own joke here), so I went to a company, Blush, who I’ve used before in other capacities, and they did what I couldn’t, turned my ideas into a great book cover, which is the one you’ll find on the finished product in the Amazon store.
One thing I hate is waste though, and there’s a version of the cover (as we worked together on developing it) that I really loved, and suits the content of the book so well, so it’s included here at the top of this post for you to see. As time running out and different years and times are central to the narrative, I really liked the idea of incorporating this into the cover, but that’s me thinking as an author, and that’s the problem. The final great design you can see here is far better for drawing in the reader, is cleaner and easier to see and read in thumbnail, and the purpose of the cover of course, is to get you lovely people out there to buy the book. I just thought you might be interested in the process we went through, and some of the considerations that have to be taken into account in the creation. I can talk more about my experiments with different covers if anyone wants, fonts and Photoshop and all that. Just leave a comment if you’d like that.
Stay safe
Kit