Avoiding Work with More Covers

A long time ago I wrote an R-rated crime comedy screenplay called The Scenic Route, about a pair of directionally impaired bank robbers who get seriously lost during a getaway.  I self-published the screenplay for a while, but screenplay format is really not meant for ebooks, or for pleasure reading for anyone who isn't used to it.

Lately I've been thinking that A) I'd like to turn more of my screenplays into novellas, and B) if I toned the rating down to a PG or maybe PG-13, this story might make a fun companion volume to Harsh Climate.

Then today, I put Spirit in the Sky on continuous loop (it's my robbers' theme song) and started sketching, and ended up with a real nice, loose cover style for them.  It doesn't reduce down to thumbnail size as well as I'd like, so I'll have to tweak it.

Now... Harsh Climate has a good, generic thriller cover, but the cover does not fit the book.  And I don't want to work with photographs on any of my covers any more. I'm thinking this style will suit it much better.

So now I've got two more projects on my plate: a new cover for Harsh Climate (which I've been meaning to do anyway) and I've got to novelize a screenplay!

Sigh.

See you in the funny papers.

My New Short Story Covers

As I said last week, I need to redo my covers for my short fiction. My body of work looked like a total hodge podge.

Here are the original covers:

I wanted to go for a sketchy, woodcut look.  I was going to do hand drawn fonts for the template, and then a commercial font for the titles, but I could find no font that fit, and doing the individual titles and subtitles by hand, would be a LOT of work.

So I decided to just go with the Mick and Casey standard font - Copperplate. It's not rough like a woodcut but it does look engraved.

And here is the crazy kicker: when I tried out various fonts to go with it, I discovered that no sane font quite worked in combo with Copperplate either.

Copperplate is a display font, but it's also very simple.  It has a very serious, weighty aspect to it, like it should be used only for a nameplate on a Victorian bank.  It's a weird font - not just simple, but gothic. That is, there is no variation in the thickness of the lines. So even though it's a serif font, it looks sanserif.  It half blends in, and half stands out, and neither matches nor contrasts with others.

So in a fit of desperation I started trying whacky fonts, and by golly, the worst cliche of a font out there actually worked.  To me at least.

What's wrong with using Curlz?  Well, first it's hard to read. It's also one of those pretty, fancy fonts that every person who ever dotted their i's with a little heart uses to design party invitations. It's also so silly and curly that you hardly notice the ultra-serious gravitas of Copperplate.  It comes out like....

...like Jeeves and Wooster. 

Like Jeeves, Copperplate isn't as plain as it looks.  It isn't like Arial Black, which is so familiar it's completely invisible.  Copperplate is a unique display font that adds to the sense of branding.  And since it is the font of my name, as well as the identifying band at the top, it makes those the important part.  The solid base which supports the frivolous and sketchy title and art.

You'll notice that, as they say on Sesame Street, one of these things is not like the others: I made the Mick and Casey novelette different to tie it to the series.  I used the Mick and Casey logo for the art, and chose colors from Have Gun, Will Play.

My favorite of the designs here is the one for 5 Twists.  The concept seemed obvious and the simplicity of the design just makes it stand out to me.

My one concern is that these might stand out too much.  I want the crudeness and frivolous aspects to make this feel like minor works -- short stories, etc.  Might they overshadow the novels?

When I look at my Smashwords page, and a search on my name at Amazon, I can see all my titles laid out.  I do think that they work.  They don't overshadow the other covers, but they look good.  (They also make me want to upgrade Anna the Great, and Misplaced Hero. The other covers hold their own, but those now look the cheesiest.)

The purpose of this exercise was to upgrade the overall look of my body of work, when seen unsorted on a search page. I think it'll do.  The only other thing I really need to do is write more books in my various series so that the series look like something among all the other books.

See you in the funny papers.

Clearing Up My Mess of Covers

I've been increasingly bothered by how my covers look as a group, particularly in search at online bookstores (Amazon in particular.)

The thing about search is that you can't control the order in which books appear.  You can't put the "important" books up top and the ephemera down below.  That's ruled by one of Amazon's relevance algorithm: which uses a rolling number that has to do with all sorts of data, including the user's brosing history, and recent activity in general on the page.

So you can't control how your overall body of work is presented, and moreover, special promotions and cheap books are likely to pop to the top, regarless of how much their covers suck. Books in the same series will not appear together.  Books in the same genre will not appear together.

So... cheap books with covers that suck is a common problem in indie publishing, not because indies have no taste (though that is, alas, a factor) but because if you have a loss leader book out there, you can't afford to put a super expensive cover on it.  And if you write a lot of short stories... you don't want to spend huge amounts of cash on those covers.

And that's okay, mostly.

One big problem that has cropped up with traditional publishers as well as indies is that it is hard for the audience to tell the difference, at a glance, between a short story and a promotional price on a new novel.  This has been happening to a lot of big name authors:

They write a short story at the publisher's request as a promotional item. The publisher puts a spiffy cover on it, to "brand" it with the author's main series.... and even though the short is free or 99 cence, the audience is furious.  It looked like a new novel and they were expecting a new new, long read.

So when there is a cheap cover on a short story, it at least looks different from the novels.

Except, of course, that your cheap short stories get more traffic, so they and their sucky covers pop to the top of your book lists.

My problem is a little more complicated than that, though.

I don't just have different lengths and prices to juggle: I have  several series, different genres, as well as lengths.  I even have different ratings and age groups of the intended audience.

So as I was putting each book out, I was thinking about how to brand for each of these subcategories to help readers see exactly what they were getting.  And the result is... all of my covers are very different from one another. It doesn't create clarity, it creates confusion.

On the bright side, I created lots and lots of different kinds of covers, and that helps me experiment with what kind of look I want.

For the most part, I'm happy with the series novels. Their main problem is that I don't have multiple books in each series to make the portfolio look coherent. I particularly like what's going on with The Man Who and the Mary Alwyn books.  Mick and Casey and Misplaced Hero have something to build on.

So that's four different looks for my most important books.  The problem is that the rest of my books are scattered too.

And the short stories?  They're the ones that are all over the place, and they create a lot of the confusion. And they are the "cheap" set.  So they are up for re-design first.

The redesign has to be cheap and replicatable.  What I need is a template I can use for all of them.  The question is what kind of template.

Waiter is my most popular book -- even when it isn't free.  But that has a lot to do with the title. I use an almost identical layout and font for my least popular book, The Adventure of Anna the Great.  Meanwhile, Scattershale Gulch does okay, but it's trashy comic book cover design is the sore thumb here.  It might look okay if that was the template for all of them, but it's really a fussy design to work with.  And I don't think it's right for much of my short work.

The other two are simple, but they are so simple they kind of disappear.  If all the short covers were like them, they wouldn't look like a separate thing from the novel covers, they'd just blur the lines.

So I need distinct, cheap, simple.


As I was falling asleep the other day, though, I had one of those brilliant thoughts.  It was a visual thought, not a verbal one.  Woodcuts.  Take the basic layout I'm using for Waiter, but have the frames and lettering in a woodcut style, the middle frame can be for a simple symbolic image.  I can do a fourth frame as a narrow band across the top that says "short stories" or "novelette."

What you see here is a modified version: I don't have an upper frame for the title and then a middle one for an image or subtext.  I'm thinking that I will handle the title above, like the name below, and maybe doing art in a black band across the lower middle.

But I will worry about that when I get to the redesigns of individual books.

One of the reasons I like this, aside from the fact that it's easy, is that it has a literary "title page" look. Well, not what you see here -- I modified it from that. But the three frames on white or beige used to be a standard in many small and academic presses, especially low budget foreign presses.  And ESPECIALLY in Arts and Crafts small press printing.   They'd have nothing but plain text on the cover. Maybe a colophon and a pretty border for decoration at most.

I think that's appropriate for short fiction.

In the end I really won't know how this will affect sales.  Some of these books were free for a while this year, and they should be trickling back to priced soon.  That will affect sales.  The fact that I am getting more books out there will affect sales.  The phases of the moon will affect them too.

But for my own pride and sanity, I think it's worth an effort to untangle the mess in my portfolio of covers.  I am glad to have created them in the first place.  It's a learning curve, and the longer and more you do it the better you get at it.

See you in the funny papers.

---

 A Round of Words in 80 Days Update

This Segment's Progress:

Sunday Day 42 - 90 minutes
Monday Day 43 - 180 minutes
Tuesday Day 44 - I didn't record.  But I'm sticking a fork in ToF for the time being. The last two episodes need work, but we'll do that when I get back to the formatting and editing pass.

Tomorrow, I might start a transition toward word counts again, as I take up Devil in a Blue Bustle.

Fun with Covers (and a storm delay)

I'm blaming Hurricane Sandy.

I had to skip an episode Monday because of computer problems.  But I was also having a certain level of creative problems, too. I realize there are some things I have to stop and focus on.

Which is the whole basis of my next set of goals: focus.  So, given that everybody is distracted by the Big Storm (and a whole lot of people may not even have power or internet for a while) I have decided to skip this whole week on Test of Freedom.

I'll talk more about how this focus thing is going to work for this story tomorrow when I post the new goals.  In the meantime, here's the illustration I did for the ep.  I had to do it at the last minute, and so I just hunted down a period engraving for a reference, and recomposed and drew.  I like working with black and white and gray.

On the good side: the prequel to the story, The Wife of Freedom, is finally being offered for FREE on the  Amazon Kindle Store! (In the U.S. anyway.  International stores don't often match the prices the way the U.S. store does.) Other stores where it's already free: Barnes and Noble, Sony, Deisel, Kobo, and in every format at Smashwords.

This sale lasts until Thanksgiving. (Some retailers will continue to offer the free price for a while after that, but I can't predict how long.)

The Case of the Misplaced Hero, almost published.

Okay so here it is, the first final cover of The Case of the Misplaced Hero.  I hoped to have it published by the time you see this, but the computer issues kinda cascaded into that project too. I should have it done by the end of the day, however, and I'll do an official announcement on Thursday.

I'm pleased with the cover concept -- basically characters from the header illustrations, enlarged and polished up.  The type in the logo gave me trouble: I really like that font for the title... but it's so thin that it doesn't up and down-scale well.  Since the upload copy has to be high-rez, it's a long way down from 1600 pixels to 100.

I tried a number of things, but I finally did the one thing I never would have thought of:  I exported as a jpeg at full resolution and then resized the jpeg.

Resizing a jpeg is normally not recommended at all, ever.  I mean, seriously, you just don't resize a jpeg if you can avoid it because every time you re-save it, it recompresses and you lose a little more of the image quality.

But for taking a high rez print image with text, and shrinking it down to the tiniest thumbnail, it works better than resizing the Photoshop file, or resizing a png.

What you see here is actually still legible even at half the size. (Though the smallest text is just barely legible). The little figures across the middle still look like figures, though it's harder to see what they are doing.  But then, they are a design feature, and it doesn't matter if you can see their details in the thumbnail.

Random Pre-Designed Covers

I hope, in January or so, to start selling pre-designed book covers.

For that you need more than a portfolio of designs, you need stock to sell.  So I'm foodling around a little here and there.

I really like the design to the right ("BlueYellowSmear1"), even though it doesn't feel like any particular genre.  It's more abstract and fine arty, so I'm not sure if there is a market for it.  Still, there are a lot of writers, and stories, which don't have a genre.  And something like this has a literary feel, so who knows?

That is one of the problems with pre-designed covers: you have to have an idea of a niche or audience who wants them.

Still, I like the idea of doing the art on spec because most of the cost of designing a book cover -- that is, the billable hours for the artist's time -- is taken up by going back and forth with the client trying to get the thing right.

I'm assuming that is why Joe Konrath's cover guy went to "pre-designed" covers rather than doing work on commission.  It's a better deal for everyone.

So the question is whether I can find my niche, to fit my skills to a demand.

This other cover, "FireMoon." is an image I posted earlier.  Just something I did off the cuff, which doesn't stand alone as art at all.  But when I put it together with type, I like how it came out.  It's got kind of a 'retro' meets 'out of date' look.

This look is has to do with how the font matches the design. They're both just a touch simple and ugly in a way that works together.  The font is Apple's Capitals font, which is a sucky system font available only to Mac users.  Using a different font would have a different effect.

This one would probably be a "bargain basement" type work, though. It's a very specific image that may be hard to match.

That's it for this week's images.  Next week we'll have another Miss Leech cartoon.

See you in the funny papers.

Test of Freedom - Story Notes and Concept Art

Yesterday was the first episode of Test of Freedom, so I don't have  a lot to say in terms of story notes, except for about the art, and also a spoiler warning:

If you are reading Wife of Freedom -- or are interested in reading it soon -- and if spoilers matter to you: Thursday's episode contains a spoiler for certain events that happen in the middle section of Wife of Freedom.

In the meantime....

I was very unhappy with the illo for yesterday's episode.  (Here it is for those who don't want to click back and look.)  I have too many different style ideas in my head.  I wanted to go for a more abstract, more primitive, and more contrasty look. I ended up with the opposite of nearly everything I was going for.

My original goal was to create an illustrated cap with the episode number in it.  I wanted it to be a woodcut, and to capture the awkward roughness of period woodcuts.   But I didn't account for the fact that period woodcuts were often AWFUL designs -- especially when they are an actual illustration, and not purely decorative.  They don't often make good use of negative space (that is, the space between things) and don't have a lot of contrast either -- working with line rather than shape a lot of the time.

Modern woodcuts (or woodcut-style design) are what I really should have been going for.

I also had decided that I would create black and white designs.... and when I got the thing mostly done, I found it too low contrast. It was boring, so I added a wash of color.  Originally like some hand painted woodcut prints I had seen, but I decided to go with colors that were compatible with the blog design.  And to make them brighter.  The fact is, both color schemes were ugly.

And since I had this spiffing idea for a representational illo, I also chose to do something too complicated.  And because it was complicated, I made my biggest mistake: I created it at a higher resolution, so I could get more control over the 'etching' marks.  But I lost too much detail in downsizing.  These dingbats are not going for print, I need to create them at the size they will be.  That's the only way to get the detail level right.

I figure I have two choices.  One is to go for the colorful style of the book covers for the series, which I might do, but I think the better choice would be to go back to black and white - and if I want anything more, might add a shade of flat gray.  I'm going to play with the style for the next couple of weeks.  I really do want to create some repeating motifs that make use of black and white.

Concept Covers!

In the meantime, I mocked up a draft of the cover for the ebook version of Test of Freedom.  I've got a lot of work to do on the image of the bowed prisoners on the lower left.  I like the concept of the one looking up, while the others are down, but I don't like the composition yet -- it's too busy.  It looked really good in a pencil sketch, but it's hard to do that kind of overlapping repeating shape in the simple color scheme I've chosen.  (I also did a better job with the pose in the pencil sketch. I'll have to look at it again, and consider how to translate it.)

What I really do like, though is the red figure up top.  That's Rocken, a character you will meet somewhere around Episode 13, I think. (I may reorder some episodes.)  He's an important character: dangerous, scary, and ... oddly reasonable.  A self-aware villain.

The chemistry between Rocken and Jackie drive an awful lot of what goes on for the whole trilogy of stories.  Which is why this image is like it is.  The other figures are bowed, with one looking up.  But he's not just looking up, he's looking at Rocken.

The Misplaced Hero Cover Mock-up

I also did a mock up cover for The Misplaced Hero.  This is truly just a mock up, because I basically just grabbed figures from the various illustrations I posted here.  But that led me to see what I wanted the concept to be.  Those little individual figures are like little bits of story. An abstraction of the idea of a serial -- bits of episodes.

I want to go for this "visual anthology" look.

I'm still working on every aspect of it, from the colors and composition to the fonts, but I do like the concept.  (I am unhappy with the idea that the font which worked so well for a web graphic logo simply doesn't resize well enough to be an ebook cover.  I may fiddle it in Illustrator, though, and see if I can save it.)

One old-timey concept that could work with this design is to have an oval at the upper center, which would make the figure of Alex with the sword stand out more -- and then have the tiny figures arranged around that.  (I'll probably make those tiny figures larger, though they don't have to fully recognizable in the tinier thumbnail.)

The last thing I need to do is see if I can get a sub-title in there.  I third bit of text tends to look good on a book cover -- especially this banded style of book cover.  I still haven't decided on the series name, though.  I will probably go with some blurb about being the collected episodes of a web serial.

In the meantime, I need to get to bed.

See you in the funny papers.

Art - What I'm Doing (and Adventure Magazine)

I mentioned that I was doodling out an "illustrated cap." I was just talking about the letter part of this illustration you see at left. (Or is that to the right? I never can keep them straight... Left!) I did the background just fiddling with layers and brushes and cycling colors. I have fun with that "grass" brush, I have to admit.

I didn't do this for any reason other than that I want to start playing with hand drawn letter forms, because fonts don't always do what you like with every letter. I've come across a few times when I had a look I wanted except that the capital C was weird, and since my name starts with C, that sinks the font for my cover design.

I'm possibly thinking of doing my name as a logo.

In the meantime, "A" stands for Adventure Magazine. I came across a few issues of Adventure on Archive.org. The three issues in question were from 1921, 1935 and 1949 (though the last was mislabeled as 1945). As the title suggests, Adventure was a pulp magazine of men's adventure stories (before "Men's Adventure" became code for "soft porn" -- although there were plenty of those at the time too). The stories were often sea adventures with pirates, but they were also westerns, or hard-boiled detective, or even knights and broadswords tales. I think I saw one spy/war story.

Many of these types of magazines were illustrated, some just had illustrations at the start of each story, some no internal illustrations at all -- just a cover, and ads. Adventure had illustrations for most stories, and something extra: Dingbats!

At the start of every section break in a chapter (but not the chapter headings themselves) they had a little illustration set into the corner of the type like an illustrated capital. Not very big at all. Maybe three quarters of an inch square.


In the three issues I saw, only a few of these dingbats were reused, but I suspect that most of them saw use in multiple stories and issues. For those of you who don't know why clip art is called "clip" art, the reason was because you might have a book or sheets of these kinds of things, and you'd clip them out and literally paste them in with paste when you did your layout.

If you look at the globe in the selection above, you can see that the shadows made by the cut edge has made it into the image itself. (They are too thick for that to have been a first generation of those cut lines. Likely those lines were very fine at first, but got reproduced and reproduced.)

I don't know what attracts me to these sorts of little images, but I adore little illustrations which enhance the book without really being quite illustrations. Many magazines and books used to have chapter headers which were partly decorative and partly illustration too. And I keep thinking about how these kinds of simple black and white drawings could look really spiffy on an ereader -- even a monochrome Kindle.

So doing something like these may become one of my drawing day projects.

I'll sign off with a word about Archive.org:

Archive.org is a clearing house or aggregator for libraries and archives and sites like Project Gutenberg, where they make all sorts of public domain media available -- from video and audio clips, to old magazines. They are really raw, though. Unlike Gutenberg, which has volunteers constantly working on proofing and upgrading the files, I swear that most of the magazines I find on Archive.org are raw scans which have been automatically OCRed and processed into ebook form without correction. So I usually download the whole set of raw scans to do my reading from those. It is MUCH easier to read them that way.

See you in the funny papers.

Monday Art - What I'm Working On

One of the sad things about ebooks is that it has to look reasonably good as a thumbnail.

And this goes against everything you get trained in if you learned to do art for print. Art for print is all about looking good in high-rez. For one thing, if you draw something too small, and then scale it up, it looks awful -- all pixelated.

And this is something you learn very strictly not to do -- not even to think about it. Except....

With ebooks, the most important images are the small, low-rez ones. That's what everybody's going to see all the time. It's either going to be the 100 x 150 thumbnail, or the somewhat larger image on the product page, usually around 200 x 300.

And here's the thing that makes it sad -- textures are in. And textures really don't scale. If they look good at a high resolution, they disappear completely in thumbnail. Or they become muddy and strange.

Now, when I say "texture" I don't mean it quite the way we do in out in the real world. Among ordinary humans, the word "texture" means a tactile surface -- bumpy or smooth or something you can feel. But in digital art, texture has come to an image where the surface has a pattern or color variations. It may appear to be stained or faded or discolored, or marbled like stone, or with woodgrain. It's basically just a surface.

(That's the reason we started calling it a "texture." In the early days of 3-D animation, the objects were smooth, and so to get the appearance of a texture, you would draw a picture that looked textured, and you'd apply it to the surface.)

Textures are really in vogue right now. You'll see scrapes and smudges even on "conservative" things like ads for banks and insurance companies. You'll see some really spiffy ones on modern print books. They add a lot of quick visual interest to plain, abstract designs. But like I said, they don't scale.

So I've decided to play around with creating textures which would scale. And I've decided the way to start is by going against the rules and starting out by creating the texture small -- at 200 pixels by 300 pixels, then upscaling them to 600 x 900 to do the details that matter most at a higher resolution. Because I started small, the main gist of the texture stays visible when it is then reduced back down to 100 x 150.

The two blue images here show one example. On the left is a close up of the higher rez version of the image, and on the right is the thumbnail of the whole image.

It's dark because I was experimenting with text, and it looks good with white or very light text on it. However, because I did it in layers -- with the texture itself in grayscale, and a blending layer to add the color, I can make it lighter or darker or a different color (or a number of different colors) to suit the mood. With some settings it looks icy, others it looks like stone. With the right red it can look bloody. I could also invert it so that the streaks in the foreground are dark, and the smudgy background is light.

The other cool thing about a texture is that it can be applied to something else. You may have seen it on some modern thriller covers. A scraped up grunge texture might be applied to a silhouette of a gun, for instance. Here you see a mock cover made using that design above. I dulled the texture so the text and the silhouette would stand out.

This, I think, could be a very nice technique for making memorable but quick short story covers. Once the texture is done, it's very quick to play with it, and knock out a whole bunch of covers like the one on the right. (I'm tempted, actually, to offer to do such covers in return for proofing.)

I'm thinking I may replace my cover for Harsh Climate with something like it. While that's one of my spiffier covers, it doesn't necessarily suit the book that well, and I don't want to use photos or stock on anything I use any more.

The textures I did here, I knocked out in Photoshop with some grunge brushes. Next week I think I'll play with Painter for some less "canned" effects.

See you in the funny papers.

Monday Covers: Light and Dark

This week I was jazzed by two covers. Neither of them were adult mysteries, but if I were to see these covers in the mystery section, I'd pick them up in a second.

The Apothecary is a children's book (middle-readers). It has mystery and magic, and it is historical -- but from the 1950s, rather than the Victoran/Edwardian era the title and art evokes.

The artwork here reminds me, indirectly, of Edward Gorey. I haven't decided how. But it sets a mood: dark and imaginative, but with a certain simplicity. It suits a children's book, and IMHO, it really suits a great old-school cozy mystery. A lot of modern cozies do go for this mood.

I was thinking about why I like this sense of simplicity and I finally put my finger on it. Great cozies and great children's books have two things in common: they have moral clarity, but they have a subtly twisted world view which allows for a lot of complexity inside the broad brush strokes of a slightly cartoony world.

The Sisters Brothers has another simplified and moody cover. I love this because it makes great use of pure design. The shapes are all symbol and/or text. The text itself uses modern typographical design -- stacking the words of the title to make a neat box, and then throwing some grunge "distressing" over the top. The characters are each holding a gun, but that hand/gun shape is almost like a typographical symbol of some sort. Their bodies make a big black "M" shape, which works with the two triangles of the nose in the moon/skull behind the. (As well as giving the moon/skull a more skull shape.)

And of course, the heads are the eyes of that moon/skull, complete with hats for eyelids, and their own eyes act as the pupil of the background figure.

The colors -- red, black and off-white -- I just love what they do with so little. The whole thing screams dark crime comedy, and that appears to be exactly what it is. From the description, it sounds like it's darker than I would really enjoy but this cover certainly gets me to look at the description and maybe a sample.

See you in the funny papers.

Monday Covers: Evocative Images and Little Text

For these "Monday Cover" posts, I sometimes just browse through the Shelf Awareness newsletter for the more attractive or interesting cover in the bunch. This time, while I saw a couple of good nonfiction covers, I almost despaired of finding anything interesting in the fiction area....

Until I got down to the paid "advertioral" section. There at the very bottom, was this evocative cover for When The Dust Finally Settles.

The first thing that strikes me is the fact that it's both dark, and vibrant. The colors are all secondary colors, all blended, but still highly saturated: green, red-violet, yellow-orange. That alone evokes a muted intensity, something under the surface. The buildings and details up at the top are crowded, and yet lonely in the fact that there is a field between us and those buildings. It's lush with green, but feels barren in the stark, unidentifiable rows. (It could be rows of moss for all we can tell.)

Little (or No) Text

Here is something for the e-publishers to think about: We all talk about how we have to have a legible cover in thumbnail; use big fonts so you can see the title and author.

And yet, note also that the title here is small.

But Seth Godin has pointed out that with an ebook it doesn't really matter. It's not an actual physical cover -- it's a "product image" which goes next to the title on the page. He's leaving text off his ebook covers altogether now, and just going with an image.

I'm not sure I agree with him. The problem with leaving all text off the cover is that it confuses the issue. It's supposed to be a picture of the product. If the product is a book, well, a book has text on the cover. (This is why ebook-only publishers sometimes put little blurbs in tiny illegible text on ebooks covers -- to make them look like paperbacks) . A picture without text confuses the reader as to what they're getting. Is it a print or painting? Or are they getting the item depicted? If you write a book about a clown, the customer can't tell at a glance whether they are getting a clown costume, or a DVD of a clown's performance, or what.

That's why proportions are important as well. Last week, when I went looking for links for those short story recommendations, I kept coming across video and audio adaptations and spin-offs. In some cases it was hard to find the original book. The only thing that helped was that the CDs and DVDs and such were all different dimensions.

Right now, it's great to use the freedom we have to deviate from the norm... but we're still trying to communicate here. What will a "book" look like when there are no more physical books? I have a feeling we'll still be using some of these unnecessary elements as a cultural signal.

Evoking Other Books, Evoking A Genre.

The other thing I wanted to talk about with this cover is what it evokes intellectually.

The book is described thusly: "Narrated in part by a ghost, When the Dust Finally Settles is a novel focused on land, loyalty, and Southern racial politics in 1968."

I'm not a big fan of the Southern Gothic, but I am fond of its cousin, a genre you could call "Northern Noir." Things like the movie Fargo, and also like Archer Mayor's police procedural novels about a team of detectives in Vermont.

And that cover above immediately reminded me of a set of the older covers from the Mayor series:


I always really really loved these covers. I wanted to collect the whole set of Mayor's books with them. But alas they changed the style, and the later books never saw a cover like these.

The cover of When The Dust Finally Settles evokes the same feeling via the saturated colors and the countryside subject matter. The use of pattern within rows. The colors here are brighter and closer to primary colors, but there's a lot more black to mute them.

The other element that draws these covers together is the primitive style. The Mayor books are woodcuts, the one up top has the odd off-set proportions of a an American primitive painter. They both evoke the folk art of a deep-rooted culture.

Will I buy that book up top? Probably not. Like I said, it doesn't sound like it's quite my cuppa. Nothing against it, though, and that cover DID put it on my radar in a positive way. I'll grab a sample, and even if I never get around to reading that, the author and book will be in my mind when I hear about them another time.

See you in the funny papers.

Monday Covers - Perry Mason and The Case of the Cozy Thrillers

I always find it interesting to look at mystery covers from the Golden Age of mystery. Nowadays, cozies have very different covers from thrillers and hard-boiled mystery -- and the books are very different too.

But back in the day, a mystery was a mystery. And I'm always surprised when I look at older covers and see how much more, well, thrillerish they used to be.

The other day I happened across some Perry Mason covers from the 1960's. These are some of the ugliest covers I've ever seen, but that's the sixties, you know? What interests me is that, just as with modern thrillers, the typography dominates. Who cares what's on the cover as long as you know it's a Perry Mason novel?


The striking difference between these and a modern best seller is the fact that the author name is tiny. The title is mid-sized. The main character name is huge. Of course, this is reasonable, after all by 1965, Perry Mason was not only a popular book series, but had been a big radio show and TV show. (Trivia: When CBS first wanted to put Perry Mason on TV, they wanted to make it a soap opera. Gardner wouldn't allow it, so they created a thinly veiled rip off, The Edge of Night, a very popular show which ran for 30 years.)

While the dominant type reminds me of a modern thriller, though, the images don't (they don't remind me of anything much current). And I can't say these are representative of much of anything. So I went hunting around a little further. Here are a couple of other Earl Stanley Gardner covers from just a tad earlier, 1958 and 1962.



The one of the left looks like modern Chicklit; on the right, it looks glitzier and more hard-boiled (which I think the A.A. Fair brand was trying to do -- although I haven't read the Bertha Cool books myself.) And while the first two are ugly as sin, both of these are actually rather attractive covers. Sure the woman from The Count of 9 looks very sixties in her make up and foundation garments, but otherwise there is a neat modern look to both of them. The only problem for a modern book is that The Case of the Terrified Typist doesn't look like a mystery cover. And I don't know that it did then either.

A well-established series can do what it wants -- the series IS the genre.

I decided to go looking for other authors, maybe looking for something a little more Golden Age. My own memories of these books, when I first read them as a child, were mostly of used hardbacks with no dust cover at all.

But I have vague memories of more thrilling covers, so I went searching wider, and look at these covers I found of Christie, Sayers and Queen books:


While there are aspects of these covers which are common with the modern cozy mystery, these look a lot more thrilling. They are suspense covers. They're for books you read on a dark and stormy night. They're... dangerous.

These days, cozies are seen as a separate genre from suspense. They have a reputation for being very safe (even when they're not). But once they were dangerous; the point of a cozy was not to stay in the light, but to look in the shadows and see that Evil lurks even in the sunniest of locations.

I don't think it's really a change in content. And certainly the writers and readers are still looking for the danger that lurks in the shadows. It's a marketing thing. Somebody -- someone who didn't even like cozy mysteries, I swear -- decided that the key hook to the whole genre was clean bright safety.

I understand it, really. Suspense and thrillers have moved into horrific territory these days. And I understand why the audience might want to be assured that the book is not going to be grueling and horrifying. But at the same time, frankly, you don't need to package something as G-rated just to assure me it's not R-rated.

I write silly, frivolous mysteries, but I really would like it if I knew people looked forward to reading them on a dark and stormy night. To me, that's what "cozy" means -- the night is dark, the house is creaking and the wind howling, and you're cozied up under blanket with a good book, a cat and a cup of cocoa.

Tomorrow, I'll talk about short fiction and recommend some authors and a few specific stories.

See you in the funny papers.

Monday Covers - Covers for Starling and Marquette

I'm still busy trying to get The Man Who Did Too Much done, so this is a short post for Cover Monday: just a look at the thumbnails of the covers for the first three books in the series.

If you remember, I decided to go for a more old fashioned abstract 50's hip kind of look (inspired by Anatomy of a Murder). And this design really seemed suited for Adobe Illustrator -- which I wanted to play with this week.

I also happened to find a shareware font on DaFont which had exactly the look I want. Mostly modern, with just a suggestion of retro cool. Curse Casual is by J.V. Enaguas.

I like this concept for a whole lot of reasons, but one of them is how well it can adapt for a series style, so that's why I played with doing three books all together. (I know the titles and concepts for the next two.)



In the first book, the main victim is shot (and this one still needs a little tweaking on the space between the title and image). In the second: the vic was done in by a fall down the stairs.

The third book will involve "Clean Boot Hunting" (or possibly drag hunting -- haven't made up my mind) - as George volunteers himself as the "fox" in a fox hunt. I really haven't worked out the crime yet, but I'm assuming the body will be found in the woods (so face down in an implied ditch seems good).

Here's where a dilemma kicks up: A cozy mystery about clean boot "fox" hunting suggests all sorts of wonderful ideas for covers. But if you want to go for a consistent series style, you can't just run willy-nilly after opportunities presented by a single book. (However, single books can give you ideas that may adapt well to the others, too.)

One additional thing I like about this cover concept: in The Man Who Did Too Much, Karla, who sees everything though a lens of old movies and TV shows, sometimes describes George as "The Saint" or as "Roger Moore." (To which George responds, "I haven't the grace to be Roger Moore." But Karla assures him, "Movies aren't about reality.")

And The Saint, of course, is really the most famous of those minimalist abstract designs for mysteries of the mid-century.

That little stick figure featured in all the books as well as the movies and TV shows. It was like the Scarlet Pimpernel's seal -- a little signature he would leave on notes for the bad guys, designed to scare the bejabbers out of them.

It's an effective "brand" for the hero inside the book, and it sure was an effective one for the books and TV show, etc. And I think that's part of why something so simple and repetitive attracts me. (When I look at the flavor of the font from the credit card here, I can see why I immediately responded to that Curse Casual font.)

Tomorrow, I'll tell you about my next writing Dare effort, via A Round of Words in 80 Days, an organized dare which is on-going, and more flexible than NanoWriMo.

See you in the funny papers.

Monday Covers

This week, when I opened my Shelf-Awareness newsletter, I was struck by four covers immediately.

Well, five if you count the biography of Snowman - the greatest horse that ever lived. But I'm not looking at non-fiction unless I think it would be a great fiction cover. In this case, it's not a particularly exciting cover even for non-fiction -- but it does the job because if you already know the story of Snowman, then a white horse jumping over a title "The Eighty Dollar Champion" tells you all you need to know. And if you don't know the story... well, it still tells you most of what you need to know.

Favorite horse stories aside....


I took an immediate shine to this all-text cover of George Pelecanos' new book. It's a unique typographical opportunity to have such a short title, and to be able to fill half the cover with it. Even with the little blurbs, it looks very uncluttered. (In looking at other versions of the cover, I find that when they added a gray medallion next to "George" for the blurb, it then started looking ordinary again. This is a touchy thing.)

The straight black and white, with the retro-hip orange as the only color, has a modern feel -- especially with the very plain sanserif font. Usually pure font/color covers come to look dated quickly. Those elements tend to be subtle, but are very prone to designer fashion. However, the fact that the font is so very clean, and there is only one color, this one may stand the test of time longer. (Does it need to? No. The name "Pelecanos" is what is iconic. This cover is not.)


Okay, I have to admit that I think this cover for The Twelfth Enchantment is just about the worst cover I've seen from a professional in a long time.

The background illustration is fine. It's pretty standard, actually - for an historical, romance or literary. I don't recognize it, but it has the look of a public domain "classic." Using PD images is also pretty standard, especially with literary fiction, so not really a problem there.

The problem is ... what the heck is going on with all the scattered paper? It's ugly. You can't read the title in thumbnail, and even when you can read it, it isn't obvious what you're seeing is supposed to be the title. Luckily, with ebooks, you see the title right next to the cover, so you know. But if you see this in a vacuum? All four of the pieces of paper have equal weight, and the one you see first and best is "enchantment." Is that meant a illustration or text?

It reminds me of the 40's movie motif -- where the newspaper pages would swirl at you and calendar leaves would float by. Or worse yet, a bulletin board. It does not bring to mind any of the things they mention for this book: fantasy (god no), romance (litter is romantic?), historical (not if it isn't a 40's hard-boiled newspaper drama), thriller (a regency dame attacked by static cling?).

There is a slightly later Victorian style this could have emulated, but that painting blows that choice out of the water. (They should go for etchings if that's what they want.) This may well illustrate something that goes on in the story well, but if you have to read the story before you "get" the cover, the cover fails.


This cover for Trackers does a nice job of telling you right off: African thriller. The overall image says "Thriller" with color and lack of detail. The Rhino says "Africa."

What I really note though, is the typography. It doesn't quite bleed off the page, but it fully uses the space with almost no buffer at all. The tracking (space between letters) is very tight, and there is negative leading (the space between lines). The only place it has buffer is in the lower right, where DEON blends in a little with the red-orange above -- the little bit of black on the right margin helps make the N more legible (and if you do it to the N, you have to do it to the R below that).

Text that goes all the way to the edge like that is a tricky thing for printed works. There is little margin for error for the exact cut line. For an image, you can just use a "bleed" where the image extends a little beyond the edge of the image so you can't tell if you cut a little wrong. But text? Text has defined edges. If you miss the cut by even the tiniest amount, you screw it up.

(So Indie Authors? You can do this with your ebook covers, but if you are going for print, modify your design.)


This last cover, for Duty Free, stands out for me because it suggests two genres but doesn't quite fit either. Instead it seems to merge them. I hope the style is coming into fashion, because it is attractive.

The first genre it suggests to me is chick lit. Chicklit these days usually has a vector drawing of an attractive woman. While a lot of designs put more emphasis on the legs, but the woman is always prominent, and if she isn't happy, she's at least doing something which is a part of the chick dream-life.

This is not a vector drawing, but it is heavily posterized (that is simplified to flat color areas). The woman may not be classic chick lit, but she does suggest a happy woman shopping or traveling -- having a chick adventure. (Plus the font suggests chick lit all over the place.)

The other genre this suggests to me is the lighter end of the more highbrow kind women's books: non-fiction adventures. Travel, biography, cultural experiences. The covers for these are usually photographs of the location or subject -- suggesting it's about the experience and observations of the character more than the character.

From the description, this book is pure chick lit -- but the main character is a Pakistani society woman. Chick lit which, for Americans, also broadens your horizons. So, imho, it's good that it reminds a little of each genre.

Well, that's it for covers this week.

See you in the funny papers

Creating the Cover: At Last A Cover For My Hardest Book!

(For new readers, this is a continuation of my series about creating a cover. Most of this post is a "standalone" but you may want to catch up with my first post in the series, about using Amateur Illustration as a Brand.)

I now have eight books, each with a completely different style of cover. And I have two more coming which will have completely different styles yet. And the genres of the books are also all over the place. So much for branding....

And yet a part of this is the learning curve. The books have somthing in common: my voice. And what I'm doing now is finding my visual voice. And this week I think I've found it, at least for my most "off-genre" books.

The Wife of Freedom is my toughest book to put a cover to. It's all genres and no-genres. When I sat down to write it, I deliberately threw off the idea of publication. I knew I wanted to write something without world-building or historical detail. I wanted to write a pure story. It's like a play on a stage -- with good costumes and props, but if the actors don't touch it, it either isn't there, or it's a dim painted backdrop which suggests more than it shows.

I wanted to do this partly as a reaction against the fashion of the time, in which setting overwhelmed everything in a story. In fantasy and science fiction, it was all elaborate world-building and magic systems, in historical fiction it was all time period and setting. Not that I'm against these things. It's just that it got to be the Monty Python spam sketch. Publishers needed books to be longer and bigger, and were demanding more stuff in every kind of story. And everywhere you went, everybody was pushing it, workshops talking about how important it was to include more "spam" in every dish. Writers pushing each other to find ways to slip more in. It was almost like an loyalty oath or something. Those who didn't like it, were lectured on being lazy or unsophisticated. I began to feel like I was in a cult.

But there was another reason I wanted to cut the story free of those kinds of expectations, and that was what was really on my mind: I really like folklore and traditional storytelling. Fairy tales don't take place in a specific kingdom. They have no historical accuracy or even consistency. They're like dreams -- they use what's useful and throw the rest away. And I wanted to capture that but in a regular story.

And it still might have been okay if I had written it as a fantasy, but I didn't have a story to tell about magic. I had a story about people.

Ah, but how to explain to anyone just what the heck it is? It's not a fantasy (though it takes place in an unreal world), it's not an historical (though it is like an historical), it's a love story which is decidedly not a romance.

And given all of the above (especially since I wrote it to be NOT publishable), it was the obvious choice to self-publish when I first heard about Kindle publishing.

Except, your first book is your "learning experience" book. Yikes! Blurb and cover are a real challenge for that book! I first did the obvious with a classic painting (public domain). Then I tried going for symbolism with a coin-like image. (After all part of Mary's problem is that she is seen by others as a symbol more than as who she is.) But the art really didn't convey the concept, and it just looked ugly.

But heck, it's not a book which sells much anyway. Maybe once every two months. No Big. Just forget about it.

The along comes this series of blog posts: The Misplaced Hero cover and all my efforts to come up with a brand for it. So there I am, studying period samples, and WPA posters and sitting in on these lectures in the Digital Illustration by a wonderful illustrator.... and things start clicking. And last week, the big click happened.

I had just posted last week's post about WPA posters, and that very next day, the lectures were on color. And we were looking at examples of connotations and denotations of color, and color schemes and the various kinds of contrast and balance -- like contrast of hue, or contrast of value or contrast of saturation.

And one of the examples was a logo with a child sitting in a tree. It was a stylized silhouette, and the foreground and background were just two different values of the same or similar hue.

"Oh," says I. "Oh! Wait...OH!"

I had this flash of the "Save Your Eyes" poster from last week's WPA post. That background bit with the workers in silhouette in a darker yellow-orange, separated from the paler yellow background only by hue.

And suddenly I had this experience like on the TV show, CHUCK, where the intersect kicks in and all those relevant images just go flashing through Chuck's head and he suddenly knows what he needs to know. (And he always comes out of the flash saying, "Oh. Oh! OH!" like an eager monkey.)

Flash. My main character, Mary Alwyn is like that child in a tree. Flash. The whole story is designed to be like a play -- like the plays the WPA sponsored. Flash. Her husband is a writer of political tracts. Flash. Politics, woodcuts. The WPA is the wrong period, except (biggest flash) it can't be the wrong period, because there is no period. If anything this story is supposed to be like one period filtered through the eyes of many other generations. COOL!

But the intersect kept working for me, because after I got this designed, I began to worry. Is it too much like where I'm going with The Misplaced Hero and other Awarshi stories? They're really going to look similar compared to the different style of the Mick and Casey covers, and my mystery covers. What can I do to separate them?

And that's when the final thing hit me.

They may not be the same series, but they sure are the same genre. Yes, the Awarshi stories are more swashbuckling and Mary's stories are more melodrama -- but both come from the same well. They both come from an imaginary dream place which is not magical or fantasy, but not realistic. Built of old-fashioned genres and remembered images rather than facts.

Of course I should brand them the same way. My other books -- the mysteries, and a fantasy I have coming out this fall, have at least one foot planted in a commercial genre, so they should have covers which at least suggest those genres. Mary Alwyn and the Misplaced Hero are their own genre -- and it's good that they feed off each other.

A while ago I posted about being a newbie and a neo-pro, and how you gain perspective as you go. This goes for covers and branding too. You have a single book, and you worry about presenting that book. You have a second book, and you realize that you should have planned ahead, because that first cover was tough, and matching it will be even tougher. And as you get more books, you begin to think beyond that, and see how your worries didn't matter. And maybe you see something you overlooked in part of your overall brand.

So in that neo-pro post, I quoted Dean Wesley Smith stating that he wasn't accepted as a "real" pro until he had ten published books, and he didn't understand why until he'd written ten more. This is like that. You can't see the whole picture until you get enough pieces.

When you've got a lifetime of all different sorts of things scattered all over your career like I do, it's really nice to see those pieces start to fall into place. It takes time, and you begin to think that big picture is kind of a myth, a holy grail. Something you'll never really see.

It's lovely when you actually start to see it.

As I said in the last post, I'll be taking a break from posting for a couple of weeks. I'll just post Write-a-thon updates and jokes every Tuesday and Friday. I may post some art if I have something new, though I won't talk about it until August.

See you in the funny papers!

Oh, and you can check out The Wife of Freedom and its new cover at Amazon's Kindle Store, or at Amazon UK, or in multiple formats at Smashwords. (It is also available from Barnes and Noble, Kobo and the Sony Bookstores, but the cover hasn't filtered through yet.)

Creating a Cover: Looking at WPA Posters

Some may be wondering about how long it's taking for me to do a cover for a 99 cent novelette, which hasn't even been written yet. It doesn't actually take that long to do a cover. I'm doing two things here -- I'm using this as a jumping off point for various subjects, and I'm also going through the creative process of developing a brand.

The period for this alternate world story is what I call "Golden Years of Silent Movies" or approx 1914 to 1927. But it isn't an actual historical so I'm not worried about evoking an exact year. Going for general Art Deco feel is the main thing.... and it was a little later that Art Deco really hit the pop culture end of design.

And for ebook designers in particular, it doesn't hurt to look at the wonderful posters by the Works Progress Administration (later Work Projects Administration). Most people these days don't know too much about the WPA. You may live in a town with a post office built by it -- although that old building may have been converted to a restaurant or something else by now.

During the Great Depression, the WPA acted as form of stimulus, hiring people to do works for the public good of all kinds. Not just building roads and buildings, either. One fun story I heard in grad school is that there was a program to provide manual labor for archeaological digs for colleges. Later on, some of the road construction managers complained that their workers, whenever they found an artifact, would set up a grid system and carefully record all the finds in the road way! (Unfortuantely, in later years, archaeologists came to realize that just recording the locations of items wasn't as important as a whole lot of other things they could do in studying soil, etc. And it probably would have been better to not dig the sites at all. The roadways, though, they would have been destroyed anyway.)

Among the creative people the WPA hired were writers, musicians, actors, jugglers, and yes, artists. The writers and musicians largely went out and recorded folkways and oral histories (and unlike the archaeology, much of what they recorded would have been lost if they hadn't done so). The artists, though, made posters. All kinds of posters, safety warnings, travel posters -- lots and lots and lots of travel posters. The idea was to help small communities struggling in the depression.

The posters were largely woodcuts, with simplified colors and style, and are largely a lesson in design. This safety poster is a lesson in itself. Everything about it is clear, even in thumbnail. The goggles at the center make a striking image. They are the only white in the image other than the unprinted boarder, and where they aren't white, they are blue -- which is the compliment, or opposite color to the predominant orange of the rest of the image. You don't even have to read the subtitle "use your goggles" because "SAVE YOUR EYES" and the goggles themselves are all the reminder you need.

This poster is an interesting one color-wise. RGB monitors notwithstanding, the primary colors of reflective material (i.e the real world) are Red, Yellow and Blue. Those are the inks used in this poster. It is one of the basic color schemes. This poster, though, evokes two other color schemes. One is complementary -- where you stick to two colors which are opposite each other on the color wheel. Blue and orange are complements -- and though the inks used here are red and yellow, they are mostly blended to make orange, or in the case of the face, with a little black to make brown. The other color scheme that it evokes to me, though technically it isn't, is split-complementary. That's when you use complementary colors, but instead of using an exact complement one one end, you use close colors on either side.

This travel to Sea Cliff poster is another that feels like both a primary color scheme and split complementary. They've fiddled with the basic colors, pushing the blue toward purple (which would be the opposite of a yellow-orange) and then pushed the red a little toward orange.

The main thing about this one is the really dynamic design. First there's the dark foreground of blue and black, a foreground with an active human figure in it. Dark and cool colors recede, and "feel" like background. The background here, though, is vibrant -- almost jumping out at us with its brightness. It really makes us notice the negative space.

And, of course, there is a further aspect -- one most people would notice right away: the figure of the human is also leaping, as across a chasm. He hasn't landed yet, so even though his back foot is on the ground, there is nothing supporting him at the moment. Nothing to stop his fall. We expect him to make it, but he isn't there yet. This is like the moments of tension I talked about in my post about N. C. Wyeth and that image from Treasure Island.

I have more examples I'd like to talk about, but I don't have time this week, so I'll just end with one more point which is important to ebook cover creators: The fonts. In both cases here, the fonts are quite simple, and the most important element ("Sea Cliff" and "Save Your Eyes") is legible even when you shrink it down to sub-thumbnail size. They both use fonts with some style to them, however. It's just a more subtle style.

The Sea Cliff poster has more text, but not all of it has to be visible in a thumbnail. In this case the title and the dynamic image are likely to make you look closer, at least if you are interestd in travelling to cliffs by the sea.

As you see, I am posting this at midday, rather than at midnight the night before. Since I'm not posting as much for the duration of the dare, I'm going to experiment a bit with the time of day of postings. I'll tell you why in the Wednesday Update post.

See you in the funny papers.

Creating the Cover: Preliminary Fonts and Color Test

When I do a cover, the real heavy duty font work tends to come at the end. I will shop around for the right look, the right color, the right effect, all the way through the process. And at the end I put it all together.

However, fonts are also important early in the process -- especially in this modern day of online purchasing. With ebooks, your customers may never see anything but a thumbnail. Even with paper books, if a customer buys online, they won't see the full sized cover until after they've bought it.

So it's important that your title and name are legible at a very small size. (Even if the subtitles are not legible, and the picture is not clear.) Color also plays into legibility, as well as how the design looks overall.

But the big reason I wanted to look at fonts right now is because I need to know if my design, it's size and layout will work with fonts. And I find that the answer is.... maybe.

Here is a new concept sketch which I did in the class I'm sitting in on. We were playing with color combinations, and the instructor made a couple of suggestions about the foreground figures. I changed the positions of the figures to be more dynamic -- off to the side, facing the castle at more of an angle. I could then make the swashbuckling shadow bigger, and the figure of Alex smaller. This color test is interesting -- matching the frame with Alex and a hot color makes Alex pop. I also simplified the design by dropping the water layer.

It still needs thought and work, but I think this is a good design to test for how it will work with fonts.

The four images below are at "thumbnail" size, which is the size people will see in Amazon lists. I basically took a bunch of Art Deco fonts of different weights, plus another font more associated with swashbucklers, and tried them out. (I'll talk about the pros and cons of those fonts later, when I get to the point of actually making a choice.)

Okay, on looking at this, it's clear that legibility is not much of an issue with this design. However, the image really does dominate the design. I don't have much flexibility to add a subtitle (even an illegible one). And I don't have room to do that "breakout" on the castle roof.

But I really like this design concept.

I like the way the foreground figure of Alex becomes a part of the frame, so it feels like a logo. (It's not strong enough yet, but I'll work on it.) That could be the branding element for other stories in the series. A different swashbuckler pose and a different adventure setting behind the same frame on every book in the series. Plus I think it's something which could work GREAT for future stories with other characters -- a flapper silhouette for Lady Pauline, for instance.

In the meantime, I've got another 500-600 words to write tonight, so see you in the funny papers....

Creating A Cover: Using Layers to Plan The Attack

This is a series of posts -- every Tuesday -- about the creative process in making a book cover. (The series begins here.)

So yesterday I explained a little about what Photoshop layers are, and how they work. You basically use them to keep parts of the picture separate so you can move them around and make them bigger and smaller and change things about them without affecting the rest of the image.

In that post I played with a photo, but layers are especially useful when you are drawing pictures.

I think the best example would be if you look at the concept drawing here of my Misplaced Hero cover: There's a scene in the middle, and a nice neat, square frame around the outside. When I paint that image in the middle, I want to use free brush strokes. I want to paint beyond the edges of that frame. So if the frame is on another layer, it's like it's a real frame in real life -- a separate piece. The frame is safe from paint, and the paint is safe from the frame if I want to change sizes.

So now I want to transform this concept sketch into a Photoshop file, the first step is to really look at it, and see how the pieces interact, and then plan out how I will set up my layers. I would do this if I were using clip art too.

And just as there are "pantsers" and "plotters" at writing, some people plan layers like I do, and others just add layers as they work. However, I find thinking about it first really helps make the process go smoother. There's nothing worse than painting two things on the same layer and then later realizing you wanted to separate them. It isn't just a matter of copy and paste -- as I showed you in yesterday's post, it will leave a hole, and there are ragged edges. It's a mess.

First I scan or take a photo of my original pencil sketch, and I make that the background layer of the image.

I'll want to keep that layer locked most of the time, so that I don't accidentally mess it up. In this case, I had to unlock it, because there is too much space at the bottom, and not enough at the top for the title. So I'll unlock it, position it the way I want it, then re-lock it.

(Photoshop users, this is a good thing to do anyway -- because Photoshop has a weird feature that it lets you draw on the the locked background layer. You can't move it, but you can draw on it! However if you unlock it, it stops being a background layer. You can then re-lock it, it actually LOCKS the layer so you can't draw on it. Weird but true.)

At this point you'll also want to decide the size of your image. With an ebook, it doesn't matter so much. It just needs to be approximate book proportion and a high enough resolution that Amazon and Smashwords will accept it. If I know for sure it will NEVER be a paper book, I usually make it 600 pixels wide, by 900 pixels tall. If you're going to do a paper book, you really have to know your exact dimension, plus bleed, and resolution and do the math. I'm not going to do that here, but I'll explain it later if anybody wants me to.

Let's look at the parts of this design, shall we? Which things are in front and which are in back? Which belong together, and which are better separated? NOTE: We're going to ignore the fonts for now -- because fonts have separate layers anyway. (We'll talk about those next week.) So look at the sketch:

The top layer is the frame... or wait, is it the roof of the castle? Uh, oh, my design calls for something tricky here. The castle walls are behind the frame, but the roof "breaks out" of the frame, and appears in front. ( I have to admit, I have a weakness for breakouts. They're a spiffy cool design thing -- and part of the point is that the breakout feels dynamic. It's like it's alive.)

There are several ways to deal with this, but they can all be done later, so I'm going to worry about those in a later post. For right now, we're going to pretend there isn't a break out. The frame is on top, the castle is in the background. I created the layer and sketched it out in orange so you could see it. (Then I turned it off so it wouldn't be in the way.)

What's next? The water. Alex is standing in water -- because he rises out of water into the world of Awarshawa, so a few of the waves appear in front of him. That's on its own layer so I can paint outside the lines all I want, and also play with position and color. I may want Alex in deeper or not so deep. The water is in blue in the second panel.

Then comes the solitary figure of Alex, as an alienated modern college student. He's in green because he's an MSU student. (Go Green!)

Then comes the larger Alex - The Hero Swashbuckler In His Soul. The Swashbuckler is in lavender because he's manly enough to deal with it.

Now, with these two figures, I'm going to have a challenge drawing them. They're going to be silhouettes, and they're not going to be real detailed, and they're going to have to be clear what they are even at a small size. I mean, look at my pencil sketch: it's not fully clear whether that line is the corner of the castle or the Swashbuckler's sword.

So layers are really going to help me out there. I can reposition either of them, resize them, and even re-draw one without disturbing the other. I can change the Swashbuckler from a sword-up-and-ready position to a sassy sword-down position if it works better. All without disturbing the rest of the image.

Up to this point it's obvious that all these elements should be on separate layers.

But the background layer is trickier. It could be just a painting of a castle -- one layer. But let's pause to think about how you paint a scene like that: A real painter would first paint in that texture and color in large rough brush strokes, and then paint in the details on top of that, like the windows and the line of the edges later.

However, since those details are all on top of the background texture and color, I could put them on a separate layer. And then I could change my mind after I saw all the details in place. I could repaint the background, change it from warm limestone to cold granite, or I could make it awash in moonlight or even a bright sunny day. And the details would not be disturbed. I could preserve the details like the windows and the lines, and just change the background. Same with if my hand slipped when I was drawing the line and I made a mistake. If they were on the same layer, I'd have to erase part of the background when I erased the mistake.

So I created two layers for my castle. And I'm thinking I want another for the sky. The sky seems so simple, but that just gives me one more reason to put it on a layer by itself. I can just fill the whole layer with dark blue. I can brighten or darken it separately from the castle, and move the castle around more easily. I can put little men on the castle walls and then change my mind and erase them. (I can put a giant cat back there...) I can add clouds or take them away more easily.

So in the end I'll have nine layers, from the top down:

1. Fonts
2. Frame
3. Water
4. Small Alex
5. Swashbuckler
6. Castle details
7. Castle color
8. Sky
9. My original sketch

Is that a lot of work? No, actually it isn't.

It's a lot of thinking. It saves work. Your best bet is to first be creative and sketch ideas. But once that's done, you should pause for a moment and be logical and plan what you're doing. Then you can start being creative again.

Now, as I said, next time, I will talk about fonts. Because this is a book cover, and I will want to be sure my Title and Author Name are highly visible even at the thumbnail size. I may have to adjust a few things if they aren't.

See you in the funny papers!