There are two things a prospective reader looks at first: title and cover. The title must sound interesting. But designing book covers is a real challenge for me.
My Challenges
Since I do my own covers, the design must be one I can draw. Animals and plants are much easier for me than people.
Photographs are a good source of ideas for me. So I want a design that can be partially photographed.
Cover Considerations
People seem to like seeing people on a cover. Some genres seem to require having people on it. “Hopes, Dreams and Reality” should have Mindy on the cover.
Since I try to put a book out as an eBook as well as a print book, the cover must be easily seen on a mobile screen as well as on a big cover. This is more challenging than you might think.
Designing Book Covers
Nothing is more irritating about a book cover than when it has little or nothing to do with the book. DVD covers are notorious for this.
Publishing companies have a staff of cover designers. They send over a synopsis of a book. An artist comes up with a cover. The author is stuck with it.
This doesn’t concern me as I self publish. The reasons are many and I might address them another time. It does leave me doing the writing, editing, illustrating and designing book covers, then trying to do marketing so readers will notice my little book among the thousands of other titles published each year.
“Hopes, Dreams and Reality”
As with the title, I had to do a lot of thinking about the cover. It was so tempting to find a cover looking at a sunrise or goats or chickens. Anything but Mindy.
But Mindy needs to be on the cover. She needs to be fighting the storm.
That left me putting on a show out in the yard. Luckily we have no neighbors. I got to set up my camera on delay, press the button and race over to pose holding my umbrella as though fighting wind and rain as the sun lit up the yard.
I needed a rain slicker, but don’t own one. Oh, well.
Maybe I am now ready to take my fast sketch and do a real design. And the watercolors will get used again.
