This past weekend, I was lucky enough to both organize and participate on an amazing self-publishing panel (though it’s over, see my original announcement for more details). For those of you who couldn’t make it, you missed a 90-minute, crash course on self-publishing success, failure, resilience, and prediction.
Reviewers provide budding authors–and other readers–with an invaluable service, the unbiased consumer review. This is an especially precious service in an age when we can’t wholly trust the literary gatekeeper we had (traditional publishing) nor, even if we could, depend on it to keep up with the avalanche of indie books coming down the pike…and are going to continue receiving in the coming years.
This is the second part in a three part series about book cover design. The intended audience is the self-publishing writer with little design experience. The guidelines I set forth are from my experience working with my own self-published titles, with graphic designers, and about twelve years of web design experience (which is no substitute for experience in print design).
In the first part of this series, I talked about the importance of typography in setting both your title and author line apart from the fonts of workaday web pages, white papers, and emails that have desensitized many readers to the impact and beauty of the most popular fonts.
In this stage, I’ll get away from typography for a second and talk about what I consider the second important attribute of a winning cover: a single, stunning professional picture.
While we’re on the subject of covers (see yesterday’s post), I thought I would take the opportunity to release the tentative cover for Blueblood, the second in the Marty Singer mystery series.
I’ll be posting more about the release of Blueblood very soon, including an excerpt and other goodies. The last draft is with my editor as we speak, going through those precious little tweaks that often make all the difference. My goal is to release in digital form for all sellers (Amazon, Kobo, B&N, etc.) by the third week of August. With luck and hard work, it will be available by the last week of August or early September.
Let me know what you think of the cover in the Comments!
Tip Tuesday has gone a bit high and right, since I wrote just one and then promptly started releasing new titles instead of writing helpful content. But I’d like to make this humble offering as the second installment in the nascent Tip Tuesday series: print book covers.
I’m certainly no expert in the business of print mechanics, but I thought I’d leave you with some hints from my own experience, a little bit of feedback I’ve received, and point you to a couple of guys who are experts.
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