Great blog post here about tips for designing a good Kindle cover.
Some of the 'don'ts' make me appreciate Halfway to Hell's cover all over again.
Showing posts with label cover. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cover. Show all posts
Friday, 20 April 2012
Sunday, 12 February 2012
The cover
My good friend John Ferguson has brought his considerable graphic design talents to bear on a cover for Halfway to Hell. I'm impressed:
John's done a really great job here, and given me exactly what I was looking for: something that is immediately identifiable as a thriller, but is striking enough to stand out from the pack. It looks modern, but at the same time the colours and font give it a retro 70s vibe. I think that nicely mirrors the neo-noir sensibility of the book.
The font is exactly what I was looking for: big, chunky and no-nonsense. It's Poplar, for the font geeks.
The font is exactly what I was looking for: big, chunky and no-nonsense. It's Poplar, for the font geeks.
Saturday, 4 February 2012
Judging a book by its cover
One of the fun things about self-publishing is you get to design your own covers.
Most authors, even the really big guns, are never let near the design and packaging of their books. There's probably a good reason for that, in a lot of cases.
The old adage is 'you can't judge a book by its cover'. As an absolute statement, that's bullshit.
In terms of judging quality, it's probably true, but that leaves a whole lot of things you can judge a book on, based on its cover. To wit:
Scrupulously, I did some market research, consisting of visiting Asda and the local library and having a look at the contemporary thriller jackets I liked and didn't like.
Good or bad, no-name author or big gun, I was interested to see that pretty much all of them are done the same way: somebody takes a stock landscape photograph from Alamy or Getty or Shutterstock or iStock, takes another element or two (e.g. the purposeful striding man) and puts together a composite image. A lot of them don't even bother with the composite and just use the landscape. Not being a graphic designer, I thought it might be better to try the easy route.
These are the covers I came up with all by myself:
None of them are great, but it gives an idea of the direction I want to go in. Of the three, I think I like the second one best.
The images are royalty-free from Microsoft Clipart, which is a pretty good place to get images to play about with. It doesn't have the range or quality of somewhere like iStock, but then again it's completely free.
My low-tech approach to composing the covers was to use MS Publisher to add the text and try out some different fonts. I then did a screen-grab, pasted that into Paint, saved it as a JPEG and cropped the JPEG in Picture Manager for the final cover. I'm sure any arty or techy people reading this are pissing themselves right now, but hey - I do whatever works.
I showed these (and a few others, all embarassingly bad) to a friend at work who's a graphic designer, and they gave him enough of an idea of what I'm looking for to go away and work up a finished product.
So to cut a long story short, watch this space for an actually-good version of the above.
Most authors, even the really big guns, are never let near the design and packaging of their books. There's probably a good reason for that, in a lot of cases.
The old adage is 'you can't judge a book by its cover'. As an absolute statement, that's bullshit.
In terms of judging quality, it's probably true, but that leaves a whole lot of things you can judge a book on, based on its cover. To wit:
- If the cover is bright pink with stars and a sparkly embossed cursive font, chances are it's chick-lit.
- If the cover is a black and white or sepia picture of a wistful-looking child, with a title like Daddy Never Bought Me A Nintendo DS, you're looking at one of those inexplicably-popular misery-lit books.
- If the cover shows a foreboding and barren landscape (forests and deserts are good), with a guy with his back to us striding purposefully into the scenery, it's a thriller. Extra points for railway tracks.
Scrupulously, I did some market research, consisting of visiting Asda and the local library and having a look at the contemporary thriller jackets I liked and didn't like.
Good or bad, no-name author or big gun, I was interested to see that pretty much all of them are done the same way: somebody takes a stock landscape photograph from Alamy or Getty or Shutterstock or iStock, takes another element or two (e.g. the purposeful striding man) and puts together a composite image. A lot of them don't even bother with the composite and just use the landscape. Not being a graphic designer, I thought it might be better to try the easy route.
These are the covers I came up with all by myself:
None of them are great, but it gives an idea of the direction I want to go in. Of the three, I think I like the second one best.
The images are royalty-free from Microsoft Clipart, which is a pretty good place to get images to play about with. It doesn't have the range or quality of somewhere like iStock, but then again it's completely free.
My low-tech approach to composing the covers was to use MS Publisher to add the text and try out some different fonts. I then did a screen-grab, pasted that into Paint, saved it as a JPEG and cropped the JPEG in Picture Manager for the final cover. I'm sure any arty or techy people reading this are pissing themselves right now, but hey - I do whatever works.
I showed these (and a few others, all embarassingly bad) to a friend at work who's a graphic designer, and they gave him enough of an idea of what I'm looking for to go away and work up a finished product.
So to cut a long story short, watch this space for an actually-good version of the above.
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