👋 Hello, beautiful person!
Is there anything better than reading during a storm? While a torrential downpour has covered our city lately, I’ve kept my windows open and have been reading for hours on my bed.
If you’re currently facing some days of rain, you may as well make the most of it. Light a candle, brew some coffee/tea, and lose yourself in a good read.
We’re talking about: BOOK COVERS!
We all judge books by their covers.
Nothing wrong with that.
Well, I suppose there is. If we’re talking about it as a metaphor for judging people, then there’s plenty wrong with that. Making snap judgements about something/someone is impossible not to do though, and when it comes to your book cover, first impressions are everything.
My Cover Journey
There are a lot of designers out there so I had my work cut out for me. While I was choosing the designer I wanted to work with, I had the pleasure of sitting in Taormina in Sicily with my friend Lydia, and she helped my choose between the dozens of talented people out there.
We drank a lot of red wine and I bored her to tears with my thoughts and concerns, and finally I decided on a high regarded company that employs a collection of experienced designers. They’re on the pricy side for an indie publisher, but I figured you gotta go hard or go home.
A few clicks and a short form later, and we were in business.
I had a lot of fun chatting back and forth with them about the tone, world, characters and plot of You Heard It Here First(now renamed to A Rockstar Has Exploded). Two weeks later, three design ideas arrived in my inbox.
From these, I could choose one to pursue, or request an additional design.
I chose the one in the middle because, quite simply, I liked the feeling it gave me. The middle design grabbed me in the gut. It felt right. And in a genre where mood is everything, that emotional connection was key, so I tried to put all my intellect to the side and trust it.
The blood spatters, the guitar strings (which we would later get rid of), and the font all spoke to the vibe of the book. It says mystery, it says edginess, and it hints at a bit of fun.
From here, we went back and forth about six times. I’d give feedback and the designer would come back with adjustments to the design. They have ‘unlimited revisions’, but if you take the piss, they reserve the right to throw their hands in the air and walk away.
We experimented with different colours, different fonts, slightly different layouts, and different levels of debris.
Happily, we had a great working relationship and eventually settled on a cover that we all love.
The Big Reveal
YOU HEARD IT HERE FIRST by Emerson Black - what a cover!
Look at it!
it’s it beautiful?!
Losing the guitar strings was a surprising call, but it makes it feels so much cleaner, and the guitar pick is enough to allude to the rock band element of the story.
In each book in this series, we’re gonna have a small object that alludes to the nature of the mystery of that book. The first book is about the death of an international musician, so the guitar pick hints to that nicely.
🤔 4 Things To Keep In Mind When You Embark On Your Own Cover Design
- You have to engage two parts of yourself. Your gut and your brain.
Let your gut speak to you first. Imagine you’re a passerby and the cover catches your eye from a bookshop window. Or you’re a hungry reader scrolling through the Amazon store. - Find some comparable covers.
What books and authors are you aligning yourself with? What do your favourite covers in your genre look like? Go for a fun trawl through some online book shops and make an image board. It’s a great starting point for your designer to get into the right space. - Be open to being surprised.
You might have a concrete idea of how you want your cover to look. You might have been dreaming of this for a long time. I feel you. But book cover designers, if they’re good, are clued up when it comes to what works. If they’re making suggestions, do yourself a favour and strongly consider them. - Your cover has ONE job: intrigue a potential reader enough to want to know more. Your cover isn’t just pretty; it’s a silent salesperson. It needs to seduce readers from across a crowded room (or a crowded Amazon page) and whisper ‘You need this story.’
Designing a cover is a battle of art and commerce, instinct and analysis. But remember, it’s your story’s first handshake with the world. Make it count.
📣 What I’m reading: THE TWYFORD CODE by Janice Hallett
I highly recommend this book if you’re a fan of mystery fiction. I read it in two days despite being swamped with work.
It’s about an ex-con who embarks on a journey into his past to find his favourite teacher who mysteriously disappeared.
It’s a mystery told through transcribed voice recordings. The voice of the protagonist is so earnest that I fell in love with him after five pages. Apart from being a page-turning mystery that sets up revelation after revelation (the last couple of chapters had me laughing in awe at how clever this author is), the human relationships are touching and engaging.