PRETTY HEARSES & E-BOOK COVERS: COVER DIARY:  Status as @ June 2012 

I promised myself no regrets or rancour – just to move on and learn from my cover adventures. What I didn’t quite get starting out is that choosing a new cover is a bit like most things in life. Perfection is rare and it usually comes at a price.

The e-Book cover design for The Good Cemetery Guide, was severely constrained by budgetary considerations. The best piece of advice I can offer with hindsight is to take a more measured approach to the selection of the cover designer. I couldn’t afford the professional cover designer I wanted so I swung over to the other extreme and went for the first cover designer recommended on a fellow writer’s blog, figuring the cover looked professional and the service was cheap. There are all kinds of caveats to this impetuous approach. 1) Does the cover designer have (any) e-Book cover experience?

2) Have you checked the e-Book covers they have done and do they make your heart miss a beat? 3) Do the e-Book covers work as thumbnails? In other words is the title and your author’s name clearly legible, as well as the background image? If not, move on to another cover designer. 4) Have you checked the e-Book distributor you want to use (as well as others you don’t plan to use) for a list of recommended cover designers? The cover designers on these lists are usually VERY experienced at doing e-Book covers (what you are looking for, remember?) which means they work quickly and effectively to your brief and hence offer their services at a reasonable rate.

5) Do you have a clear brief/idea of what you want? Make no mistake, if you don’t it’s probably going to be a long protracted process. 6) Is there a particular image/photo you want on the cover? For example, in the case of The Good Cemetery Guide I’d had the idea of a hearse for ages. If so, do your research beforehand, get the necessary permission to use it (in my case involved negotiations), and make sure you have the picture ready to go. The alternative is that the cover designer sources the picture and you take the knock of their higher fees, the fee for usage of the source image, and the additional time impact on your cover design project. 7) Can’t make up your mind as to which cover direction to go?  Know any book clubs you can approach? Why not do a mini survey amongst readers to see what they think? Don’t expect one cover to stand out as the clear winner.

In my case it was almost a tie between three different covers. In the end I went with a favourite, the hearse cover, (that put me in good company with other pretty hearses as you can see from these examples) but we eventually used another design layout and concept because the hearse photo owner didn’t want the beautiful Cadillac hearse to look scratched or as if it suffered from a fungal infestation … Understandable. 8) Are you going to self-publish a Print on Demand (POD) version some day? Prepare the back cover as well in this case because that way you’ll have it ready and looking exactly like your e-Book cover. 9) And you thought that figuring out the formatting requirements for your e-Book was tough? Wait until you try to figure out the cover requirements. E-Book distributor instructions are frequently confusing and not detailed enough for authors who aren’t familiar with graphics packages. Enrol yourself on community forums and don’t be shy. But remember, if you’ve appointed an e-Book experienced cover designer familiar with YOUR distributor (Amazon Kindle & Smashwords in my case) then they prepare the covers for you with exactly the right pixel dimensions etc. 10) What image design software do you use? I have Corel Paint Shop Pro. My designer had Adobe Photoshop. Guess what? Source files created on the one piece of software can’t necessarily be edited by the other. Quite a revelation to the average uninitiated control freak writer. 11) Have you given any thought to what files you want at the end of the project, how many cover designs are included, how many changes/modifications are allowed in the standard fee, and whether all designs belong to you, or only the one you eventually select?  A simple written agreement can be very useful to clarify expectations up front. Remember, cheap is as cheap does…

LESSON 1: FIND AN EXPERIENCED
E-BOOK COVER DESIGNER! Yes, I am yelling, because this will save you lots of time,money and heart-ache. Trust me on this one.

LESSON 2: If the thumbnail doesn’t work, the e-Book cover doesn’t work.

LESSON 3: Accept that it won’t be perfect this time round (if it isn’t) and aim to improve it in the future. There’s no shelf life on an e-Book! You can always improve it later.

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RESEARCH: ONE BOOK MANY COVERS 

 

I have a bit of an obsession I have to admit to – call it Covers OCD.

In the days when I read every Famous Five book that Enid Blyton ever wrote I never thought about covers consciously. But looking fondly at the old friends I kept I notice now they all have a colourful cover; a certain look that tells me what’s awaiting me; never-ending adventure stories where nothing too bad is going to happen. Not much later Classic and Superhero comics started arrived in boxes, rescued by my father from the paper mill’s waste-paper depot where they were destined to be pulped into bagasse. Maybe that’s where it started; the first awareness of dramatic cover design.

Anyway, to cut a long story short. I strongly disliked the first published cover of my first novel The Good Cemetery Guide, changed from a quirky/arty (in my view) pink and red hearse artwork to a funereal white lily jacket which proved to be oddly popular with many readers.  Now I have the opportunity to do exactly what I want and while it’s liberating it’s harder than I thought. So I’ve started a Covers topic which I’ll add to as time goes on with useful links and information gleaned.

17 March 2012: Stumbled upon an interesting article on Createspace Community about the importance of genre when selecting a cover. Seems obvious, no? But it isn’t, as I’ve discovered. People have all kinds of subjective reasons for why they like or dislike covers (myself included). In the end it has to be about book sales. Which cover will attract the attention of online readers so word-of-mouth and good reviews will exponentially attract other online readers?

That’s what finally helped me decide on the new cover for the new e-book and POD version of The Good Cemetery Guide. I decided to listen to the experts. Thoughtful insightful people in the book business took the time to choose one cover above all others using terms like ‘genre-appropriate’. It wasn’t the cover that got the most votes in my little market research exercise; sometimes the minority view prevails, especially if it’s based on more experience and knowledge about what drives book sales.

So. Catherine Ryan Howard is my guru. My guru says ‘Oh for the love of fudge.’ Isn’t that retro and cool? Never had a guru before. I have become slavishly devoted to everything she says because she is going to teach me how to be more than ‘just a writer’. The problem is I don’t have good ideas like hers. I’m going crazy trying to find a good blog name never mind do all the rest.

The best I can come up with is Consuelo, Chocolated. It is clear plagiarism of Catherine, Caffeinated and not as smart or as humorous. Chocolated also reminds me of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory which is not good. This means I’m the most unoriginal person on the planet. Why can I dream up  story after story but I can’t come up with a name for a Writer’s blog that is glittering with the smarts, never mind a bright tagline that is part of the whole cohesive trip… How do you compete with ‘Writer, Astronaut, Skinny’? I ask myself. ‘Writer, Ballerina, Straight hair’, is the best I can do. But it sounds lame because I’m copying Catherine.

I’ve been on first name terms with my guru for a while. Copying is not good. The problem is this whole marketing yourself thing is a bit like writing an unbelievable story about myself and that’s where it comes undone; the non-fiction of my existence doesn’t excite me. I like to make it all up; none of it must ever have existed before.

Catherine says all one has to is have a cohesive concept and stick to it – brand yourself in other words. So she does pink the whole hog, and normally this could be girlish and a bit mundane – but she has this very cool picture of a retro pink tea-cup (much prettier than a coffee mug) and super-retro pink typewriter and it’s practically irresistable. Right now a cohesive concept is eluding me. What is my unique angle? What do I have to share that anybody else might want to know about? Oh for the love of fudge…!

Somewhere along the way I’ve become a book peddler. It seemed an infinitely preferable course of action to watching my novel THE GOOD CEMETERY GUIDE languish in a publisher’s warehouse.

Being one of those people who suffer from excess optimism, otherwise termed ridiculous enthusiasm, I ignored the advice of all the sensible caring people in my life who told me marketing my own book was a bad idea and not to even think about doinga website around the novel, not even in my wildest dreams; that it would distract me, delay me, detour me; that I was a writer not a salesperson, a novelist not a web-designer, and in case I really didn’t get it, no writer ever made money out of a website and I should be concentrating on my second book.

Not strictly true of course, some writers have done very nicely through their websites, but for the sake of argument they (those of good intent) were absolutely right. My 2008 New Year’s resolution to earn a living as a writer has been postponed once again to the following year. They did however forget to mention what seems most pertinent; that it would require endless painstaking hours of hard work. Doing a website is worse than writing a book; it’s a consumptive black hole.

Any serious enterprise requires time.  Writers never have enough time because we’re leading double lives; we live and work in parallel so just making the space to be aware of taking a breath (listen to/read Eckhart Tolle’s A NEW EARTH!) is hard.

The good news is it’s been a gas. Rollicking fun-on-the-road growing-up-to-be-a-real-writer stuff. The truth is the adventures are as much a real life affair
as being in cyberspace.

I’ve vanquished shyness and expanded horizons by getting out to small independent bookshops in the city environs and in outlying country towns, and talked about the book and website to some of the countless readers circles, writers groups and book clubs that keep the book industry in South Africa humming. Along the way I’ve sold books.

The readers of the kind of books I read and write finally have a face. I’ve written pages of content for the website in a different style to anything I’ve published before. I’ve experienced enormous crafting satisfaction from turning an idea that wouldn’t let go of me into a cyber space called www.goodcemeteryguide.com that dwells lightly on the interplay of life, love and death. Always with the hope that someday we’ll have those important conversations at the dinner table!

And here I am baring my soul on book.co.za! I’ve stormed the bastions of technology with a website; now with Ben’s help I’m inside the fortress. I wish I could say I just threw a few words onto the ‘page’ and it was a breeze. Truth is I dithered over it because spontaneous unedited expression is scary.

Measured words are a writer’s weapons in the war against mortality. I look forward to further real life marketing forays and cyber adventures but the time has come to put self-marketing on a slow burner and return in spirit to the really tough stuff that terrifies the living daylights out of me as much as it drives me nearly insane with pleasure.

The gods of the universe and I had a serious chat the other day. I’d been out in the car and material for future books was being thrown at me thick and fast (as tends to happen when I drive around); I felt pummeled and exhausted by the end of the trip.

“I haven’t even finished my second book!” I said grumpily to no-one in particular. A voice in my head said quite clearly, ‘Well, get on with it!’ And so I shall.

Source: First published in its original format as ‘Adventures in Cyberspace’ on Sunday Times Books Live