Ebook 'Covers'

by Louis Bertrand Shalako

c2010

All Rights Reserved


If none of my books are ever released as print books, then the standards and concerns that apply to print books do not apply.

If people are shopping for books using an iPad, phone, Kindle, etc, then first of all the screen size is small. While some people have big screen computer monitors at home, the most popular accessories are portable. They are, after all, status symbols as well as practical devices. The people who buy them are mobile, and pressed for time. If you are at home, why do you need an ebook at all, is one way of looking at it.

For that reason, it might be wise to have different versions of a cover, one for electronic, where the thumbnails might be quite small, and one for a print version.

Small text, blurbs, all of that can go on the webpage where it is sold. The image is merely a marketing image rather than a 'cover.' Do people judge a book by a cover? No, but they do judge whether to look inside the first time by its cover. Of all the things I would like change, the cover of 'Core Values' is one of them! I have no ideas. That's the real problem, and I suppose I am stuck with it.

An ebook doesn't need rear cover art unless previously published in print, and then it is either a courtesy or a convention.

The point is that tiny little images that barely work on a paperback might not be too good for ebooks, and for that reason we experiment with short titles, big text and big images.

There is no doubt that a free giveaway product would benefit from a really attractive 'cover.' The basic file or product is the same.

Many have remarked over the centuries, how seldom do the pictures on book covers resemble the stuff that actually happened in the book. That never stopped anyone from buying them.

If I had a really good cover image in mind, one that I thought I could produce very well, then I would be more likely to publish another novel. As it is, I'm not even really submitting the things around.

There are some good reasons for that which I might talk about later.

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Notes: I have two stories to be submittted tomorrow. Having something on the desk for the morning kind of helps me to get going. By later in the day, something has been 'produced,' and then maybe I kind of wing it a little more and follow my interest and see where it leads. The one story is a fragment of something I abandoned back in November, and the other is an old story, re-polished in the light of newly-acquired skills. It is more prosaically written than my recent stuff, but that's okay. The thing is to polish it and take out unnecesary words. I can maybe submit it somewhere for a younger group of readers.

Children's literature is anything but easy, and it's a very competitive field.

Anyway, it can't hurt to try. It's also lucrative, incidentally. (Or so I've heard.)

***

I woke up this morning and thought I had broken my left heel! Man does that hurt, and I have no idea how it happened. This is actually a good thing, as surely I would have remembered any major physical trauma from the day before. Maybe it's just a tendon pull.

It really makes going up a set of stairs a kind of misery...let me tell you. The problem there is no hand rails into the basement, and now my right knee is packing it in. Old injuries. Lower back all stiff and sore!

It's just too negative to blog about!

So the hell with it.

UPDATE: the chat with horror author Jeremy C. Shipp at #sffwrtcht went very well, and a big thumbs-up to Bryan Thomas Schmidt for hosting. That's Wednesdays at nine p.m. and Bryan's on facebook if you want more data.

I think I have the hang of TweetDeck now.