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| A strong image with room for the text. That's Layla, the alien girl in the book. |
by Louis Shalako
For marketing images I have a few limitations. For
one thing my old Pentium II computer won’t operate Adobe CS-6, (Photoshop) a
major program for making book covers and all sorts of wild other images.
Staying within these limitations, I have two
choices. I can farm the work of making an image out, or I can do it myself
using the simplest of paint programs. The cheapest ebook cover I am aware of is
$25.00 U.S. and she doesn’t include a POD cover. I would still have to acquire
the original ‘clean’ image and make my own for the paperback, as similar as
possible, using the paint program I have available. This sort of limits her in the fonts and effects she could
use.
The snake sort of swallows its tail in that case.
It is ideal have the ebook and the paperback covers
similar if not identical as it avoids confusion in the shopper’s mind when they
are clicking around on the average bookstore website. They don’t just keep
going because they thought it was a different title; get lost and give up.
The other option is to get a pro marketing image, by
that I mean a stock image were there is no text. From a stock photo website,
you pay by credit card and download a digital image.
Because of those limitations, I have no choice but
to take the cheapest option anyway. If I am capable of making a halfway
credible rendition of someone else’s design, I might as well have done it
myself. However, the odds are they would be using Adoble CS-6 or something very
much like it. It’s strictly either/or here.
There’s not much point in me making
one version and them another. It would still cost twenty-five or more dollars.
So my marketing images cost $5.65 plus whatever
interest I end up paying on the credit.
The big difference in the resulting image is that I
can’t meld two or three layers together. It affects the design, and so far I
haven’t taken a straight shot and tried using the limited special effects that
I do have. I buy a pro image and then put a title on it, the author name on it.
Sometimes there is a superscript. I only have
limited fonts and I only have limited colours.
.jpg) |
| Typical POD cover using Createspace free template. |
Even so, I seem to have learned a lot. If the book
or story is targeted at men, put a girl on the cover, if it’s targeted at
women, put a handsome man on the cover. I zoom out on the created image to see
if I can read the name when the image is real small. I look for strong and
dramatic images, that stand alone in the pictorial sense. They don’t need anything added.
The technology available affects the design.
Since I can’t meld layers together, I’m looking for
entirely different, whole and
substantial images. I’m not looking for elements or components that can be
layered together, like a red rose on a white table with a face faded in above
and behind, and sparkling galaxies whirling around in the background. I simply don’t
have the technology. If I needed something like that and found a suitable
marketing image on a stock site, I would of course buy it. If it was cheap
enough.
Then I would stick my text on there and there’s my
book cover. I would still have exactly the same limitations from the paint
program.
This would obviously affect the branding of the
works. It would be a challenge for all the different pen-names, all the genres
and all the books and stories I have out there.
Just as an example, the third in the Maintenon
mystery series, Blessed
Are the Humble, is a pro image.
It would be nice to find a few more of the same
type. First of all, I like that one. Secondly, I would prefer not to have to
replace it anytime soon. I have no money to waste. It takes time to shop and
time to make them. I would very much like to upgrade the covers of Redemption:
an Inspector Gilles Maintenon mystery, the first in the series, and also the
cover of The Art of Murder. Then there is the original novella, the one that
inspired the series.
The Handbag’s Tale has been soldiering on for a
couple of years now with a cover that looked okay at the time, considering my
limited experience, but it clearly needs something new—something branded,
something that is clearly recognizable as a mystery novel.
When you think about it, it’s like twenty-three
dollars to get four new images. What I hope to do is to write quite a few more
mysteries. Each of the covers must be ‘branded’ to some degree. The real killer
is the time spent on a stock photo site looking for something, anything, that
will work.
It’s always going to be a compromise, no matter how
good your computer and your photo-shop type program. The real compromise is in
the time it takes.
I have a nice little story here, it’s about 6,500
words. The image for such a product still costs the same as a full-length book.
The difference is that I might spend an hour, maybe two looking for something I
can use.
I spent days looking for an image for Horse Catcher, and that one ended up being a real big...compromise.
It’s just that simple: can I make this work, because
it’s a good image and it fits well enough. But how will text look on there? And
who is this book written for? Women don’t get turned on by other women—they get
turned on by men.
If it’s an erotic or romantic story geared to women
readers, then everything about that image matters. If the story is targeted at
gay males, it still matters. Don’t put a hot chick in a bikini on the cover. So much of this
should be no-brainer stuff but it still took me some time to get this far.
If an aircraft is a series of compromises flying in
close formation, then writing a book and putting the whole thing together is a
study in the art of compromise.
The Case of the Curious Killers, (iTunes.)
END
