Book Covers – Build or Buy and How and Why
Here’s a tasty bit of irony: deciding on a book cover for The High Road has been making me dig past my own surface, and ask some hard questions about what kind of writer I’m trying to be. Both about capturing the appeal of my story, and about my plans and my whole approach to building my career. Deep stuff.
The cover’s always been a writer’s rite of passage. Even after years of living in characters’ heads, there’s something about seeing those words not just “try to paint a picture” but actually appearing in one that makes it more real: I made a frickin’ book here! I’ve heard dozens of stories of authors reveling in that moment, or moaning when some artist mangled it, and I have my own tales of the fun times people have sat down with me and complimented the cover for my other book, Shadowed.
Like Deepik Tuli says, it’s like looking at your own new face (http://magazine.oditty.me/2015/10/24/selecting-my-book-cover-was-like-selecting-a-new-face-for-myself/).
And yet…
How Much Coverage?
Right there on the long list of writing issues that have been knocked on their ear by technology, is how book covers may not mean what we think anymore.
For one thing, us fearless self-publishing types can take full control of something the traditional author has to entrust to the publisher and some talented but very busy artist. In other words, With great power comes the proverbial great responsibility (or as Mark would say based in the book, great disaster if you don’t watch your step). If I got a cover that didn’t do my characters justice, that would make it a self-inflicted wound.
Of course, a proper, quality cover is a basic hurdle of a successful book: Rachel Aaron sums it up neatly, the four basic steps of hooking a reader through the cover, the title, the blurb, and the first page. (See http://thisblogisaploy.blogspot.com/2015/09/writing-wednesdays-cover-title-blurb.html for more.) There’s no way around that.
Or is there?
[bctt tweet=”Every #book needs a good #cover, title, blurb, and first page. Or does it?”]
Maybe today’s book cover isn’t quite as vital, if the book’s natural habitat is in the Amazon jungles (and Kobo forests) more than it’s going to be competing for glances on a shelf. Hugh Howey and Bella Andre (at http://www.hughhowey.com/iconic-cover-art/ by the way) spell out a humbling fact: what looks like a good cover when it’s in your hands will only shrink down to the “Amazon size” of an online poster when you’ved walked back to one hundred feet away.
A hundred feet. Hugh’s point is the need for good but “icon”-type art that makes an impression on that postage-stamp scale. His Exhibit A is 50 Shades of Grey, and how readers simply learned to match its cuff link to what they’d heard about the book. Shades isn’t a typical success story, but it does remind me that covers don’t have to make the first impression any more. And the whole article stirs up two other dimensions in the self-publishing world:
How much time and money would be better spent on getting readers to see that art, rather than fine-tuning the tiny image that’ll greet them if they get there?
And, where’s the exact best balance between those—because I really can take control of that cover, with anything from degrees of outsourcing to total Do It Yourself.
Decisions, DIYcisions…
Could I design my own cover?
Of course I could. One of the perks of my being a steady reader of Joanna Penn is seeing her step-by-step instructions at http://www.thecreativepenn.com/2013/10/20/book-cover-design-ms-word/ that put the total cost for one great method at $80; how many Facebook ads would that savings free up? And the whole technical process can be done in about an hour, if I separate it from the searching and the creative choices that really make or break it.
So forget the fancy “design,” it’s more that: could I plan my own cover, good enough for “Amazon size,” without ruining it?
It’s the kind of question that starts whole voices in a hapless author’s head.
“But I’m not an artist!”
I can barely make my handwriting readable, and I’m thinking of entrusting the “face” of Mark and Angie and all the rest to my own anemic sense of visuals? After all the effort and all the hope I put into the story and the series, this is no time to forget what I’m here for.
“But it’s only choices.”
There are only so many kinds of layout out there, and background types, and combined with the right foreground image… I can start to see a cover lining up as just one decision after another, with each step not as hard as it looks. And all the time I spend writing my books is also learning to see each scene’s walls and skies and people and how they fit together. I love showing off the art I got for Shadowed, but what if I made The High Road completely my own?
And that’s only the start of what that choice brings up. With so many steps in building a cover, each one is a chance to spend or save more time and money, and they’re all tied into how I see the book, and myself. Could I make a simpler cover, because I don’t know how many people will see it if I don’t save up for ads and networking? Could I split the difference by hiring someone to find the perfect central image, and do the rest by common sense? Are covers even something I should be getting that deep into, when I’m a wordsmith instead of an artist?
(And of course: Mark Petrie, at the center of The High Road, actually is a would-be artist among his other dabblings. I swear I didn’t plan it that way…)
My Answer
Tempting as it is, the notion of a self-made cover feels wrong to me. The odds are I could assemble a decent picture and call it “good enough”—but I don’t want to say “enough” and think The High Road is never going to be famous enough for the cover to matter. Because I think it will be.
Besides, putting a cover on a book isn’t only an investment: it’s a reward. It’s a gift we writers can give ourselves for finishing the story, of a kind we can share with the reader. And I swear, when I look at Michael Whelan’s classic creations and all the other people I’ll never be able to draw like, I wonder if the book is partly an excuse to get some awesome artist to give me their time.
(And if I’m not big enough to lure Mr. Whelan into some contemporary fantasy yet, that’s just one more thing to aspire to.)
That’s my own decision about what a cover means to me, and how it balances with the rest of the book launching process. If any of you visiting authors have worked through the same logic and put the balance at a different place, I’ll be delighted to get a Comment or an email from you on how you do it.
Next time: the cover itself, and why it’s glorious