Covers and such...

I know most everyone on this blog is an author. And at some point they’ve all had to deal with a cover and a cover artist. Some get lucky with a fantastic cover artist, some not so lucky and end up with something that doesn’t pertain to the story or is really just ugly. So what do you put on your cover request? What do you want to convey? What is your vision of the cover? These are the real questions you need to ask yourself so you can get that message to the person who’s designing your cover.

So just to show the progression of a cover, here’s a ‘for example’ of a typical cover assignment.
Viv recently tasked me for a new cover. Her request was this:

Vision for the cover- Back of a naked woman or naked from waist up, who has long blonde hair. Her hair blowing to the side. Bright sunshine rays. She could be looking at a hot guy in the distance or not. The hair blowing thing would cover the wind.

OK… So my first interpretation was this:

This was OK, but the fonts are all funky… And Viv didn’t really like the girl…

So, the next version was this one after I had Viv hunt for pictures she thought would fit the story better:





Then we found out that the lovely beach scene photo was $15! Uh, no thanks.
After several attempts at different fonts, and photo filters, we had these:

Completly different beach scene as another option and it was OK, but just not working for Viv.

Then back to the original couple and a new beach scene, but with different fonts:

And finally, after more font tweaking (I hate fonts), this is the end result:

So, all you authors out there - or even aspiring cover artists, remember that what you might start off with isn’t necessarily what you end up with…

It is a lot of fun to work on covers, it really is. Even with these pesky nitpicky authors. :D

Valerie