The Book Cover Challenge; Story as Picture
How a simple picture is teaching me how to communicate in visuals
My book is written, it’s in the final stages, it’s time to think about visuals. My story is about an apocalypse where roller skaters rule. It’s an amalgamation of my love of end-of-the-world fiction and roller derby. If anyone is going to survive the downfall of the earth, it’s the ladies of the rink.
How do I put the toughness of the skaters I know into the world I created and make it marketable? Over the past few weeks, I worked with a designer named Elias Perez to create an image that not only tells the stories but also makes science fiction readers want to pick it up.
Here’s where we started:
I shared these with a few friends, a sibling and those close to me. At first, I only went for aesthetics. I didn’t say anything about the story. We experience a physical or ebook as an image before we read anything and that’s what I wanted to measure. Which of these images made people want to read the story?
My favorite was the last one, but I didn’t say anything because I was scared it would skew the results. Luckily for me, most of the people I spoke to also responded the most to the last one.
I went back to Elias, my designer and told him about my quickie feedback. He ran with the final design and began to play with font and placement. Here’s what he sent me:
By this point, I had my title and a decision on how to display my author name. A lot of my favorite writers use their initials so I decided to do the same. My title comes from a focus of the earth’s new surface in the book. It’s an alloy of combined plastic, metal, what-have-you melted down from tons of acid rains. The author name is inspired by some of my favorite authors and I thought it looked professional.
The trick with books is to not write in a vacuum and also not get inundated with feedback. It’s important to do a little of both. You want to showcase your authentic author voice and yet you also have to keep in mind this will be for sale.
To help me strike this balance, I use online author groups, self-published friends who are kind enough to give me advice and my own intuition. If you are writing without any online or in-person support, I encourage you to find your own community. I took the time to seek out fellow writers and they keep me going even on my worst days.
I belong to author groups for independent publishers, (what I hope to be), science fiction and specifically female sci-fi fans on Facebook. My fellow members were happy to weigh in. Here is some of the feedback I received:
Now people want to know a little more. As the design gets more specific, the text becomes an issue. Any time someone asked for more details about the subject, theme or genre I provided it.
Below is my personal favorite piece of feedback. This fellow author spent some time with the design and came back to me with this:
This is where author groups, online communities, aspiring creators really come through. Maomi didn’t criticize, he took the time to give the cover some love. How cool is that?
Below, McFall also gets into the nitty gritty of the design. He has some great thoughts:
All of this gave me tons of notes to send back to my designer. First, I’m going with the fourth version but with some suggestions on font. I love seeing the title up higher and I want the figures to be bigger. The cover is currently cut in half with the light purple and dark, I want to change that two two-thirds light, one-third dark.
Something about seeing a book cover for my future publication pushes me much more than any good reviews.
Meanwhile, back on my Google Drive, my beta readers are leaving me notes on my text. What did they think? More on that next time.
Don’t forget to clap, follow me and comment to keep tabs on my progress. Are you a writer? Let me know where I can follow you and read your stuff.
