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Cover Design

Over at Mad Genius Club Cedar Sanderson is talking about cover design.

She's got a List of Seven Rules, and they're good ones:

  1. Book Covers are Marketing Tools
  2. Clearly Readable at Thumbnail
  3. Fits into Genre Conventions
  4. Use Legible Fonts
  5. Choose Good Art, or at least Clean Backgrounds
  6. Make the Author Name Bigger
  7. Never, Ever, Use an Unfiltered Photograph on Fiction

The last one seems a bit obvious to me and it makes a person wonder what happened to turn it into a specific rule.

Covers are scary to do, though, if you're doing your own.  They're probably scary if you're trusting someone else to do them too!

Here are a couple that I threw together for NaNoWriMo.  These really are just meant to be placeholders thrown together.   Here's my last years cover:

 The picture is from Pixabay and I've rotated and cropped it.  The font was probably one on my Adobe Photoshop/Adobe suite program (which I no longer have).  I love this font.    I really like this cover.  Love it.

It's not a good cover for a couple of reasons.   As marketing it doesn't represent the subgenre of the novel.  I think it says "science fiction" but a bit more literary than it really is.  And the font reinforces that.  And the title refers to one of the groups in the novel but they aren't the focus of the novel, so the title has to go, unfortunately.

What I'm hoping for is figuring out how to get some retro-SF custom artwork, something that harkens back to Frazetta with blasters and tentacles and stuff.

But it sure is a pretty cover, isn't it?

This is this year's cover.  I want my old font back.  I don't like the little serifs on the font.  I just want to cry, "Why?" But this is what was available on the Microsoft Paint that came with my new computer.  The background and the figure are from Pixabay.

I like the background and I sort of like the figure... she needs tobe much more prominent, golden and shining.  As is, she about disappears into the nebula behind her.  But the posture was exactly what I wanted and the colors match nicely and she will have to do.  Probably does better than I should have expected to find and throw together so I'm not complaining.

This also represents the story (as it is conceived so far... it's this year's NaNo so it's not written yet) better than the first one.  It probably needs an exploding spaceship back there, though, in order to be good marketing.

If I could make her glowing and golden and get a font I liked and an exploding spaceship, I might even want to keep this one. 

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