Monday 15 September 2014

Ebook cover creators.



I’m fully aware that my artwork isn’t going to scare the pants off any pro but I just can’t afford to pay twenty zillion pounds for someone else to paint my covers.
     This past weekend I spent considerable time perusing the web sites offering this very piece of software. The functions within the myriad sites are relatively straightforward, and no more difficult than I could achieve with GIMP, but the large stocks of pre-painted book covers, whilst beautifully presented and far better than anything I could ever come up with, are just so generic.
     Perhaps it’s a mistake but I always try to paint my covers with an important scene from whichever novel they come from, but try as I might I simply could not come up with an image of giant lizards, or a half destroyed Buckingham Palace, and you can imagine my success in finding an image of giant lizards destroying Buckingham Palace. It was the same for my other books. A pterodactyl flying over the streets of Los Angeles, or a giant lizard cruising over Tower Bridge simply weren’t within their impressive stocks.
     Therefore, unless I can find a site catering for a mind as strange as mine, I’ll either have to save enough for a real artist, or simply improve my painting. And there’s my next problem. That might take years when I could be writing.
     So my question is this. I know everyone rails about the importance of magnificent book covers, but for Kindle, my main platform, does it really matter that much? Which is to say, would even my artwork stand less chance of sales than a bland cover with just the name of the novel?

2 comments:

  1. I have to agree Donna. Producing a marketable cover is a problem for many of us who are relatively new to the publishing world. I use photographs which I believe best convey the spirit of my writing and serve as an introduction to my readers. For instance, my first non-fiction book was titled, "A Leaf That Floats Upstream." This showed a photo of a leaf on a stream, and I guess I have always been the leaf which floats upstream. I should also mention that frequently, professionally produced books have covers which do not in any way relate to the contents. A breakdown in communication?

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  2. Thanks Alastair. That's my problem exactly - and the answer. There will be no time in the immediate future when I can afford a professional painter. Therefore I'll just have to improve my painting because there's no chance that I'll find stock images to fit my books, or even just their tittles.

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