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Setting Up a Design Brief for a Cover Contest (Part 1)

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So you’ve checked with all your friends, dug out your old refrigerator drawings you mom saved from when you were six, and you’ve come to the dismal conclusion, you don’t have access to the artistic talent needed for your new book baby. It deserves the best, so you check under the cushions of your couch and scrounge up $300 (wow!), open an account with 99Designs (since I’ve dealt with them for about a year, I’ll use them as my default example), start a contest and sit back waiting for wonderful covers to show up for your perusal.

And you wait. And you wait. And something resembling dog barf on digital canvas shows up. You scratch your head, wondering why other authors are getting exciting entries and you aren’t. Let’s go through a few things to see what you might have done wrong.

1) Did you provide a title for your book? You laugh, but a good number of the books don’t have titles when the author posts their contest. Big mistake. A title isn’t just a series of letters on top of the cover design. It’s PART of the design. Cover designers use different fonts, size letters and adjust spacing, and place the words differently depending on the title and the art their using for the cover. Think about it a moment – if you designed a cover thinking you were doing “The Hobbit” and then afterwards the author said, no, the title is “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe”, wouldn’t you be just a tad put out? The whole flow of the title would require you redesign the cover to accommodate it. And if you’re doing a print version of your book, the spine will require reworking to fit the title and author on it and any other design elements (publisher logo), you might wish to incorporate.

2) Did you tell the designers what exactly you plan to publish? Do you only need an ebook cover, or do you also need a full layout for a print version? It’s important to tell people that. I’m entered in a contest right now where the author made no mention of her needing a print version of her book. After the final designs were submitted and the contest closed she sent me an email asking if I could make a print version for her to see. I asked her to provide me the dimensions, the paper type and the number of pages. She didn’t send me these things and so I had to make things up. I told her I based the cover size and design on a 300 page book, on cream paper, with a 6×9 bleed. I still have no idea if that works for her. Don’t make your designers guess like this.

Others in the contest made print mockups, but because her title is so long they made the spines quite thick to allow for a double row of words. We’re talking spine widths to accommodate a 500 page book. Odds are her book isn’t that long (it’s for little kids), and if she chooses their design based on how the spine looks, she’ll be disappointed when the artist has to redo the whole thing because she put out a 200 page book and needs a much thinner spine.

Before you start your contest do yourself a favor and pop over to CreateSpace and check out the options for a print book. Under the covers tab you can enter how many pages your book is, what bleed you want to use (probably 6×9), what kind of paper you want to use (go with cream – it’s much heavier and looks professional compared to the white), and you can choose whether you want a glossy cover or not (this is one thing you probably don’t need to tell the designers). It will then generate a template in a PDF which you can then attach to your contest so the designers can use it to get your cover the right size.

You’ll save yourself and the designers a lot of headaches if you include this information right at the start.

3) Did you provide a synopsis of your book and information about the appearance of key characters? Again, this may seem to be a no-brainer, but a lot of folks simply say, “Make me a cover,” and are then amazed when no one can read their minds.

Be specific. One author posted that she wanted a girl to appear on her cover and that the girl needed to convey that she’d gone through a lot of trauma, but that her faith had helped her endure. She got a ton of nice covers with pretty blond girls around seven years old. Turned out the “girl” was over thirty years of age and had brown hair. Lots of wasted time and effort occurred because the author wasn’t clear about what she wanted.
At a minimum, provide age, race, gender, time period, genre, and general clothing style. Better yet, give height, weight, hair & eye color to go along with that. If you can, avoid extremely specific articles of clothing like “must have pearl necklace with sapphire gem in center, that hangs down between her breasts, and shows through the sweetheart cutout of her blouse”.

If you want plate armor state that. If you need jeans and a t-shirt, state that. If their hair is wavy or straight-as-a-ruler, let folks know. Just know where to draw the line. Like in eating goodies, remember, all things in moderation.

Remember, the artists most likely have 4-5 days to try to wow you with their initial entries. Some do paint from scratch, but most don’t. The average designer works with 3D renders, stock images, and Photoshop magic.

Next week (or so) I’ll post part two to this article. I’ll provide additional suggestions on what to include and what to leave out of your design brief.

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Put a Wrap on it

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So, as writers we create images by stringing a series of words together that we hope the reader will find evocative. We focus on that, and then when it comes time to self-publish we get hit with the realization we need an actual picture to represent to the buying public what they’ll find buried in our hundred-thousand-word new born. It can be a trifle … unsettling.

If you fancy yourself a visual artist of sorts, you can tackle this project yourself. Maybe you have a skilled friend you can hit up for a favor. Quite a lot of folks do not have these as options. What to do?
You can go to web sites with premade covers. There you sort through their offerings, in the hopes that someone just happened to capture the look and feel of your story. You choose the cover, pay for it, and they add the relevant text to it. Fairly easy, and usually inexpensive, but a good many people aren’t going to find the perfect book cover this way.

There are other options. I’m going to say flat out, I do not think Fiverr is one of them. I’m sure some folks will disagree, but for the most part, a killer cover is not the result of someone working for $5 a shot.

You can go to Createspace and use one of their options. One is a DIY system called Cover Creator where they provide templates which you modify with clip art, stock photos, or something you provide. This isn’t a horrible idea, and it’s free, so if you’re not in a position to fork over any dough, this may be the best choice for you.

Createspace also has different levels of professional help available for cover design. The less expensive version ($399) gets you a consultation, use of a single image, custom layout, custom background color and stylized text options. The “premier” version ($599) gets you a consultation, single stock image, unique stylized font and theme, two options for the cover (your version and the one the designer suggests), plus a couple rounds of revisions.

If that is too rich for your blood (or too limiting), and you’d like to get multiple artists to vie for your attention, there are companies who provide that service as well. Crowd Sourcing has grown over the years. You can get just about anything designed for your project. Not just business cards. Not just company logos. Book covers. Places like DesignCrowd have you write a brief which includes all the items you consider essential for the artists to know when competing for work . You pay a fee to the company and a portion of that (usually about 2/3) gets assigned as the “prize” for winning the contest (this can vary, but $300 seems standard for what you pay). You set the amount of time for the contest to run, choose finalists to go on to the next round, and then choose the winner at the end. If you don’t like any of the designs presented to you, you get your fee refunded. I mentioned DesignCrowd, but there are others. The one I am most familiar with is 99Designs.

My next article will cover (no pun intended) what to do and not do when setting up a contest at a crowd sourcing site. I’ve entered a number of contests at 99designs and have dealt with the frustration of dealing with authors who didn’t know what they were doing. I’ll try to provide you some tips so if you go this route you’ll have a more successful campaign.

In the meantime, if you want to know a whole lot more about the actual art of cover design, check out The Book Designer. There you can find out all kinds of useful things, and once you’ve published your new shiny book, you can enter your books cover into his monthly contest and perhaps gain a little exposure for your work.

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Things Learned

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I haven’t heard back from MERP, so I’m guessing that’s a dead end. I would have thought they’d at least have a bot send me a notification that they got my request and would get back to me with their decision in so many days. Jakiblue sent me some other links for Blog Tours and I may look into them.

Of more interest are my initial findings on the DIY ads at Goodreads. My ad has been running for a week now. According to their daily statistics they’ve placed my ad 3512 times on pages people are looking at. This has resulted in exactly 0 (zero) clicks. The good news is my $50 is lasting a good long time – LoL. The bad news is that either people don’t care about the ad or they’re not seeing it. I know that when I go to the various pages at Goodreads, the ads are along the side of the page and toward the bottom. Unless I scroll down the page for some reason, I often don’t see them at all. Other times, when I do see something that catches my eye, it’s usually right after I’ve clicked to go somewhere else and then I can’t get the same ad to pop back up.

In other news, I started a Giveaway on Goodreads. I’m putting up for grabs one print version of my book. The Giveaway is open to everyone. Goodreads handles the entire thing (aside from me being responsible for getting the book sent out to the winner). I’m running the sign up time until September 9th (my birthday!). There’s still several days available to sign up. Tell your friends. Heck, tell your enemies!

I’ll report back next week with further news on my DIY ad, and update y’all on the Giveaway.

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Learning Through Trial and Error

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Okay, so I read about how to market myself before I actually published my book. Of course, I don’t have a head for such things, so all the information sorta just slithered through and back out of my grey matter. Jakiblue, who has Google-fu skillz, has attempted to help me out by pointing out the various places that do blog tours. I finally caved in and signed up for one – Merp Squad Tours – and I now await their decision. Having never done a tour, I have no idea what to expect. With luck I’ll get accepted and learn a few things in the process.

Merp is free, by the way. I’m trying to sell books, not keep myself in dept by paying for all kinds of promotions. Still, I thought maybe I should at least attempt to invest something into promoting myself, so I’m giving the Goodreads ads a try. What it boils down to is you give them your budget (I went with $50), and put together and image link with a synopsis, and they charge you out of your budget by the number of clicks you get. You set aside a limit per day. My budget allows for .50 per click with 10 clicks per day. My promotion continues until my $50 gets used up. So, assuming ten people a day click on my ad, my promotion will last ten days. I have zero idea how effective such site specific ads are, but I’m willing to invest $50 to get an idea.

If I sell 15 ebooks as a result of the ads I will make back what I invested. That doesn’t seem like an outrageous number of books, so I don’t feel I’m risking too much. As of today, I have sold a total of 54 books in a little less than a month. Considering the fact I wasn’t sure I’d even manage to sell one book when I put it out there, I’m feeling pretty warm and fuzzy.

If anyone who has picked up my book is reading this, thank you so much.

OH, and of course I’ll post back when I have some idea what my ad accomplishes. If nothing else, perhaps my findings will help some other new author-publisher out there.

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Still Getting My Feet Wet

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Things are chugging along with the first book. A few people I don’t know have actually picked it up, and that’s a start. I have my first ever review, and it’s about as wonderful of a review as I could ever hope for. It seems to be responsible for the three sales from people that I don’t know (or at least they haven’t told me they know me). I’m excited and gratified by the attention.

I can’t just loll about hoping for more strokes to my ego though, so I’m settling down for a long day of typing/editing/writing. I finished up Chapter 5 of the sequel last night. It’s in desperate need of pruning, but that can wait until I finish entering the rest of the story. Getting distance from it will allow me to make better choices in terms of what to keep, what to eliminate, and what to move.

Chapter 6 will be the focus of today’s work. It’s much shorter than Chapter 5, and tighter written, so it should go much faster. I think I’ll move a scene from a later chapter to it, which will accomplish a couple of things. One, it will bolster the page count of an otherwise too short chapter, and two, it will place a scene earlier in the timeline, which will make a lot more sense in terms of character development. It’s also a less than serious scene and the story could use something to lighten the mood at this point.

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Print Version Out

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The first few days, only the Kindle version of my book made it into Amazon’s shop. I misread and thought Createspace would make the print version available within 12 hours. I was mistaken, 3-5 days turned out to be the accurate amount of time. About 10 a.m., three days after I gave the okay for the book to go live, the print version finally showed up in the store.

All of this is new to me, of course, but already I’ve learned a few things. One is that, don’t presume everyone is enamored of digital readers. I’d assumed the fact that you can store hundreds of books on one little digital device would convert the world. Wrong. The print version of my book has only been out two days and it has far outsold the digital version. Also, 2/3 of my sales have been from outside the U.S., with most of those making up the print orders. There’s something extra special about knowing a person on another continent may curl up with my book.

Okay, I’ve lollygagged enough. I still haven’t found a way to alter the CSS on this theme, and I’m not going to waste more time on it today. I have another book to finish writing.

Everyone take care. )

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It’s ALIVE!

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Cover 3 Candidate 3

It only took what seems like half my life, but the first volume of the Chronicles of Shadow, Exile’s Redemption is finally available on Amazon. It’s in both ebook and trade paperback formats. If you belong to Kindle Unlimited you can read the ebook version that way. A sample is available, of course, and it’s also available via the Prime Lending Library.

What is it about?  Here’s the blurb:

After four hundred years, isolated from the rest of the world, the Elven Nation has finally reestablished a presence on the mainland of Allasea. With their return, the elves have built the city of Second Home, a place of learning, open to all who would come to study.

For Raven, a young Shadow Elf historian, and one of the few elves born on the mainland, it’s an opportunity for her to research the truth about the first child born to the elves, Umbral K’hul, a god-like boy whose attempted patricide and subsequent banishment triggered a civil war that fractured the Elven Nation.

A more sinister presence sees the elves’ return as a chance to strike, filling the beautiful city with an army of chaos and death. But along with the demons, strides another: after ten thousand years of exile, Umbral K’hul has escaped his prison.

Now, the elves’ greatest pariah and an untested heroine must face an enemy bent on genocide. In the process they will discover secrets their people have kept since the elves established First Home. Secrets which could prove even more devastating than the demons.

I’d love it if you popped over to Amazon and checked it out. If you read and enjoy it, a review on Amazon and/or Goodreads would be much appreciated.

Buy at Amazon!