More About Book Covers

At the end of July, I uploaded two of my books on Amazon's Kindle: a romantic comedy called Easily Amused and a collection of humorous essays titled Lies I Told My Children. In my last blog entry, I detailed how the cover of Easily Amused came to be. It was pretty straightforward. I had an idea, took some pictures, and enlisted the help of my daughter Maria to put it together.

The book of humorous essays was not as easy for me. I was unsure how to do the cover. At one point I thought I might use an old black-and-white photo of my kids. I liked the picture and the expressions on their faces, but I was uncomfortable using their image for commercial use. (You notice I have no problem using stories about them, however. Ahem.) Ultimately, I nixed the idea. Too cutesy and too much of a violation of their privacy.

Then I decided that since the collection was mostly family-based humor, I'd use an iconic representation of family life--the front of our refrigerator complete with coupons, kitchen magnets, and photos. I bought a white board with the intent of writing the title and my name on it. My idea was to place it in the middle of the fridge, cluster everything around it, and voila--instant cover! David Sedaris's book, Me Talk Pretty One Day, uses a similar idea with a chalkboard and I loved the way it looked.

Sadly, this was a terrible idea. The white board didn't photograph well. Too much glare if I used the flash, not enough light otherwise. Plus, our fridge is located in a narrow pass through, so I had to swing the door open to get far enough away from it to get the shot. My lack of photography skills may also have played a part.

So that idea got scrapped. We still use the white board however, mostly for grocery lists (me) and to taunt one another (my sons).

Finally I came up with the concept of "fingers crossed," as in, crossing your fingers when you tell a lie. I used a piece of poster board, and my own hand. Greg took photos outdoors, where we were helped by the natural light. We tried it every which way.

This one almost looks like I'm begging. Please sir, could you spare a dime? My hand is deformed and I need to see a doctor.

This one looks like I'm giving someone the finger. Definitely not a good choice.

Shadow puppets? maybe a bunny?

Finally we settled on one, and Maria used fotoflexer.com to frame the text. In all honesty, this is my least favorite of all my covers, but I'm not sure how it could be done any better, short of hiring an art department. It is what it is.

In October, I uploaded A Scattered Life, whose cover is seen on the previous blog post. When I was looking for images for that novel on istockphoto.com, I came across a striking photo of a young woman in silhouette. It seemed to me that the image was made to be a book cover and would be a perfect fit for another book of mine, a young adult novel titled, Favorite.

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When I was ready to release Favorite on Kindle, I bought the image, and added the title and my name myself using fotoflexer.com. Maria was off at college by then, and I was very proud that all the hours sitting at her elbow paid off. Here it is, looking oh so wonderful.

In December I released another young adult novel, titled Life on Hold, which I discussed in a previous blog entry. That same week, I self-published a children's book, Celia and the Fairies, in both paperback and Kindle.

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Photos of fairies are incredibly hard to come by. Some would say nearly impossible. Fortunately, istockphoto.com also offers artwork and there was an assortment of fairy images. I found one featuring a fairy flying past a full moon and knew it would fit the story.

Maria was home at that point and I put her to work. She used Adobe Photoshop to create this cover:

For the paperback version I used CreateSpace, which offered a template showing the front, back and spine of the book. Again, Maria used Adobe Photoshop to fill in each section.

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And that's how the McQuestion family creates covers. :) Since I'm officially out of books, we should be set for awhile.

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Off to do some writing,

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Karen