Book covers, a journey.
I am wrapping up edits to the prequel for Without A World and I’ve been shopping for a book cover artist. Rebecca Rebouche, the amazing artist who did the cover for Without A World is not a book cover artist by trade, she’s a painter and she’s super busy with commissions at the moment (go girl!). So, I had to look elsewhere for the cover for Behind the Red Door.
Writers should write, not spend hours on Canva…
(Guilty). I did a few (boring and bland) mock-ups myself and decided I should be writing instead. Time to hire someone. I checked out Fiverr first but was overwhelmed by the range of prices (which I conflate with the range of quality for the finished product, for better or worse). Next, I scrolled over to my trusted source for editors: Reedsy. I have no doubt that the designers on Reedsy would have knocked it out of the park, but this is a 9,000-word prequel and the quotes came back between $450 US and 1,600 Euros, and that my friends, is out of the budget for this project.
Everyone is on Twitter…
(This is good and bad). I hopped over the Twitter #writingcommunity to ask for some recommendations from fellow writers. Well, that was possibly a mistake, because I was inundated with tons of requests from designers themselves. Good in theory, but I did want a recommendation from an author who had worked with someone. I gave one of the designers a shot though because her other covers were beautiful and really to my taste. I will pause here to say that I am, apparently, extremely picky when it comes to book cover design. When I look through covers on Amazon, in my opinion, 93% are complete garbage, another 5% are interesting, and 3% are wow! That wow 3% are likely not on best selling novels.
Designs I do like…
I was pressed to find designs in the YA and Sci-Fi genres I do like within the top 100 sales on Amazon. Here are three, there were two others, but when I looked again I decided I didn’t like them enough to include them.
I think the reason that things did not go well with the designer I found on Twitter is because I didn’t give her enough information about what I was looking for. She didn’t have a form or contract for me to fill in and didn’t ask me any questions. I gave as much information as I thought would be helpful, but it was not enough. I paid a deposit and a few days later she came back with, well, an unusable product. Of course she offered to revise, but it was so far off there was no point given the price we had agreed on ($100). I thanked her and cut my losses with the deposit.
Facebook authors groups= helpful.
I knew that. I knew there were people on there ready to be genuinely helpful, I had just forgotten. So when I asked one of the FB author groups I am part of for recommendations for affordable book covers I got immediate, helpful answers. That’s how I found 100 Covers. They offer unlimited revisions and a finished ebook cover for $100 bucks. Ok, I have learned some things, like the importance of including examples of covers I like and even including some things I don’t like (such as people on the cover (why do I hate this?!)). I’ve just started with 100 Covers, so I don’t know where it will land, but I’ll tell you their form was very detailed and it made me do some research to be sure I was giving them useful information and that bodes well for a quality product in my view.
In a few weeks, I’ll have that final product. Here’s hoping it will be in my 3%!
Here’s two more covers that I like. Clearly I am partial to a dark cover. I’ve collected these and others on my Great Book Covers Pinterest board.
