I've all but decided to self-publish my second fantasy novel, The Five Elements. I'll go into the reasoning in an upcoming post as well as discuss the strategy for how I intend to release it (serialization, Kindle store, etc.).
As I go through this process, I'm finding the hardest part is coming up with a decent cover. Book covers are important. Studies have shown that a cover has only seconds to entice a buyer to pick it up. So, it's important the cover look professional and possess some element to make the buyer want to see what's inside. Then, hopefully the writing takes it from there.
Now, I'm no graphic artist. I do what I can, and, ultimately, if none of the covers I design myself leap out at me as the right one, I may hire a freelancer. (If you know any good ones, send me their info.)
In this post I wanted to just show some of the ideas I've come up with. Hopefully as I progress from one to another I get a little better.
Here we go.
1.) This first one is this one. It's a bit busy, I thought, and maybe is trying to convey too much. Also, the fonts became distorted when shrunk down for Kindle store viewing.
2.) So I simplified. In the following image, I represent the four elements by four colored lines, almost joined together. The almost-square is surrounded by a simple white circle, the fifth element. Simple and (hopefully) to the point.
3.) Another option is this one. I made the text slightly larger, and made some changes to the clean lines of the shapes representing the elements. Biggest problem with this one is that the center image is hard to see, especially when small like this. OK, maybe the biggest problem is that, depending on your monitor settings, the blue on the image looks pretty bad (it looks fine on my laptop LCD, but hurts my eyes on a different monitor I just happened to view it on).
4.) So I made some more changes, altering the center image a bit with some special effects and widening. I also enlarged the circle and square. Better. I also went back to black; it's a monitor-neutral color that looks the same no matter what your settings.
That's what I've come up with so far. Like I said, I'm not a graphic artist. But I've seen some books, self-pub'ed and not, where the covers are horrendous. I could do a lot worse, in other words.
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