Book covers – what I love and what I hate

When I choose a book to read I tend to look for an author I’ve heard of, then read the blurb and maybe the first few pages. If I’m still intrigued, I’ll go ahead and buy the book. However, I am put off by photographic representations of characters. I like to make my own mind up about how they look. Artists’ impressions are a little more palatable as they only make a suggestion and this is just about the same as the one made by the text itself. Oddly, I’m less precious about setting. 

Also, the cover shouldn’t give away too much of the story. It should be a little like the blurb and just hint at something.

I’ve included a few here from my own collection of books – ones I’ve written, ones I’ve published and ones I’ve read.    

Clara’s Story 

Clara's Story

 

This is the second in my Schellberg Cycle and picks up the style of The House on Schellberg Street. The wild flowers in a jug and the pearls are really very much part of Clara. They do feature in the story.

The House on Schellberg Street

The publisher asked me to pick a selection of stock pictures. I chose some lovely doorways but these looked too much like what they’d used on another book. However, we then decided to use a sepia tinted background – after all this is an historical novel – and present the doorway as a line drawing. That the door  is open intrigues us. This fits well with the story. It sets the tone for the other books in the cycle.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Salford Stories

We used a photo of Salford here. We desperately wanted a photo of The Old Pint Pot as one of the stories is set there. However, we just couldn’t get one that would work. We needed a picture where we had room to fit the blurb and the title. We had to go for a more generic picture of Salford.

 

Baubles

This is one of my favourites. People may have thought of Christmas tree baubles as the book came out just before Christmas. We thought more in terms of bits and pieces that are collected as people go through life. Chris Bowles’ story in the collection gives a particular take on that idea.

Something Hidden

This is the title of the first story in the collection and this was in fact the winner of a short story competition we’d held. I found a stock photo that goes very well with this story by just searching the site using the story title as search words. This often does have amazing results.

 

Beggarman’s Cottage

Here is an example of  an artist’s impression. It’s very watery and ghost-like and just given an impression. It’s still left to us to decide how exactly the old cottage might look.

Words and figures as pictures

Her are a couple of examples how we’ve used a series of words and numbers for the cover. One displays all of the authors. Another creates a bit of a puzzle. What happened on which day?  The third works on a pun and gives you numbers to play with.

Are you tempted by any of them? Are the pictures working?  

Click on them and find out more about the book.            

Which services should self-publishing authors pay for?

More and more people are self-publishing. Print on demand facilities and Amazon’s Kindle have made it extremely easy and you can now do this without the fear of ending up with a garage full of books.

The message seems to be, particularly from writers who have gone the conventional route but who are now resurrecting their out-of-print backlist, that people who self-publish will have to market like mad, but then those published by the Big Six have to do than anyway, and that you should never pay huge sums of money to have your book published.

Some services you need

I agree with the former argument, I’m not so sure I agree with the latter.

Editing

Your book needs editing. Even the best writers need editing and copy-editing and the writers themselves are not the best placed persons to do that. Editing takes time. I’m a publisher as well as being a writer and even a beautifully and competently written 1000 word short story will take me at least 30 minutes to edit. Now think of a patchier 100,000 novel. I can edit, copy-edit and critique, but find it best not to do all three for the same text – especially if I actually wrote the text. Even at minimum wage, you’d soon be racking up the £s. It’s absolutely accepted that freelancers charge more per hour than staff earn per hour – because so much of their time is spent in tendering for more work – and for publishing houses / indie authors they’re still better value for money than employing someone full time.  

£240? Low estimate?  

Designing

Your book needs designing. You may be able to learn how to do this correctly but this will take time. This isn’t just a matter of getting it to look nice. It’s also about making sure that the software that’s going to print the book understands what you want. Different formats require different formatting. The Unicode you use in a Word programme is not supported on Amazon Kindle, for example. Just look what it does to foreign accents. You save a lot of time and effort if you let someone in the know deal with this. Also, if you use a proper designer, they’ll know about all of the conventions.

£120.00  / 12 hours? (after you’ve learnt the ropes?)

Cover design

You can use a stock picture for a few pounds or pence but you’re still need your designer to make sure the title, spine, bar-code and blurb all look right and end up in the right place.  Of course, again, you can learn this yourself but remember this will take time and actually designing each cover will also take time.

£60- £300? 6 hours if using stock photo /art work

Marketing / publicity

Word of mouth always works well but you have to be established. Do you want to get someone to do the nitty gritty – getting out press releases, contacting indie bookshops, nagging W.H Smiths and Waterstones  etc? Or is that just more time you’re willing to steal from your writing day? Buy £150 worth of someone else’s time? Or expertise – they might be better at press releases than you are.   

I’m not counting all the social networking here – we all do that anyway. You’ll have to do that as well.

Book trailer

If you have the expertise, the insight and the time to do this yourself, great, if not I’ve seen people charging €30 - €150 – and much more, I’m sure. They do seem necessary these days.   

When you should pay and when you shouldn’t

To sum up, I’d say most of the above you can learn and if the budget’s tight you could even swap editing procedures with a group of colleagues. Whatever happens,  however, you should own your own ISBNs or you could form a cooperative with writing colleagues.  

If you add the above up, and then throw in the costs for setting-up printing costs you’re around about the £1000 mark. This is remarkably similar to what some self-publishing companies and some vanity publishers charge.

The crucial difference comes in what happens once the book has been set up. If you’ve paid these charges for someone to do all of these activities for your book, that company should have no more profit from it. If they handle the orders for you, fair enough, an admin charge should come in every time. And probably it’s best not to use the same company for each procedure. Employ people according to their strengths.

If you’ve paid those upfront charges you should receive all of the profits.  You have become the publisher. Vanity publishers and less scrupulous self-publishing companies want to charge you an upfront fee and merely give you a royalty. Steer clear of them.

The way forward

The traditional publisher risks those services on you and pays you a royalty on every book sold. These days royalties on electronic books are quite generous. There are still many advantages for going this route to the writer.

Personally I’m enjoying having books published in a variety of different ways – some are by traditional publishers, some are merely on Kindle, some are self-published but in print and some are published by small presses. Diversity is probably healthy anyway these days.                     

 

 

The Excitement of a New Book Coming Out

I’ve been really busy this weekend. I’ve been putting together two of our collections which I hope will be out by the end of the month, in time for Halloween, as they’re a collection of ghost stories – Spooked - and a collection of horror stories- Scream.
The covers are glorious – we seem to be going form strength to strength with those. One of our authors doesn’t like one of the covers, but actually it’s quite unusual for authors to like coves at all. So, all in all, we’re actually winning.
I’ve had lots of buzzy ideas about selling these two collections at a discount. Or also selling our whole collection at a discount, with a further 25% off for authors.
So, lets set it up and get the orders rolling in.
This is going to make an excellent “day job” for me when I retire.

The Books Have Come

They’ve arrived! My lovely creamy, yellowy copies of The Prophecy. I did worry a little that they may not come in time. They have and they all look good.
Over thirty books out and I still get quite a kick out of seeing their glossy covers. However, I don’t like opening them. I find sentences I want to change. It’s odd as well – I don’t quite recognise them. I’m so used to seeing my books as double-spaced A4 sheets. They don’t look quite as if they belong to me when they’re in the form of books on the shelf. Who is this Gill James anyway?
I’m going to have to pick the bits I want to read soon and practise. That’s enjoyable, though. I think we’ve got a fair audience. Perhaps the free chocolate cake and the free carrot cake is attracting them….
Is text enhanced by performance? Or should the text speak for itself? I know often in critique groups, one tends to underread. I did have a friend, though, who could make the direst texts come to life. At readings anyway one has to actually perform. Practise I must, therefore.

Book Covers

I get excited about book covers. I’ve had four to be excited about recently. I’ve been sent one for my 9-11 novel Kiters due out next spring, one for my Young Adult book Scum Bag. Also, one for my other Young Adult novel Veiled Dreams and last but not least, the one for our anthology Making Changes. It’s always seeing the cover which gets me excited. I’m not so precious about getting the book in my hands. I might just open it and find another typo or start editing it again. But the fact that some editor has found it good enough to give it a cover – now that is something! This is what my darling is going to look like when it goes out into the world and my darling is indeed going out into the world.
Unfortunately, I can’t share three of the covers with you yet. They’re not released. I can, however, share Making Changes with you. It’s out on 13 November. Preorders are accepted for that now. So take a look.