The post 246 Book Cover Design for 2024 with Holly Dunn appeared first on Sacha Black.

In this episode we cover: 

• When should you update your covers?
• How to know if a cover is good
• Cover mistakes to avoid
• How to create covers when you’re writing cross-genre

This week’s question is: How do you plan for a new year?

Recommendation of the week is: One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston

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Rebel of the Week is: Chris Williams

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The post 113 Cover Design for Indie Authors with Julia Rozdobudko appeared first on Sacha Black.

Episode Show Notes

This week’s questions is:

Should you judge a book by its cover?

You can preorder The Anatomy of Prose digitally on all bookstores now.

Click the link here.

LAST CHANCE to read a review copy or be part of the street team for the launch of The Anatomy of Prose. I have a short form which can be found here: https://bit.ly/AoPTeam

Book recommendation this week is Smoke Gets in Your Eyes by Caitlin Doughty

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Listener Rebel of the Week is Aime Sund

If you’d like to be a Rebel of the week please do send in your story, it can be any kind of rebellion. You can email your rebel story to rebelauthorpodcast@gmail.com or tweet me @rebelauthorpod

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How to Get an Amazing Book Cover with Andrew and Bec Brown

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Twitter: www.twitter.com/design4writers

The post 024 How to Get an Amazing Book Cover with Andrew and Bec Brown appeared first on Sacha Black.

I launched Keepers, the first in my Young Adult fantasy series in November 2017.

I am in the final straight with Victor. I have about 10,000 words or so left to write and a full (short) edit. Then, I hope, it will be ready to go to the editor. Even if I have to get the hot glue gun out and superglue my ass to my office chair, this sequel is being finished THIS month.

My hope is to publish Victor sometime between late April and mid-May.

Without further ado, here is the brand spanking, shit hot shiny, new cover:

But what I love most, is when you’re able to see TWO books together in your series. Now THAT is quite a feeling… and I’ve just commissioned the prequel cover too… *squeal*

Read Keepers, the first book in my Young Adult fantasy series now. Or to hear more about the release of the sequels as well as get regular CogMail updates you can do so here.

You can get more awesome writing tips in my book 13 Steps To Evil – How to Craft Superbad Villains. Click this link and just tap the logo of your device or regular bookshop and it will take you to the right page. You can also get a FREE villains cheatsheet by joining my mailing list just click here.

You can also find me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Goodreads

The post Cover Reveal: Victor #2 in the Eden East YA fantasy novels #amreading appeared first on Sacha Black.

Shit. That makes me shallow doesn’t it?

Ah well, fuck it. At least I can admit it.

I’ve been thinking about marketing a LOT recently. Minus a total meltdown last week and a decision to bin (and subsequently re-write the last 30K of my book), I am still on track to send my book-baby to beta readers on 30th September.

Being the incessant 5 steps-a-head planner that I am, it means my mind is on marketing, book covers and that big ol’ scare-the-shitsicles-out-of-you decision: Do I run the poison, trap-infested gauntlet to a publishers door? Or drown in the overly saturated ‘Amazon’ rainforest of books as an indie? As it happens, I’ve finally made my mind up, but I’ll leave that for another post.

Book covers are without doubt, THE most important marketing decision you’ll make. Fuck it up, and you can watch your readers Foxtrot Oscar into the sunset, never to return to your bookshelf! So, I’m sharing my research and the lessons I’ve learnt in preparing to have my book cover designed.

Thing One – Genre

Know your genre. I know. Sounds like I took my stupid pull this morning cause of course you know. But seriously, think about it. You go into a bookstore and you can identify ‘your’ spot, you know the exact location your fave books will be in, just by looking at the shelves. No one read the signs anymore, we just look at the covers!

Scroll through – there are lots of covers in the gallery.

Those are some of the currently popular covers from the YA genre. You can tell a lot when you line a row of books up. I can often be found, detective specs on, snooping in a Waterstones (or #GoogleTranslate: Barnes and Noble). I actually have an album on my phone dedicated to book covers. I snoop. Take Photo. Repeat. I collect them in order to deconstruct and analyse their make up.

Even from the small selection in the slide show, you can see there are clear themes to all these YA (generally fantasy) covers:

• Most have a clear theme or symbol from their stories represented centrally in the cover
• Bold colours. Lots of blues, whites and blacks.
• More often than not with yellow or white writing.
• The book title is larger than the author’s name
• The book titles are generally less than 3 or 4 words, and more often just one word
• There’s a variety of placements of the title words from the top to the centre and even to the lower quartile of the book so placement seems more about overall fit than a formulaic style
• Of the 18 books included, only 4 have an obvious image of a person on the cover. One other has very small figures in the distance. But for this genre it doesn’t seem essential to have a figure or body part on them. Unlike say, romance.

The point is, don’t make assumptions. Markets and genres release new books constantly. Which means the tropes and themes within those genres are always evolving. When you need a cover creating, stop and analyse the top 30 books in your genre to see what the themes are.

Thing Two – Same, Same but Different 

Why examine book covers in your genre when you want your cover to be different? Well, let’s pretend we’re bitchy school girls. To get in with the cool crowd you need to be the same as them but unique enough you’re valuable the Queen Bee.

If your book is on a shelf in Waterstones, you want it to be identifiable within your genre. But you also need to be different enough that it actually stands out to readers (in the milliseconds they glimpse your book).

Normally I’d tell you comparing is a plague, its second only to the plague of self-doubt. But when it comes to covers it is essential to collect and compare so you know what you’re up against, what tropes you need to follow and what you can happily avoid in order to stand out.

Simply – follow the key (reoccurring) patterns in your genre but in your own way.

Thing Three – Write Your Own DETAILED Brief

If you’re rolling your eyes, because you’re giving your cover to a designer therefore it’s not your problem, then stop rolling and listen up.

If you’re an indie author, the cover is down to you. If you’re going to pay out for a designer you might as well make sure you get what you want. The more detail you can give upfront the less iterations you will go through and the less it will cost you. Most designers have a limited number of changes they will make, which is why this is so important.

Give as much detail as you can, including:

• Target audience and genre
• Colour schemes
• Spellings (REALLY important)
• Examples of other covers you like AND importantly examples of ones you don’t like too
• If you have a preference on layout
• Any conceptual information, i.e. if you want a symbol or particular ‘image included, like a door or a key’
• Whether you want a person in the cover and if you do, whether you want it realistic or otherwise
• If you have a preference on style or type of typography /font 
• Whether you want an eBook or print or both versions
• If you have a short synopsis why not send it with your brief

Thing Four – Colour Matters

Study your genre, but also ask yourself what fits your story? If it’s a dark story you need dark colours and vice a versa.

On font colour, keep it simple. Opposing colours to the ‘main’ book colour work well, and as you can see in the slide show, the YA books mostly have white or yellow font. Your designer will advise you, but it helps if you go in knowing what you want so you don’t change your mind two months after you launch it.

Thing Five – Fonts

I don’t profess to be an expert on fonts, and again your designer will help with this, but if there are fonts you like in your genre, show them to your designer. You need to decide if the font is the focal part of your cover or if the image/symbol is. This determines how fontalicious  you can go with your typography.

BookCoverDesigner has a great post on fonts and what are well used fonts on covers.

Thing Six – What’s Your Symbol?

Your cover needs to symbolise something – your story, obvs!

Even if you don’t have a physical symbol on your cover, like a lot of the YA books do, you need to somehow symbolise your story in the cover. Perhaps using your books central theme.

How do you do this? The same way you write. Show don’t tell. The TED talk below is all about book design and the same reasoning goes for covers as it does writing.

Readers, much to our writerly surprise, aren’t idiots. I know. I know. It’s a hard pill to swallow. But really, they do interpret and infer, so you can be somewhat abstract when it comes to your cover. Especially if you have a nifty title giving the reader context.

Last But Not Least – Thing Seven – Details. Details. Details

While your designer is shimmying up a book cover, think about whether you need a thumbnail image, a spine and back cover for print books. Do you need additional marketing materials?

Such as:

• Business cards with book designs on them
• Bookmarks
• Postcards
• Physical posters and Banners
• eMaterials for Facebook or twitter or any other social media
• Merchandise with covers or symbols on them

The world is your oyster – but economies of scale apply. Once you have designs it doesn’t take much for your designer to add them to a little something-something else!

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The post 7 Things You Need To Know to Master Your Genre's Book Cover appeared first on Sacha Black.

Having scrutinised it, I have to say I highly recommend it as a design site. For those of you who don’t have photoshop and illustrator its the perfect substitute. It has a plethora of professional looking templates for everything from book covers, blog photos, infographics, flyers, posters, cover photos… anything you could want it has pre made templates which you can edit to your hearts desire.

If you want to increase your blog traffic next year I am certain this tool will help.

ONE – Templates Galore

Canva has templates with the optimised sizes and pixels for everything from:

Every type of social media – Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest. It has a variety of book cover templates with fully customisable functions, magazines, letters, presentation templates, infographics, album covers, cover photos for all social media, invitations, event designs and much more.

TWO – Infographics

The reason I find this such a useful tool is for its infographic capabilities. I have for a long time, searched for a tool with the mechanism to create infographics for free. With Canva, as long as you have your own photos or use their free ones – you can. Every image you create otherwise is the standard price of a dollar.

Infographics if you don’t know, are long thin images with standout facts and figures, or hints and tips,  this is one I created in just a few minutes.

I know infographics aren’t everyones cup of tea, but they are hugely popular on Pinterest, which drives an obscene amount of traffic to my site – if you want to up your traffic this is a no brainer, especially if you get them onto Pinterest.

THREE  – Attracting Traffic

Everyones knows photos attract people to your media, I wrote about how to create them in this post: 4 Easy Steps To Seriously Awesome Blog Post Photos. This is a catch all site that gives you the ability to create photos and media for all your sites in one quick go AND they are already set up in eye catching templates. Which means, traffic, traffic, traffic.

FOUR – Functionality

It’s functionality its intuitive. With a panel on the left for all the icons and an easy drag and drop system into the main panel for anything you want to pop into your graphics.

Fonts are changeable, text moveable and just about everything can be edited. If you can use wordpress, you can use Canva. Not because it looks and works the same, but because its as simple and intuitive as wordpress.

It also has a tutorial if you get stuck.

FIVE – Motivation & Inspiration

Have ever wanted to have a book cover before your book is finished? You know just to see? To play around and see what it would be like to have your name on a cover?

Maybe for motivational purposes to help you carry on but you can’t afford a designer incase your book changes and the cover needs to as well. Well Canva is your tool.

I made a pretend cover for Adultland, the second novel I am drafting as a result of this writespiration. Clearly this isn’t what I would put on the actual cover, firstly I’d get it designed professionally, I’d want a girl walking up the path anyway and it’s not right on a lot of levels. But, it is motivational. Plus not having published anything yet, it was kind of cool to see my name on a book. Definitely motivation to hurry the F up!!

Thoughts? Have you ever used Canva? Have you created a pretend cover to drive you on? What kind of graphics do you use? What do you think of infographics?

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