Hello everyone and welcome back. I am hoping today will be better than yesterday. So far so good in that my ability to see isn't hampered by terrible sharp awful head-stabbing migraine pains. I took far more than the recommended dose of Excedrine yesterday and that pretty much didn't work. That was fun. It was interesting to learn that the exhaustion caused from the migraine beats out the two and a half cups of coffee worth of caffeine though, so I was able to sleep. I'm expecting another one to hit today, I'm just hoping it's not nearly as bad.
I've started gathering up images for 'Rending the Seal's cover. Or what will hopefully one day be the cover. I am not a cover-artist. I don't have the program that lets me be a cover artist nor a computer to run it on (I live on a laptop and I don't like running Adobe programs on it out of fear it will catch on fire and melt) so as you all may know I am forced to pay people in food to make them for me once I get the images together. Since we are getting close to that time I wanted to take a quick look at that today.
I keep mentioning that despite that whole 'you can't judge a book but its cover' additive you've heard since you were like two years old, that doesn't mean your cover isn't important. In fact I think that when you're working with ebooks it's even more important. Look at it like this, let's say you're in...I'll say Barnes and Noble because I can't think of anywhere else, and you find a book with an interesting title. The cover looks...a bit oh the weird side, so you turn the book over, read the synopsis, and decide to still give it a shot because it still sounds interesting. That's where the not judging stuff comes in.
Now with an ebook things get a little more difficult. Typically people on the internet are doing at least two things at the same time, sometimes more, and this is in addition to shopping. The other thing to keep in mind that unlike shopping in the 'real world' in order to look at the synopsis of the book, generally a link that will bring them to another page must be clicked. These are all downsides in the world of the internet. If your title and your cover aren't interesting enough they will overlook your book without a second thought. They aren't judging it, they just haven't found the thing they think is super awesome about it.
I'm not saying the cover has to be able to punch them in the face to get their attention (that technology doesn't exist yet) but it does have to be eye-catching enough to do almost the same thing. Use light to your advantage, help it draw the eye up to the title, and also make sure that it has something to do with the story/title because if your story is about ships in space going on this epic journey and you have a dinosaur bone on the cover, and there aren't any dinosaurs or references to them in the story, it's going to be weird and feel like a let-down.
Covers need to be planned just as must as any other part of your story. Even if you don't make them yourself, have an idea of what you want going into it before just throwing stuff at whoever is going to make it. There are several royalty-free image sites that have collections of stock images that can be used that are cheap too. If you're writing a series, try to also keep font consistent between the works so that the readers can easily tell there is a connection (other than the author name) it just makes things look nice. It all can be done, it's just the last little bit of work you need to do before uploading everything to the world.
Thanks for stopping by. I'm hoping Friday will be nice enough to me to have a decent posting. I hope everyone's week is going well and that the rest is fun and happy too. For now I will leave you to it, have a great rest of the week!
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