Authors. It Takes a Strong Back and Spine To Be a Winning Cover - UPDATED

It Takes a Strong Back and Spine To Be a Winning Cover

This is the final installment of blogs about the cover of your book.

I find it interesting to watch what people do when I hand them a copy of one of my books. After looking at, and generally commenting on, the cover, at least half the time, they turn the book over to the back cover without opening it.

So, what’s on the back cover of your book?

Here are three examples and a handful of tips.

Tip 1: Use third person tense. It makes your book sound soooo much better. Try writing your back cover text in the first person. Then, rewrite it in 3rd person. You'll be surprised at the different feel that provides—it makes your book more professional.

Tip 2: Use a smaller font than in the text of your book. Try a sans serif font (Arial, Calibri).

Tip 3. If you use a template, be sure to leave space where it says to leave space for your barcode.

Tip 4. A short biography (and photo?) is a nice touch. So are reviews—but keep them SHORT.

Tip 5. Include a description of your book. This is where you expand your logline to provide a view into the plot (see my blog from 7/29). Adding some text from the book is okay, too.

Finally, does your book have a strong spine?

Seriously! Look at the spine of your book. That part of the cover is what most people will see of your book most of the time. Books are placed side-to-side, not side-by-side on bookshelves to conserve space. As a result, the spine is all that’s visible to the passerby.

Make your spine a strong one. Here are the three spines from my books that are currently in print. Two are from publishers. The third is self-published through Amazon’s CreateSpace.

Notice the similarities, including the publisher’s logo. 

I made up my own logos. I think a logo finishes the cover. However, if you notice the MJ and Kohler logos, they are simple. Mine are too artsy and hard to read when they are "spine" size.

Since the first version of this post, I've self-published more books and learned more about covers. Take a look at the difference in the RIFTS cover and the cover of the revised version of the book, INSECTICIDE.

 

1. The front cover art is the same. 
2. The only difference in the spines is the title and font used.
3. Notice that the tagline and the acknowledgement of the artist on the front cover are easier to read, my name is in a different location. 
4. The "boxes" are missing from the back cover. Boxes are generally a bad idea because they break the natural movement of the reader's eyes.
5. The quote from a review at the top of the back is different.
6. There's a question for the reader instead of the Bafwequian alphabet.

     The next photo shows two iterations of cover ideas for the revised version of my book Premature Grandpa. The book's content was rearranged from a linear narrative of events to clusters of ideas with similar foci. 
     While I liked the idea behind the Navigating NICU version, my focus reader group supported NICU - An Insider's Guide. While the text on the back cover is too small to read here, it is similar in both versions. Notice the lack of boxes in the final version.

The Mixer Murder back includes a letter from private eye, Phil Mamba challenging the reader. The logos are more an eyesore than addition. They will be replaced . . . eventually.

Although The 5th Page is no longer the title of the novel, the back cover of Betrayal in Blue, the new title, will be similar, unless it gets picked up by a publisher. The back is a mix of review quotes, teaser, and a challenge to the reader. The book had an "okay" Kirkus review, so a quote from that review is on the front.

Notice how the front cover text, the text on the spine, and the quote on the back cover all have the same glow. Since the book is nearly 750 pages long, the spine is wide enough to get my name parallel to the top and bottom of the cover.

Next Blog: Over the next 13+ weeks, I'll be previewing one of my books each week. Backstory of the concept, brief synopsis, cover ideas, and other tidbits are included. Traveler's HOT L is the first.

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Authors. Closing the Cover - UPDATED

In my last blog, described the process I followed for the cover evolution for three books I' had published. In this blog we’ll look at three elements of book cover selection: 

1) Book under contract; 
2) All books in a series;
3) The cover is just plain wrong.

If you are looking for a contract with an established publisher, you probably won’t have the option of auditioning an artist or an idea for your cover. You might, but the odds are not in favor of those options. My second book with Koehlerbooks, The Observers – A Science Fiction Odyssey, will be released December 2014. Koehlerbooks has a unique approach to many of their covers—they offer two options and visitors to their website can vote on the option they like the best.


Books Under Contract

Left Cover. Very sci-fi. Use of sun illuminating planet and eyeball is dramatic. Eyecatching. Right Cover. Eerie/Ominus. Iris of the eye contains or is reflecting a solar system. Very dark. Still has solar flash on iris.

I liked the one on the right a lot, but the original had eyelashes--see photo above, something the characters did not have. Who knows if a bit more contrast and no eyelashes from the get-go and . . . 

Here’s the result of the vote for The Observers. And the winner is…

I think potential readers did a fine job. The cover captures the essence of the book without giving away anything significant in the plot. It also includes the visual drama of the faded alien eye (observing!) with the flash of an unknown sun as it rises over the horizon of an unnamed planet.

To close this part of the discussion, a New York Times Best Selling friend of mine under contract with a large publishing house was shown two version of the same cover art for each of her books. She was asked for her opinion, but it was worth only one vote.

All Books in a Series

Chances are good that if you don't already have an idea for a series of stories, you will have a series in mind at some point. What do you do about the covers for books in a series?

Since I've already set up the idea of a triad in this post, here are three options for book covers in a series. There is always the option of a different cover for each book in the series. I'm not going to spend time on that option because individual book covers are discussed in part 1.
A common cover for each book in the series--only the title is different.
While this isn't common, some authors use this choice. There is no doubt in a reader's mind if a given book is part of a series.

A theme--similar layout and "feel"--for all covers in the series.
This choice may be the most common marketing ploy. 

A common element only for all books in the series. This can be overt.

This is the cover for the boxed set of this series. The common elements in each of the four separate titles are obvious.

Other authors choose subtle, almost subliminal commonalities.

The author's name is prominent and consistently placed. There is a single symbol separating the author's name and the title in each. The most dramatic difference is the formatting of the "art" on the cover. These examples are less obvious, but there is a tagline on each noting its inclusion in the series.

In both cases, the idea of a book series is evident.

I have two series in some level of production. Mamba Mysteries are the stories featuring my private detective, Phil Mamba. My original thought for series integrity in the covers was to go black and white with the same detective silhouette in each. The books are set in the 1980s-90s, and Phil considers himself old-school in my ways.

Okay, but hardly compelling. So, I tried logos.

The MM logo was more of a publisher's imprint. When I get around to it, I'll add the silhouette logo to the Mixer Murder cover. It's already on Betrayal in Blue's current cover version.

My signature series is Traveler's HOT L. Below are the covers of the first four books in the series.

My intent was to have some version of the retro sign on each cover. I even made a logo. Dumb idea.

I decided to hybridize series cover ideas. Look closely at each Traveler's HOT L book cover. What's the common element?
(Answer at the end of this post.)

The cover is just plain wrong

I doubt if anyone wants to admit to making a major error on the cover of their book. I suspect it happens more often than you think. 

Here's an idea for a book cover that's just bad. It's one of mine that will never be seen outside this blog. 

Four pages of names and one page with California DMV information. Five pages total. Never even got the name of the book on this idea.
Thank goodness!

When a cover idea is bad, kill it!

I stumbled upon this blog 8 cover design secrets publishers use to manipulate readers into buying books. It gives excellent hints and examples of strong cover design.

Traveler's HOT L series common cover item.

Original Traveler's HOT L title fonts and the volume number are on all volumes subsequent to the original.

Next Blog: It Takes a Strong Back and Spine To Be a Winning Cover - UPDATED - Final blog in this series on book covers

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#Anthropology #Kumeyaay Where I live was under the sea! Part 2 - "On the Estuary" a tale of life on tidelands

If you took the challenge in last week's post and tried to identify the artifacts, the answers are at the end of this post. If you didn't do that yet, there's still time. Here's the link to Where I live was under the sea! Part 1

On the Estuary
By C.R. Downing. ©2018

The Mother bent down and gently puffed her breath toward the dry cattail leaves. She was trying to start a fire. A tiny spark from her prized flint glowed on the dry leaves. If she was careful, she would cook dinner tonight.

She paused, and then she blew softly again.

A tiny flame licked hungrily at the dry fibers.

With the same gentleness she used with her babies, the Mother placed two twigs on the flame. Within seconds, she had a true fire. 

Over the next several minutes, the Mother added small pieces of precious wood to her cooking fire. Only once did she have to stop and call her children back to their task of searching for evidence of clams on the sticky mud of the low-tide estuary. She hoped the Father would arrive soon with some fish or game for dinner.

Her people, the Kumeyaay, were strong and proud. Their clans controlled all the area from what is now Escondido, California to the North to far below what is now Ensenada, Mexico to the South. The Eastern border extended to what is now known as the Colorado River. Only the Pacific Ocean to the West blocked her people’s expansion in that direction.

   Overall, the Mother’s life was good. Her clan lived in what is now the Point Loma area of San Diego, California. She and her husband had three children. The family lived along the tidal flats in a willow-framed structure covered by brush.

   Many in her clan used boats made of bundled reeds and coated with tar as waterproofing. The shells that they collected and sometimes made into jewelry were traded far beyond her nation’s boundaries.

   This late afternoon, as the sun prepared to drop into the sea, putting out its fiery light and bringing another night for rest to the Kumeyaay, the Mother looked off to the high ground that was never covered by the ocean’s tides. It was there the family last saw the Father as he began to hunt before the sun was high in the sky.

   She turned toward a sudden shout from down the mudflat beach. Her children were running towards a figure striding purposefully toward her fire.

   The Mother stood and smiled. It was the Father, and he was carrying a pelican!

   Working quickly to take advantage of the dying sunlight, she plucked and gutted the bird. She stuffed some kelp blades into the body cavity, pushed a cooking stick through the body from tail to neck, and propped the stick so the pelican rested just enough above the now glowing embers to cook. She was careful that their meal was not so close that it would catch fire as the fat dripped down on the coals.

   Calling her youngest daughter, she instructed the girl to turn the stick so the featherless skin would brown on all sides. She watched as the girl performed her task once, then she gave her daughter a smile and a soft touch of recognition for a job well done. She wrapped two seagull eggs in kelp blades and placed the kelp-wrapped eggs in the embers. These the family would share along with the meat.

   When both the bird and bird eggs were cooked to her satisfaction, the Mother called the Father and her children to the fire. Using her flint knife, a luxury she enjoyed thanks to the Father’s skill at bargaining shells for needed items, she cut the bird into five chunks of varying size.

   She handed the Father the largest piece. She placed one of the kelp blades in a basket, placed one egg on the brown kelp blade, and cut the egg in half. She slid one half of the egg onto another kelp leaf and left the other half on the first blade. She handed the Father his kelp blade and half of the first egg and put the blade with her half near the embers.

   The Father smiled as he chewed his egg. He enjoyed these times with his family.

   The Mother looked up, saw her husband’s smile, and returned it. After warning the children to be careful with the hot food, she cut the second egg into three equal size pieces and handed them out.

   The members of the Kumeyaay family were in no hurry. Each gnawed the meat off the bones in their share of the pelican. The Mother collected the bones and cut them in half with the flint knife and handed them back to her family. They knew the value of the marrow they sucked from those bones. Each was careful to remove as much as they could before the tossed the light, white cylinders into the sand next to the fire.

   “The tide returns,” were the simple words spoken by the Father. It was time to move to their shelter above the tidal line.

   Bones, feathers, pieces of eggshells, and other leftovers were scattered around what was left of their fire. As the embers died, the Mother sent a prayer of thanks to the red-tailed hawk that glided overhead. She knew the hawk would carry her message to the high god.

   Calling her children to follow them, the Mother and the Father led the way to their shelter.

   The tide rose, carrying with it a slurry of sandy mud that mixed with runoff from a rainstorm in the mountains that found its way to the estuary. The combination of clay and silt settled in the darkness, covering the embers, bones, and shells. When the morning low tide exposed their dining area of the night before, no one in the family could have found it, even if wanted to.

The Family's Cooking Fire After Dinner

Our story of the Kumeyaay family ends here. However, even though the family could not find their dining area, I found it. At least I found someone’s cooking site.

I estimate that these artifacts are at least 450 years old. I dug them up when I installed my pond in the Loma Portal area of San Diego. The total height of the bank in my yard from the top to where the pond is and the artifacts were found is 45 feet. Assuming the artifacts are 450 years old, approximately one inch of new clay and silt and shells would have been deposited on top of the cooking site every ten years on average.

Eventually, the ocean receded from the area. The deep layers of clay hardened. Only after the clay bank had been cut and houses had been built in Loma Portal in 1960 was the cooking site close enough to the new surface that it could be easily dug up.

Answers to what's in the sand/clay I dug up. 

I made a Powerpoint on the Kumeyaay for the teachers to use with the artifacts.
Here's the link to that presentation.

SEO: California history, Native American family life

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Authors. You can’t tell a book by its cover, but . . . UPDATED

When you walk through a bookstore (You remember those, don’t your? Physical buildings with shelves of books made of paper organized by genre and author.), how do you decide what book to pick up?

Or, if you’re browsing Amazon or Barnes and Noble, once your search for genre brings up a page of books, what makes you choose to click on a given book?

Answers to those questions vary. For some, it’s the author. For others, it’s the title. But, for a WHOLE LOT OF PEOPLE, it’s the BOOK COVER.

What makes a good cover? 
How about a GREAT cover? 
Or, if all the ducks line up in a row, A MEMORABLE COVER?

Browse the covers of books in your personal collection. 
Is there a theme? If not, what still draws you to those covers?

While I don’t have the ultimate answers to my own questions, I do have ideas to consider if you are publishing your own book.

Design by Publisher’s Service

All self-publishing entities with which I am familiar offer cover design for a fee. Fees start at $200 and range upwards of $500. Some companies offer templates where you use their layout (and their art if you wish) and drop in the title, the author's name, and other text. CreateSpace has several levels of cover design options from generic to full-service.

There are dozens to hundreds of artists willing to design a cover for you… for a price. Do a web search, then check a site and ask for some names to contact.

But, what if you have your own idea?

Self Design

CreateSpace offers a blank template in PDF and .png formats for covers of books published through them. The template is customized for the thickness of the spine. It’s easy to work with, IF, AND IT’S A BIG IF, you have either Photoshop or Adobe Acrobat Pro. I use these templates, and I have both Photoshop and Adobe Acrobat Pro. I would not consider trying to fit my idea/art/text into their template without one of those programs. CreateSpace also offers templates you drop photos into the front and back cover and add your title for free.

Evolution of the Covers of Traveler’s HOT L – The Time Traveler’s Resort and Insecticide-A Science Fiction Thriller

During the course of my high school and university teaching, I’ve had several fine artists as students. For Traveler’s HOT L, I was VERY fortunate to have Reed Steiner, now a Graphic Arts teacher, who was willing to work with Koehler Books on a cover design.

The photo that follows is one set of pencil sketches Reed submitted.

From that group, the publisher, with input from me, selected the lower right option to enhance. The next photo shows the intermediate design, also a pencil sketch.

If you compare this to the final cover, you will see how someone who knows what he/she’s doing can make what I think is a memorable cover.

INSECTICIDE'S cover has a similar path from a different origin. This artist is one of my students from Great Oak High. I’d seen her work when she was in my class, and I asked if she was interested in helping. She graciously accepted.

The story begins with a planet being split by a meteorite. Here’s her first idea.

Very cool, but it’s not true to the story. So I sent her the following.

Once we settled on the art for the cover, I added the title, my name, and the name of the character she represents to the front. I used Photoshop and added more of her art to the back cover. Check out the final cover on Amazon to see, once again, what an artist can do with minimal inspiration! I consider this my tribute cover to the sci-fi author’s and illustrators from the Golden Age of Science Fiction (1940s-1960s)—my favorite time for that genre!

I've done some covers from scratch by myself. I have two former students whose eye for covers are quite good. Here are photos of the evolution of two covers with which they have assisted.

First. The 5th Page is now Betrayal in Blue. 

Clockwise from top left. The original cover--since the story is set in the 1980's, I thought the cover was cool. Others not so much. My first favorite cover for the 5th page version, but I was talked out of it. Clown face with steel balls--too literal and clowns are scary. Two bad ideas. Left is my version, right is a sample done by a cover designer based on my input. Both are too busy and too literal. My last favorite 5th Page cover. An appropriate mix of mystery and a critical site in the story. My current concept for Betrayal in Blue. It needs tweaking and I may end up using a professional cover designer. The tweaked version of the police cars. Now to figure out how to adjust the sizes to fit better in the 6.5 x9.5 inch area and make sure that the important parts don't get cropped.

Second. Patterns on Pages.
I uncharacteristically deleted most the covers with the original name, Secrets of the Sequenced Symbols. Here are three of the "early editions." 

Left. An example of "it seemed like a good idea at the time." The book begins with a cataclysmic event, but...
Middle. Main characters in the book search for meaning in the sequences of symbols inside books. Look carefully and you'll see seismic terms highlighted in kind of a mauve color.
Right. Just too much. The Traveler's HOT L sign is a hint of some of the next Author blog post.

After the name change to Patterns on Pages, there were fewer candidates. The full cover on the bottom is the cover as printed in CreastSpace and Kindle.

Upper left were the two finalists for the front cover.  It was close, but the majority of the critique group liked the burned pages better than the lib'ry shelves. Although both are predictors of plot points, the consensus was that the burned pages were more mysterious. Upper right is the original burned pages photo.

We'll revisit this cover in the final blog of this pair of posts.

Next: Authors. Closing the Cover

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