I didn’t launch into self-publishing without doing plenty of research. When it comes to cover design I soon found that the universal refrain is ‘make your cover fit your genre’. Scroll down a list of SF books on Amazon, or peruse the Romance shelves in Waterstones, and you’ll see this clearly demonstrated. Whether this is a good thing or not, is debatable (here’s one dissenting view—and lots of visual evidence. It’s colourful, at least).
In my own case, identifying 'my genre' is already a big problem, as I’ve noted in an earlier post. We’ll return to this issue below.
Almost equally universal is the advice to ‘use a professional designer’. Obviously this can be an expensive option. I fully support the principle of paying properly for professional work; I’d be a hypocrite if I didn’t, having made my living as a professional photographer and non-fiction writer for many years. In the course of which I‘ve worked with many professional designers, and developed great admiration for their skills.
And yet… When it came to deciding what to do about covers for Three Kinds of North and, by extension, the rest of The Shattered Moon series, I haven’t followed either of these precepts. You’ve probably noticed and you may well have wondered why. So let me take you through some of the thought process that led to the results you see below.
Obviously cost is a factor. To do self-publishing properly, some outlay is pretty well unavoidable. (I have in mind for a later post to say a bit about where I have invested and why.) There is a low-cost option which you might like to know about if you’re thinking of following in my footsteps; just search online for ‘pre-made book covers’ to see more. Typically, the covers available through these sites are concepts that designers have created as one of a sheaf of options for a client who has chosen a different one. These ‘rejects’ aren’t bad designs, they just didn’t suit the client as well as one of the alternatives. You can acquire one for a fee usually less than $100, say £75.
I looked at pages and pages of these designs, mostly for SF, and lots of them would work very well if I had written a regular space opera, but none of them even came close to a fit for Three Kinds of North. Well, of course; it’s hardly a regular space opera, or indeed any ‘normal’ kind of SF book. A generic cover clearly wasn’t going to work.
As I ruled out using a pre-made cover, I also saw that I might face a drawn-out process trying to convey my vision to a designer. I’m sure it would be possible with the right designer, but even finding that person might take some time. I’m not getting any younger and I had been talking about self-publishing long enough. I wanted to get cracking.
And so… well, I’ve been a professional photographer for many years, and I have enough faith in my own work to believe that I have some striking images in my Lightroom collection. I also have a fairly good skillset in Photoshop. I thought it was at least worth having a go myself. And if I could get it right, though I wouldn’t be flagging a clear-cut genre in the recommended way, I might at least convey something of the flavour of the book and the series.
For more about how I actually arrived at the cover design for Three Kinds of North (which of course sets the pattern for the rest of the series), read on.
The first step was a trawl through my image collection: 30,000-plus photos to look at, though nearly all could be dismissed in a fraction of a second. The gestation of The Shattered Moon goes back nearly as far as my photographic career, but it had never occurred to me to create a collection of potential cover images as I went along. Eventually I had a reasonably compact selection to consider.
There was one I kept coming back, and this became my final choice. I took it in 2005, quite early in the digital phase of my career, on Moelwyn Bach in Eryri (Snowdonia). I’d always liked the way the light made something out of such simple subject matter. And for me there’s a sneaky satisfaction in its non-compliance with the so-called 'rule' of thirds (I had a rant about this years ago on my photography website).
I played around with this and a few other contenders; should I use the photo straight, or tweak the colours for a more ‘other-worldly’ feel, or even do something a bit more extreme? In the end the version that grabbed me uses Photoshop’s ‘Find Edges’ filter. This can give really messy and indecipherable results with some images but with the right raw material it can be very striking.
The other element that was added is the direction arrow marked on the rock. This was all happening not long after my partner and I had decided that Three Kinds of North was the title for the first book, reserving The Shattered Moon for the series as a whole, so the idea of having some kind of map/compass reference was fresh in my mind. The arrow was easily drawn using the Line tool, but it took a fair amount of work with Layer Masks and other tools to get it looking reasonably convincing as having been carved into the stone. I spent a lot of time looking at it at 300% magnification, which no one else will ever see.
The remaining question was the typography, and specifically the font. I tried lots of alternatives, some a lot more fancy, but in the end we liked the simplicity of Big Caslon.
Having done this for Three Kinds of North, I had of course committed myself to following the basic pattern for all the books and bonus stories. The next results to appear were for two short stories, both of which are available to read for free: The Singer and the Silversmith, which you can get just by signing up for my mailing list, and Watching the Selkies, which is free for all to read on my website. FYI, the covered bridge in the former is in the Lechtal in the Austrian Tirol, and the shore scene in the latter is Mewslade Bay on the Gower in South Wales (though I’d previously circulated a 'prototype' from Tapotupotu Bay in the far north of New Zealand’s North Island).
And since then I’ve been through the same process for three more published novels, and I’ve recently identified a potential base image for the cover of Book Five, which will (I hope!) be going to my primary beta-reader before the end of this month.
Of course there’s a lot more to cover design than just picking an image and running it through a Photoshop filter, but I appreciate it gets more technical and is probably of limited interest if you’re not interested in designing your own covers. However, my experience may be of interest to some and may be helpful for anyone considering tackling cover design for themselves. I’ll make this a supplementary Post.