Cover Art: Doing it Right
More authors are experimenting with electronic self-publishing these days. I want to point out two recent releases by friends of mine. Aerophilia, a short story by Tobias Buckell, and Fright Court, a serialized novel by Mindy Klasky. Specifically, I want to point to the cover art.
I love these covers. Aerophilia’s was put together by Jenn Reese, Fright Court’s by Reece Notley. (I’m noting these names for my own use, since I’m toying with the idea of publishing a few more mini-collections of my own.)
ETA: Mindy was kind enough to share her own first draft of a cover. You can see that, along with Mindy’s comments, here.
Remember my post last week about making it look easy? I look at these covers and think, Hey, I could probably do that! Maybe not the artwork itself, but if I found a good stock image, I could slap it all together. Because it looks easy.
Then I remember doing it with Goblin Tales [Amazon | B&N | Lulu]. Big shock: it ain’t easy, and skill as a writer means squat when it comes to visual art or graphic design. I did get professional artwork for mine, and I’m proud of what I came up with, but I think both Klasky and Buckell ended up with better-looking covers.
I’ve heard people talk about covers that “look self-published.” I’ve used that phrasing myself, but I think it’s inaccurate. It’s not that so many covers look self-published; it’s that they look amateur. Amateur isn’t a dirty word, and it’s not an insult. It means the work was done by someone who’s not a professional.
My friend Stephen Leigh gave me permission to pick on him. He’s an author with DAW, and has been doing this far longer than me. He recently released his dark urban fantasy novel The Woods [Amazon | B&N] as an e-book, and did the cover art himself. He used the cover on the left first. After receiving some feedback, he reworked the cover and came up with the one on the right.
I think number two is a better cover — easier to read, clearer visuals — but it doesn’t have the professional vibe I get from Mindy’s or Toby’s.
All of which leads back to the myth that it’s quick and easy to self-publish. Well, it is … but it’s not quick or easy to do it well. Slow down. Either hire people to do the jobs you’re not skilled at, or take your time and do the work Cover art and design are just two steps in the overall process, and there’s a reason publishers hire professionals for most of those steps.
Discussion time — how much attention do you pay to “professional vs. amateur” cover art when browsing e-books? What sort of things make a cover look amateur to you? (For me, I’ll admit to having a bias against most digital art.) And does it really make sense to invest in professional cover art for a small self-published project, given that most such projects probably aren’t going to see huge sales?
PS, All three of the writers mentioned here are wonderful people, and you could do much worse than to check out their books!
Steve Buchheit
May 12, 2011 @ 9:51 am
Well, I am a professional designer, so I always pay attention. If I know the book/author I’m apt to pick it up anyway, but be disappointed (my reaction to Ray Bradbury’s “Farewell Summer” paperback). If it’s someone I don’t know, or haven’t heard about the book, it gets a quick pass if the cover/printing look amateurish/cheap. There’s too many books out there and not enough time. So why waste my time with something that isn’t well constructed?
Kate Shaw
May 12, 2011 @ 9:51 am
I’ve got a Sony Reader and buy a lot of my ebooks directly from the Sony “Library” ebook store. It’s a really clumsy interface so unless I want to click through a million pages (sloooowly), I rely on cover thumbnails, titles, authors, and publisher names to guide me to books I might like. The covers are hugely important to me. There are a ton of self-published books listed, and while I’m sure a lot of those books are awesome and if only I knew I would be sorry I passed them over, 99.9% of self-published work isn’t ready for publication. I weed those books out most easily by glancing at the cover art, which is invariably amateurish.
I also get a decent idea of the content and tone of the book from the cover, of course. I do that in brick-and-mortar bookstores too. (Insert ‘judging a book by its cover’ weak joke here.)
I think you did a great job with your Goblin Tales cover. Using the same artist kept your brand intact, which helps fans find the book easily and recognize it as yours. And Jig is so cute! 🙂
Michele Lee
May 12, 2011 @ 9:54 am
And see, I like your Goblin Tales cover. I have to say I like Stephen’s first cover better. If I’d been making it I would have framed it differently, making it look like a blurry photograph, slanting it slightly then having the title and author name over lapping that.
But then I see lots of “traditionally published” covers that I don’t like. A cover isn’t always indicative of a good book, but it will get me to pick it up and read a sample. And a cover isn’t nearly as important as that sample. I don’t buy anything these days without reading a sample or a lot of recommendations from people I trust. Sadly with a lot of self published books the blurb itself is enough to tell me I’m not interested, either because the subject matter is not my taste or the blurb is really ineffective. I expect blurbs to be cliche, but if the author focuses on the complete wrong elements of the story I assume the book will as well. In a professionally edited and published book that’s disappointing, in a self published book that’s devastating.
Not sure I can say much though, because I’m in the process of self publishing a novelette myself and I did my own cover (here: http://deepdaleacres.wordpress.com/) It’s not the prettiest thing in the world, but I’m not embarrassed to post it either.
Jim C. Hines
May 12, 2011 @ 9:58 am
Jokes aside, I think most of us judge books that way. It’s the whole point of good cover art — to make someone stop and pay attention to the book long enough to pick it up and read a few pages.
And thanks! I’m happy with Goblin Tales, but completely clueless as to what to do for future non-goblin collections. That’s probably a problem for a future blog post, though 🙂
Ken O'Shaughnessy
May 12, 2011 @ 10:00 am
It depends on the cost of the book. If I’m going to pay more than the $3.99 tier for the book, then I assume that some work has been done to it to make it professional, and that starts with the cover. If the cover looks sloppy, then I assume the proofreading, writing and editing were, too; and vice versa – if the cover looks professional, then I have that expectation of the contents.
Genre has to be taken into account – the Goblin Tales cover looks like a paperback fantasy cover. I actually prefer the cover art on the first version of “The Woods” (the second looks too cut-and-paste), but not the font use. It’s a book, with words as primary, so what the words look like is huge. Note what the fonts tell you about the book on each of the first 3 covers above.
Jim C. Hines
May 12, 2011 @ 10:03 am
I think with Stephen’s first cover it’s mostly the colors that don’t work for me. It all kind of blends together. I like the structure of the second one, and the title & author info jump out a lot better for me.
And going with a commercial publisher is certainly no guarantee of a great cover.
Looking at your cover, I would have guessed that it was done yourself, but I can’t tell you what details make me think so. But that aside, I think it’s a pretty good cover, and certainly does a nice job of showing the reader what to expect 🙂
Bill Pearson
May 12, 2011 @ 10:05 am
I would say that the cover art is more of a driving force in my ebook purchases than it is in physical books. Honestly the sheer amount of junk I have to sift through to find an e-book worth reading is amazing. As of this post there are over 2 million e-books listed on bn.com under $5. Assuming I have never heard about the author, how are you supposed to choose? Heck reading the synopsis of each one would take a week or more.
If the cover looks like it was done in 10 minutes by someone with no photoshop skills… well, that is as good a reason as any to drop it. Sort of like turning in a manuscript with improper formatting to a publisher’s slush pile… something has to cull the herd.
Poorly done blurbs (especially ones that mention awards, but not the plot) also eliminate them off my list of books to read.
UnravThreads
May 12, 2011 @ 10:09 am
I’ll admit I’m actually a bit of a cover prude. I mean no offense to your abilities Jim, but Goblin Tales’ cover did put me off initially (It’s the artwork of Jig, if I’m honest), although I have since purchased it. It fits in with the rest of the books, and does look rather professional, but it’s just Jig. And his eyes.
I also tend to veer away from amatuer looking covers. A lot of them try to get too much information in a short physical space, and others just don’t appeal to me. I have more time than I think I do, but I’ll admit I’m easily turned off a book, and the cover will usually do
I think that cover art is a very subjective thing. If I’m brutally honest, I do actually like a lot of Baen covers. I know they’re slighted a lot for their rather cheesy and colourful artwork, but I do like it. There’s one cover with a soldier standing over a dead dinosaur (Forgotten the name of the book), and it just looks ridiculously, and hilariously, awesome. On the other hand, I’m not a fan of the leather-clad ladybums Urban Fantasy loves to show (Or is it Paranormal Romance? Likely that one, actually), but some people much prefer them to other types of cover.
I like cover art to give an idea of what the book is about, or to depict some characters. It’s why I really like a lot of Tor US’ cover art, and why I order their books, even if they are physically of a lower quality than, say, most other publishers. The Mistborn boxset I have looks really, really nice on my shelf, and you just don’t get that with a lot of other publishers.
As for the examples; I prefer the first cover for The Woods. The second looks more amatuer-ish to me, and the addition of both the leaf and the lady make it more so. If they were removed I’d honestly say I think it would look better.
My advice to authors self-publishing is just to take a step back and look at your cover. Does it look like something you’d buy? Does it look like something you’d like to see sat on a shelf, and can you imagine it in a window display? Of the ones above, I can really only see Fright Court in a window display, but Aerophilia could easily be on an in-store display. Look at what’s out on the market, even if it means taking a trip to a bookstore. What do books similar to yours look like, and how could you make yours look just as appealing, short of a cute leather-clad arse?
I don’t mean to sound harsh, I couldn’t do better on either count (i.e. writing or cover desiging), but if you want your book to sell, you need to make it look as professional as possible.
Sensawunda
May 12, 2011 @ 10:26 am
A professional cover will get me to pony up for an ebook. If the cover looks amateurish, I can only imagine what the story inside will be like. Both Paul McCauley and Jason Sanford recently self-pubbed short story collections of theirs and they look amazing; the covers as good as anything Tor or Orbit could come up with.
D. Moonfire
May 12, 2011 @ 10:38 am
I do judge a book by its covers, mainly for what I’m in the mood, but I also remember books by their covers. Your review of Becoming didn’t register a bell until I saw the cover, then I remembered the orangish colors and her position, which brought back my own review.
A long time ago, in a different byline and state, I had a novel (MG). The original cover by the publisher didn’t really fit the story at all in my opinion, but I wasn’t going to argue with it. Some years later, the publisher went out of business and I got lucky that the new owners didn’t think MG would sell well, so they gave it back to me (otherwise, the contract was one of those Bad Things™ with the words “life of” in it). I decided to redo it to learn how to do typesetting and doll it up.
But, one of the things I really wanted to do was redo the cover. I got an friend who makes their money with web comics create an illustrated cover for the novel, doing a specific scene from it. And it came out amazing and worth the couple hundred I gave them. (Actually, I use the cover as my background at home.)
I spent half a year on that graveyard project and had a ball, but I completely agree that it takes a serious about of time and effort to go from “good enough” to “looks damn good”.
The frustrating part is that the original cover to MG was by a “professional” (since they got royalties off the book too) and it looked like they just grabbed some clip art and threw it on the page.
Stephen A. Watkins
May 12, 2011 @ 10:43 am
I’ll agree with the assessment of the former two covers. Meanwhile, both Leigh’s covers look bleh to me. The second is more polished – but the elements don’t integrate well. The lady looks slapped onto the dusky forest background, and they don’t go together. The leaf obviously doesn’t go with either. Those three elements make for a mishmashed pallet – and it looks, as you say, amateurish.
(The Goblin Tales cover looks in-between, IMO: better than either of the Leigh covers, but not nearly as good as the Buckell one. There are a couple things I think could have been done to make the title stand out better that would’ve made it better, but it’s hard to be precise about what.)
All of which brings out a very salient point. Whatever we’ve been told about “not judging a book by it’s cover”, as you mention above, we all do it. We can’t help it. Generally speaking, we’re visual creatures, and we respond most powerfully to visual cues. In that sense, one could argue that getting the cover right is more important than the quality of the writing, even. (At least as far as getting someone to give the book a second glance, it definitely is.)
Jim C. Hines
May 12, 2011 @ 10:43 am
Do you happen to have a link to the cover(s)? I’d love to see what you and your artist came up with.
And of course, paid doesn’t equal professional. I’m sure someone at Publish America gets paid to put their covers together, but an awful lot of those can be eye-bleedingly bad…
Anke
May 12, 2011 @ 10:44 am
*heh* I think all covers in this entry but the two for “The Woods” use digital art as illustration, and that’s only if you exclude photomanipulation from digital art for the sake of argument.
When I browse for ebooks at random I know I’m drawn to ones with eye-catching and neat covers.
I’m kinda biased against photomanipulations, because most I see look – sorry, Mr Leigh – like that second of The Woods: Snippets slapped together without fitting. (There’s white, probably photo-studio backlighting on the figure that’s standing in front of a sunset… I’d probably like that cover a lot better if the illustration were only the background photo.)
Trying to think of things about layout that make a cover look amateurish to me… There’s particularly a vibe that someone found an image they liked, and somehow shoehorned the title and author name into it, looking awkward because the image was fine in itself, but not as a full-format cover illustration. Something like the writing being squished to one side, or placed over an area of the image with a lot of detail and/or contrast.
I prefer it when there’s at least a fighting chance of being able to read the title on the thumbnail. (I had a quick look at the latest offers on Smashwords, and found several covers with brown on brown or purple on purple covers. The yellow on green of the first The Woods cover is a lot better by comparison.)
I’m afraid I also count it slightly against a book when I associate the font used for the title with something else, or sometimes just when I recognise it.
I’ve seen some that used solid colour areas above and/or below the cover illustration. That can work very well, but if you make bad use of the space, like, say, having the title only half the width of the book, and aligned to one side rather than centered. Or if the area is significantly taller than the writing in it, having the writing near the top or the bottom, leaving a lot of empty space. (I’m sure there are covers which meet this description and look good, but it’s how I’d describe certain covers I remember that looked bad to me.)
I’m not sure if you can call it amateurish, but I definitely count it against a book when it’s cluttered with stuff like “best-selling writer”, or something about awards won, or quotes from whoever about how the book is good. It’s tacky.
Mind, nothing counts as badly against a book in my eyes as not being available somewhere that I can get it in a format my reader understands. Particularly when it’s only available for Kindle. “Aerophiles” does look interesting, but I didn’t buy a dedicated ereader to read books on my computer. I really loathe how Amazon seems to be headed to actually achieving a de-facto monopoly.
Jim C. Hines
May 12, 2011 @ 10:50 am
I got that pointed out on LJ as well, that “digital art” is a much broader term than the way I use it in the post. I’ve been trying to refine what I mean, but failing. I’m gonna fall back and say this just proves my point about writers generally being amateurs when it comes to visual art; I can’t even get my terminology right!
“Aerophiles” should be coming out for Nook soon. I just don’t think it’s up yet.
Re: fonts, I remember going to see Cameron’s “Avatar” in theaters, and I spent half the movie going, “Papyrus? Really???”
Anke
May 12, 2011 @ 10:58 am
Do you mean 3d rendered art? Poser?
*cracks up laughing at the Papyrus line*
B&N only sells to Americans. XD
It really sucks that authors are caught in that mess of vendors going for proprietary formats and such. Bad for authors and publishers AND readers.
D. Moonfire
May 12, 2011 @ 11:03 am
Sure, but mind if I give them over email?
Jim C. Hines
May 12, 2011 @ 11:04 am
Rendered is closer to what I mean, I think. Images that look like they came from Final Fantasy or another video game.
And you’re right, I forgot about B&N’s restrictions. Still cranky about the fact that even if I check worldwide distribution, they won’t do it 😛
Jim C. Hines
May 12, 2011 @ 11:05 am
Sure. jchines -at- sff.net
Anke
May 12, 2011 @ 11:25 am
I’m pretty sure what you mean is 3D rendering – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3d_rendering
Ken McConnell
May 12, 2011 @ 11:33 am
I love Jenn Reese’s cover for Buckell’s short story. Simple, yet classy. And it fits with his SF universe too. I agree with you about taking the time to hire a good artist. I did that with my latest novel, Tyrmia, and was very pleased with the results.
Ensuring that the cover design works as a thumbnail really does help sell ebooks. The irony for me is that most of the e-readers still have black and white screens. In fact, my Kindle doesn’t even show the cover when you call up a new book to read. You have to page backwards to see it. But the popularity of reading on phones and tablets means you better have a colorful and engaging cover.
I self-publish my novels and even though my sales are not huge by any means, I can usually earn enough from them to cover paying for a good editor and cover artist. Both are money well spent when it comes to ensuring more sales down the line.
Great post, Jim!
Joris M
May 12, 2011 @ 12:38 pm
Covers are important in a quick preselection of ebooks. In an ebook store where I cannot rely on a preselection by the store it helps to weed out the projects where the author did not care enough to have this part of the presentation done well. It does not necessarily mean that the cover has to be to my taste, but it needs ‘quality’. The first two have this, I think it is a combination of colour schemes, font choices and balance. Yours is a bit off, perhaps the artpiece is a bit too front-focussed or imbalanced in a different way (in need of framing?), the fonts could be a bit off as well.
An interesting parallel development can be seen in the Dutch PhD theses. Those are traditionally basically self-published in a small print-run (200-250 copies seems typical in the sciences. The copies are distributed as a networking tool and keep-sake amongst universities, friends and colleagues. As a result there has been a steady flow of amateur designed covers over the years. Some are simple, or examples of bad design, but (because people tend to care) there are nice examples out there of what can be done by amateur designers.
Benda
May 12, 2011 @ 1:11 pm
Familiarity with an author aside, a good cover is the first thing that grabs my attention. A bad cover (poor freehand art, clumsy Photoshop work, or god forbid plastic Poser characters) will too… but only so that I can read the cover blurb and laugh.
Unless an author is actually good at visual design (and I for one know enough about it to know that I’m not), I think their best bet is to find an actual artist to do covers for them. It’s not difficult to find interested artists (DeviantArt springs to mind, but there are other, more professional-oriented galleries and forums as well), and it’s not necessarily expensive.
Mackenzie | Red Roan Chronicles
May 12, 2011 @ 4:07 pm
A friend of mine recently self-published a paperback and two e-books and asked me to do the covers, since I’ve been a professional designer for quite a long time. The e-book ones were tough because we had no budget and very limited photos to work from, but I think the paperback came out pretty fantastic. I hope I get the opportunity to do more in the future… designing book covers and movie posters was always a dream of mine.
Like others have said, I’ve seen plenty of professionally-produced books with really horrible covers… and the worst for me is when they depict the book in a way that absolutely doesn’t represent what the author’s created. Quite often I’ve read a book then looked at the cover again and wondered to myself whether anybody even bothered to provide the cover artist with a synopsis, much less any part of the book itself. The people pictured on the cover might have the wrong skin color or completely the wrong look, or quite often with scifi/fantasy they’ve been all sexied up from what they actually are in the book. I’d rather have a more amateurish cover that really represents the book than one that looks really snazzy but will seem like false advertising when I actually get to the book’s contents. That’s just me, I guess.
jonathanmoeller
May 13, 2011 @ 10:04 am
I’m just grateful that the vast majority of Western art, pre 1923, is now in the public domain.
Michael Stackpole says that we might be entering a golden age of ebooks. Either way, we’re definitely entering a golden age for competent graphic designers.