The
Soulmates Saga is getting a makeover!
Well, the book covers are.
I always
knew what I wanted on the covers of the books in the Soulmates Saga. I also knew
that the movie poster-style covers I constantly daydreamed about was not
something that I could achieve. Not
without forking out a lot of money. And
that wasn’t something I wanted to do when I had no idea whether I would be able
to sell my books in the first place.
So I had
to limit my design ideas to concepts I could actually put together on my
personal laptop. I didn’t know much
about royalty-free stock images back when I was readying my debut romance novel
Chasing Pavements for
self-publishing, let alone aware of the fact that had I hired a book cover
designer instead of doing it myself, they would have used stock imagery to
create a cover for me.
I only
learned about some of the processes involved in professional book cover design
in the beginning of this year, when I was forced to acknowledge the fact that,
though I loved the existing covers (why wouldn’t I, I created them?), they
didn’t reflect the books’ themes, plot twists and turns, and quite frankly
weren’t as eye-catching as e-book covers must be in order to attract readers.
So the
search began for a designer to update the cover of Chasing Pavements. The
majority of the designers in the search results were US-based, understandably
due to the bigger e-book market in the US.
I decided it made better sense to work with someone in the UK and not
have to deal with the time difference, and apart from two, all the UK-based
designers I contacted were fully-booked for the next few months. Ultimately, it was Peter from
BespokeBookCovers.com that I went with.
It was double the budget I had in mind, but I decided it would be worth
it if we accomplished the perfect cover.
From just
a few e-mail exchanges, Peter was able to gauge the look and feel I wanted. I was pleasantly surprised by how he used the
colours and tones in which I always pictured the scenes in my book, without me communicating
this. Unfortunately, it was impossible
to find the right stock images to create the cover I had fantasized about since
the moment I decided to self-publish the book, but Peter made several changes
until he created a design I was happy with.
What was most helpful was that towards the end of the process, Peter
would show me how the next draft was coming along, so that I could see the
direction the design was heading and give my thoughts. This is something that really speeds up the
process and helps achieve a design that both designer and author will be
pleased with.
Then I was
left with a problem. Though my new cover
for Chasing Pavements was a 100 times
better than the old one, it also couldn’t have been more dissimilar to the
cover of the book’s sequel Make You Feel
My Love, and they just didn’t look right together. This meant that I needed to update the cover
for the sequel and upload both new versions together. Peter offered to create a cover for Make You Feel My Love, but unfortunately
he was going away on holiday during the period that I needed the new cover (I
didn’t want to wait too long before showing off the new cover of my debut
novel).
So the
search was on again. This time I
contacted a mix of UK and US-based designers, and I knew to ask first whether
they would be able to create the design I had in mind. I liaised with a couple of talented designers
(Brandi from ebook-coverdesigns.com and GX of graphiczxdesigns.zenfolio.com),
but together we struggled to find the right stock images to compose my ideal
cover for Make You Feel My Love. I was prepared for this disappointment
however, so prepared that I had a plan B,
one which I knew I would be able to create myself by spending only a fraction
of what I paid for the first cover.
Provided I found the right stock images.
Thankfully,
I did. And they were perfect, exactly
what I needed for plan B. Very lucky indeed. It took me just one evening after work to download
those images from Shutterstock.com, another evening to play around with them to
see how best to put them together, and then one last evening to pull it all
together and put the final touches. So,
while I spent a couple of months and 100s of pounds on the first cover, I spent
less than a week creating the second one myself and shelled out only £35 for it
(well, I didn’t use all 12 images I can download via the On Deman subscription
I purchased from Shutterstock.com, so it works out much cheaper actually!).
Just goes
to show, there is a learning curve with everything, and that if you have a
little patience and know-how, you don’t have to spend a lot to produce
something special. The new covers will
be revealed on Saturday 15th March, 2014. Exciting times!
