Cover Art: Doing it Right

[jimhines]

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.

Comments

[atdt1991]

With pressure-sensitive pen tablets available, I would say that the phrase "digital art" is a misnomer. If a professional is trying to make it look like a watercolor ... these days that is totally doable. Cut-outs and Illustrator graphics, on the other hand... that is often what people seem to mean by "digital art". Like "self-published" vs "amateur", it's just, IMO, a matter of semantics.

[jimhines]

Good point. A lot of tablet-drawn art is pretty damn awesome. I guess I'm thinking more of things like digitally rendered people and objects, which I used to see on a lot of the earlier e-books. That particular style just doesn't tend to work for me.

[beckyh2112]

That's because most people use crap-ass lighting and texturing, if I'm thinking of the same sort of thing you're thinking of. Like all types of art, it's possible to do some lovely stuff with it, if you know what you're doing.

[atdt1991]

That image totally reminds me of Accelerando by Stross.

[psamphire]

I think you're quite right. I would never guess that Tobias's wasn't from a major publishing house, and you have to look closely at Mindy's to tell the difference.

As in all design, the key elements are, I think, coherence of the design, and subtlety. For example, the thing that gives away most amateur cover designs is the text. People use far too big drop-shadows and color gradients and unnecessary text effects (embossing and so on), when really the clean, simple text on Tobias's cover is far more effective.

Stephen's cover suffers in terms of lack of coherence. The elements look dropped on top of each other, rather than blending in naturally as a single work of art. He would probably have been better advised to find a single really high-quality piece of stock art or photography an just used that.

For me, as a designer (although web, rather than print or ebooks), I do really notice amateur design, and it does put me off. It *shouldn't*, but it does.

[psamphire]

Oh, and I would add, it's far easier to make text look good over a block of color (particularly black) than over an image.

[chomiji]

Hear, hear. Trying to put readable text over a busy background is very difficult. I see yay many examples in LJ icons, where people have put witty sayings over complex backgrounds, and sadly, it's almost impossible to read them.

It also looks like Buckell picked up colors from his airship image to use for his text, and that's another way to add to the cohesiveness (and professional appearance) of a cover design.

[jimhines]

Oh, yeah. I spent way too much time trying to figure out how to make the title text work for Goblin Tales. A single-color background block would have made my life so much simpler.

[vito_excalibur]

I've done a couple of cover illustrations, and it's very hard to do well: looking professional is only one aspect. As you point out, there's also readability (at a variety of sizes!) and what about market research for appeal, and so on?

But it matters to me. If the cover art looks amateur, I tend to assume that an editor was also not involved in the publishing process. And while I will read plenty of stuff that was not edited...I won't pay money for it.

[megabitch]

I'll admit that I do tend to skip kindle ebooks that don't have a "cover". In most cases where I don't ignore them it is because there is a "known quantity" usually an author I already read and enjoy and the work is a short story, often one that has not been published elsewhere for one reason or another. I do judge my books, even ebooks, by their covers a fair bit - I "know" that style means romance, that one is chicklit, that one is hard SF, that one is crime thriller and so forth. Limited time to browse means that I need some way of shortcutting my selection process (especially when I have bad insomnia and can read 2 novels a night). Though the kindle with its "send a sample" ability does allow me to ignore covers and try a reccomendation regardless.

My Kindle habit was getting out of hand, so I suggested to my husband that we organise a monthly gift voucher for me to use as my "kindle allowance" to try and keep it under control *grin*

[marrael]

I can't remember if I commented on the Goblin Tales cover--but at the time I saw the post you were already swimming in good advice! I love studying book covers--it does matter a lot to me. It's amazing how sometimes even great art may not look good as a cover because the final combination of text on art can let the whole thing down. (My own post on bad covers: http://marrael.livejournal.com/243944.html And yeah, 3D art looks bad. http://www.changelingpress.com/ tends to use it a lot and gets mocked on Smart Bitches Trashy Books quite a bit.)

I'm a big fan of fading out art or using colour blocks where the text will go on covers. Looking at the covers I've done, I definitely fall back on it quite a bit! http://twocranespress.com/graphics/scs_cover-sm.jpg

Reply