Frank Dorrian's Blog, page 6

A Cover Artist for Fantasy Self-Pubbers

One of the most troubling aspects for me, when it came to the finishing touches of my first book, The Shadow of the High King, was the front cover.

A lot of people say that you can tell a self-published book by its cover, and, unfortunately for a lot of books on the market, that is actually true. Many look cheap, poorly photoshopped and patched together amateurishly, either by the author themselves, publishing groups ‘cover creator’ software, or amateur artists doing poor quality discount work. Even some ‘professional’ graphic design houses I’ve seen deliver poor-quality artwork for self-published authors  and demand as much as £500+ for it, which, to be honest, is utterly ridiculous.

Obviously, everyone has their own financial restrictions, myself included. I’m not a man of money, and I doubt many people in the self-publishing game are, either. It was a big step for me finding an artist, lacking any kind of visual-creation skill myself, to design me a front cover.

The one I settled on, however, was Jason Nguyen.

Jason is an incredibly talented digital artist, who works mostly with high-fantasy kinds of design and concept, though he is a very flexible dude.

Jason was a very polite, involved guy to work with, and took me through the process step by step, from initial concept to the final, finishing touches, and personally I feel as though he capture the proposed scene from the story perfectly, right down the finest detail (I’ll be posting pics of the cover soon). And, to top it all off, he was very affordable price-wise, especially considering the dude’s talent and amount of work he put in.

I’d recommend Jason to anyone looking to self-publish a fantasy novel, not only for the quality of his artwork, but also his agreeable, polite manner and professionalism.

You can find his website here: http://www.jasonnart.com

The website has examples of his artwork and talent, and also prints for sale should you want one for his wall.

Watch out in the next few weeks for my book The Shadow of the High King‘s front cover design, which I’ll be posting along with the back cover blurb for anyone interested!

Beginning the Grim Journey

So, this is where my writing blog thing finally begins, after me avoiding it for about 18 months against good advice as I’ve never really understood the whole blogging thing in general. Hopefully someone will explain it to me at some point.

Anyhow, I’ve started this blog as a way for me to publicise/reach out to the wider world of readership in regards to my writing work and see if it helps get my name out there a bit and hopefully make me come across as human and not some self-pubbing automaton spewing out bland, drivelly, cookie-cutter fantasy fiction from some underground fantasy generating lab, and out of simple curiosity.

So expect writing updates, snippets, current ideas or discussions of current trends in writing, self-publishing, fantasy, Sci fi, published works yadda yadda yadda and probably a ton of things about a million other people like me do every day.

Here’s to the journey.