Format Your Own Damned Book Part VII -- Cover Images

If you're going to spend money on a professional then the best place to do it might be the cover image. I have done all my own cover images. The kind of books I have been writing don't need fancy covers. I'd suggest that before deciding to do the cover image yourself you look at books in your own collection in the same genre as what you're trying to sell and see what kind of covers they have. If you're writing a how-to book you can get by with a simpler cover than you would if you're writing a bodice-ripper. Thoughtful science fiction can get by with something simpler than you'd need for high fantasy or space opera.

If you use art on your cover, bad art is worse than no art. I use public domain art, which means art salvaged from old books (pre 1923) and photos of art pieces created before 1923. I use The GIMP to dress up the art by cropping, resizing, and colorizing. You'll see examples in this post, starting with very simple covers I did early on and progressing to the fancier ones I did later.

The first cover image I did for a book was this one:



This was for a how-to book for the One Laptop Per Child project. While I sold the book on Amazon, I also gave it away on archive.org. I never expected to make any money from the book, and the simple cover image got the job done. This book has been read more than anything else I've written, so the lackluster cover didn't hurt anything.

After writing this book I got interested in Project Gutenberg and transcribed several books that had fallen into the public domain. The first of these was a book from my own collection, a novel by Pierre Louys with lots of interior illustrations, mostly of unclad women. I adapted one of the more restrained interior illustrations to make this cover image:



I used a special GIMP filter to give the illustration a fuzzy edge. I was still using the fonts that came with my word processor at this point.

A later Project Gutenberg project got this cover:



For this one I found an Indian miniature painting using Google image search. The painting was done long before 1923 so was legal to use.

Then I wrote a memoir of my wasted youth which got this cover:



This was my first time publishing with Create Space, so I needed a much higher resolution image than I would have needed for an e-book cover. The photo was one that my brother took of me for a photography class. I had no pictures of myself in the Hare Krishna movement. Taking photos in the 1970's was expensive.

An article on the Create Space website had good advice on using Display Fonts and suggested using the Chunk Five font from font squirrel, which is what I used here.

Believe it or not, I read a blog post where someone said he bought this book because he liked the cover.

I got some really nice reviews for this book, which encouraged me to write a novel, the cover of which is here:



Again I used a public domain image found using Google Search, but this time I needed one with really high resolution for Create Space, which likes 600 DPI images for covers and interior illustrations. I used two different free fonts for the cover: Akashi and Yataghan. I also put a drop shadow on the text using The GIMP. This gives a three dimensional effect to the lettering and makes the title look a bit more professional.

This cover went through several iterations. The first one said "A Science Fiction Novel By Bhakta Jim" until I read an article saying that the word "By" never appears on covers or title pages of professionally published books, and noting that Neal Stephenson's books just say "A Novel", not "A Science Fiction Novel".

I had a lot of fun preparing my books for Create Space and that led me to create a twelve volume edition of the great Indian epic The Mahabharata. This is perhaps the longest work of fiction ever written (although John Galt's radio speech in Atlas Shrugged seems longer) and every word of it was already transcribed by volunteers for Project Gutenberg. As an ebook this is challenging to read. There are thousands of subtitles and archaic English like using "hath" for "has", "seemeth" for "seems", etc. I thought it would work better as a printed book, and for cover and interior art I found a Bengali translation of the book that had hundreds of illustrations at the website archive.org.

Having the illustrations clinched the deal. I decided that I would use Create Space to publish a twelve volume set of books, with illustrations, putting the footnotes put at the bottoms of pages (which you cannot do with an e-book) and modernizing the language.

This set of books outsells everything else I publish, and since the only thing it has to offer that you cannot already get for free is good formatting I must conclude that I am a competent book formatter.

The cover of the first volume uses a color interior illustration from the Bengali translation. The illustration showed many signs of age which I was able to clean up and make new looking using filters in The GIMP.



Note that all of these images have something in common: a black border, added using a GIMP filter. If you use a white background for your book cover you'll want to add a black border to the image so it looks good when displayed on the Amazon website. I always do that with my e-book covers. Unfortunately, Create Space does not give you a way to do that with your printed books. It might be a good idea to avoid white backgrounds for book covers for that very reason.

I'd like to conclude with some cover designs for my second novel, still being written. There is something to be said for doing a book cover while you're still writing the book. Editors of science fiction magazines would sometimes buy cover art and then commission a story to go with it. F. Scott Fitzgerald liked the cover art for The Great Gatsby so much that he rewrote part of the book to go along with the imagery on the cover.

I think that books in a series should have similar covers, so I wanted to make the cover illustration the same size and shape as it was on the first book. I had a lot of high resolution images I could use from that Bengali Mahabharata, but most of them were black and white and most of them were vertical rather than horizontal. However, where there is the GIMP there is a way:



I was able to crop the top and bottom of this illustration and resize it horizontally (but not vertically). That makes the figures in the drawing chubbier than they were, but the effect isn't that bad. I also used the "colorize" filter to give the black and white illustration a blue tint.

Here is another possibility:



I wanted a blueprint for an old plane and was able to find a PDF of a very old model airplane plan. I flipped it so the plane faced right instead of left, removed sections of the plans that suggested a model plane rather than a real one, and flipped the colors to make it white on blue rather than black on white.

This is one that still needs work:



I used the "Layer" feature of GIMP to put a second illustration with a transparent background on top of the first illustration. The second illustration was part of a larger illustration and was tinted blue.

I hope that this post shows that you can make a pretty passable cover illustration using public domain art, free fonts, and a free program called The GIMP. The GIMP is well documented and worth taking the time to learn.

In the next installment I'll talk about making and selling printed books using Create Space.