Cover art selection

[image error]It’s the first Wednesday of the month again, time for a post for the Insecure Writer’s Support Group. This Wednesday, I’m one of the co-hosts, together with my wonderful fellow co-hosts Tamara Narayan, Chemist Ken, and Renee Scattergood.

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OPTIONAL IWSG QUESTION: When your writing life is a bit cloudy or filled with rain, what do you do to dig down and keep on writing?

MY ANSWER: I play with images. I love looking at images, collecting images, and lately, designing book covers. I design covers for Wattpad writers and I design all my own book covers. That’s what my post below is all about.

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I haven’t written any fiction in March, which spurs an insecurity of its own, but I embarked on a big project. Over the years, I have written a number of short stories in several speculative fiction sub-genres. Most of them have been published in magazines, but I own the copyrights. Others are new stories, not published anywhere yet. I decided to get them all together under one roof and self-publish a collection of my stories. But it appears I have too many stories for one book. It would be a door-stopper tome. So I compiled three short story collections, one for each sub-genre:

Magic realism
Fantasy
Science fiction

I’m going to self-publish them as soon as I finish the final editing, formatting, and the other tasks involved in self-publishing. All three will be e-book only. I’m not planning paper books. I also designed several possible covers for all three, but I can’t decide which covers to choose. I don’t trust myself – they are all my darlings. This is a classic case of artistic insecurity, and I need your input.

For the majority of those covers, I used images from the free image sites, mostly Pixabay and a couple from Public Domain Pictures. I also included two covers made with the classic art images: by John Melhuish Strudwick (1849-1937) and Francesco Sasso (1720-1776). Both artists are long dead, and the art is copyright-free.

All the covers are on a dedicated Pinterest board. If you have a minute or two, could you please, please, please click on this link, check out the covers, and tell me which you like best in the comments. They are all numbered for each sub-genre.

Please keep in mind that one cover for the science fiction book has a different title. It’s still the same book, but its cover reflects a particular story, and I named it after that story, while the other three science fiction covers use a different story for the collection title.

Thank you, friends.

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