C is for Cover Design

 

You should never judge a book by its cover. That's what they say. And I would agree with them, but… The cover is usually the first thing that takes your eye.

With my usual skill at arms, and ignoring every bit of advice to the contrary, I designed my books covers when I was self-publishing. I have Photoshop, I dabble in amateur photography and I take a fair picture, so it wasn't difficult to put the two together and come up with covers. My good friend, editor and sometimes tormentor, Maureen Vincent-Northam, has helped on a number of them, particularly the early Sanford 3rd Age Club Mystery covers. They were not expensive, yet attractive and I'm convinced they helped establish the series' popularity.

When Crooked {Cat} Publishing picked up The Filey Connection, it fell to them to deal with covers, and after some to-ing and fro-ing, we settled on the current example (below).

Some readers have asked what it represents. It's the headlight of the vehicle that knocked Knickers-off Nicola down.

You may be surprised at what can be done with book covers. Take a look at this, for example.

How was it done?

First I downloaded a star field from the web for the background. The planet is a picture of Neptune, which I coloured green, then shaded out most of it to make it appear in crescent. I added a yellow lens flare for the sun, and the landscape was clipped from the photograph below, which was taken near Las Roques de Garcia on the island of Tenerife (below), an area which has been used as an alien setting in several sci-fi movies.

It takes time and patience to learn how to use Photoshop or its free equivalent, GIMP, but it can be time well spent, and there is plenty of help around the web. Putting this cover together was the work of perhaps 4-5 hours.

Does the cover work? Is it attractive enough? Since the novel isn't yet complete, I have no way of knowing, but judge for yourself and let me know what you think.

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The Filey Connection, first of the Sanford 3rd Age Club Mysteries, from Crooked {Cat} Books is available for the Kindle from Amazon UK and Amazon Worldwide and in all other formats from Smashwords