Friday, August 15, 2014

Promo Friday: Photo Covers For Self-Published Books

A couple of weeks ago I gave a talk on the traditional vs. self-published experience for writers. I discussed covers, but had to stick to those with new art created by artists, since I had no experience with photo covers. If only I'd been quicker about reading the May/June 2014 SCBWI Bulletin, I would have had some good info I could have included.

In that issue, author Chris Eboch had a great article called Photo Cover Design for Self-Published Novels. She uses a case study of an author who found the main photo for her cover herself and still needed a photo artist and a designer (that's two different people, folks) to finish her cover. I mention this to make sure everyone understands how involved creating a cover is.

Finding this article will be worth the effort for anyone thinking about creating their own book cover.

5 comments:

tanita✿davis said...

This is really interesting - we're refining a panel for KidlitCon and talking about self-publishing and how bloggers can be a part of making the good books more visible (and arguing that there ARE good self-pubbed books). I wonder how local she is to the West Coast (the Con is in Sacramento) and if she'd be willing to come and sit on the panel...?

tanita✿davis said...

(She being Chris Eboch, in case that was absolutely unclear.)

Gail Gauthier said...

She's in Connecticut for 5 days right now teaching at a women's writing event. I met her in 2013 at the NESCBWI conference in Massachusetts, and I believe she was at the SCBWI conference in California this summer. So she's an active teacher/presenter. I don't think it would be at all unreasonable to contact her.

I've only met her once (she led a 3 hour plotting workshop that I thought was very good), but we are Facebook friends and interact a bit. You can tell her you heard about her through my blog.

tanita✿davis said...

Thanks. I've actually started a tumblr highlighting self-published novels, and am trying to collect more to give people a resource for after the Con... If you'd give me a list of those that you've reviewed on your blog, too, I'll definitely add you in (somewhere on the tumblr there's a submission button but I have to figure out the parameters of what I mean by "self-published," since some small presses exist only to help with formatting, etc. I'll have to see...) ☺

Gail Gauthier said...

There's only one that I recall. It is worth sending you, so I'll try to get to it in the next couple of days.

I have self-published eBooks on my e-reader, waiting for me to read, but I always get distracted by other things.