Cover art: Basic Vs. Chic

I'm sure you've seen plenty of books in your lifetime.

Kids books...

History books...

Text books...

Fictional novels...

Biographies...

Poetry collections...

Well, every book has a cover...

But, while they say don't judge a book by its cover, that's what it is there for. The cover is supposed to be the face value presentation of what the book is...showing an essence of what the story is about...

Everybody has a favorite...

I know a lot of librarians out there who love the leather bound books...the old style...

I agree, leather is nice...I love the smell of leather...but it's not practical for many reasons...

For 1, I have no way to print in leather bound...unless I go skin an animal myself and produce each book by hand, there is no way I'm getting this book out in leather bound...


Wouldn't that be cool though? Red dragon in a reddish brown tinted leather binding?

*nerdgasm*

But, I digress.

There are many formats of cover arts that you can find out there. And many of them are creative and beautiful.

Some of the major ones are:

• photography
• painting
• drawing
• photo-shopped surreal art
• simplistic (just colors and the necessary names)

If I could, I would splatter photographs and paintings all over my covers!

Wouldn't that just be grand?

I would love that!

However, while I can get my hands on a camera, I can't get my hands on something to take a picture of that is worth a cover...something that represents my story...

I mean...if there were dragons flying around, I would plaster them all over that book!

Again, I digress...

There are various ways of going about making a cover, and that comes from the main elements:

1. Title
2. Author(s) Name(s)
3. Presentation (picture)
4. Base color
5. Information (if desired)

These are like steps to take in making a cover that represents the story.

And you think coming up with a title is hard!

Think of the implications of this!

Okay, let me break it down for you how I do it...

First, I figure out what I have available that can represent the story...

For example, I used this for Red Dragon

Nice?

Simplistic?

Fun in fundamentals?

Man, this was a lot of work...

One main important thing is that you cannot go use a picture from the internet, because then you mess with copyright...

Don't fuck with the copyright!

So, I had to make this myself...granted, I looked online for some ideas and drew from different pictures the elements of this final idea...

In the end, it had to be a fully black and white picture, with not a gray pixel in sight.

Why?

Because this was just the base concept. I wanted color for my picture...

Granted, I published Sins of an Empire with this kind of concept, but that was actually pulled off of this, these pictures were made months ago, and Sins of an Empire's cover was made a few weeks ago.

I was originally going to go for something that had to do with the city...you know, New York City (the setting for the entire story).

What I came up with were sunsets and sunrises with silhouettes of buildings...

That's how I fit it into this...

But it's never as simple as cut and paste either, never...

When colors skew and you need a better quality of something, you have to alter everything and save copies of every step so you don't mess it up in the end...

In the end, you can have one or various kinds of pictures...hence what I came up with...

So, these beautiful pictures sit as the main setting of my covers...

But every book is presented with titles and names...

So I have to decide on the

1. size and location of title
2. color of title
3. size and location of author(s) name(s)
4. color of said name(s) (usually correlating with the title)

Then...I have to pick out the base color...for Red Dragon, it's either black or red...black or red...

That helps set up the rest of the cover, from the front, across the spine and to the back cover...which will look like this:

black edge for black cover

red edge for red cover

And these are just some examples of what I might do with it...I could change my idea altogether.

The back covers here actually have a drawing of mine on them (meant to represent Cadence) but I've learned before that drawings do not do well as a full scale cover, so I have implemented the base color.

So...as much as I would love to apply a beautiful and chic picture (photograph or painting) to my covers, I am obliged to use the best of my tools...and am disadvantaged with that.

What do you think then? Which of the seven covers should be used?