Friday, September 21, 2012

Adventures in Cover Design

As most of you know, I have two writing careers. One is as traditionally published Emily Mah, who sells her science fiction and fantasy stories to magazines. The other is as indie published E.M. Tippetts, who is an experiment on my part to try my hand at all the different aspects of the publishing industry. Up until this point, I've always had my novel covers designed by professionals, but this week I've taken the plunge and put one of my own covers out there.

My bestselling book so far is Someone Else's Fairytale, and so I've been writing a sequel. I wanted to design a cover that would work as a template for all the books to come after it. So, here it is, the first cover I designed and put out there:


I debuted this cover on Wattpad, where Fairytale is a featured novel (as of Wednesday). I've since uploaded it on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Kobo. The images are all stock art off Shutterstock. The leather texture is from Scrapgirls, as is the gold tone effect (I purchased a commercial licenses). The swirly patterns are royalty free brushes that my professional cover designer used, and my knowledge of how to put it all together comes from digital scrapbooking. Yes, really. That's how I learned to use Photoshop, from JessicaSprague.com and her online classes :-)

This first cover's gotten a positive response, so I put together a mockup for the second cover:


This is the book I'm working on right now. I debuted this cover on my site, (www.emtippetts.com) and people have been very positive. I need to make a few changes. I'm going to play with what word I put in the magnifying glass. Maybe "crime" or "police" might look better than just "ot cr". I also need to fix the title block. It's crooked, but nobody noticed that, right?

Now, I suppose I should tie this up with some intelligent, meaningful comment, but to be honest, I am so exhausted I can barely see straight! I launched the German edition of Fairytale, also on Wednesday, and have been writing over 2,000 words a day on Damsel, so as soon as I finish this post, I'm stumbling off to bed ;-)




8 comments:

  1. Congratulations Leisha!!!!!
    So excited for you.

    Awesome.

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    1. It's Emily, actually, but our last names sound alike!

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  2. Holy cow, Emily, I'm impressed! I love the little details and hearing about your process. I'm looking forward to Damsel, too.

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    1. Thanks, Jonene. It's a story that's begging to be written, but I'm too tired to do it any justice tonight. Frustrating, but tomorrow will be better ;-)

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  3. Nice work, Emily! And now I really want to read your sequel. I know that Lois Lowry has done a few of her own covers and I really like them.

    I'd like to know more about your German edition. Who did the translation for you? Did you hire someone to translate, or did someone purchase the rights from you? Do tell.

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    1. Thanks! The translator is Michael Drecker who has set up a business translating for indie authors. I pay him a percentage of his fee up front, and then all royalties until he earns out his fee.

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    2. Fascinating! I think it is great that not just authors, but lots of the people who do other kinds of work that go into creating books are starting to go independent. I'm still kicking around the idea of hanging out a shingle as an indie editor.

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    3. There's real demand for those and an established market. I think it provides a pretty decent income.

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