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 ;-)

Launch day for Castles on the Sand

Many of you will remember me advertising my Kickstarter campaign to get a Kirkus Review for my novel, Castles on the Sand. That campaign was ultimately successful, and Kirkus dubbed the novel: "A fast-paced blend of high-stakes drama and average teenage concerns (sex, appearance, friends), capped with a welcome message of hope."

You may also remember my post on how to make a book trailer, in which I showed the trailer for the book: 

Today, the book was released on Amazon, B&N, Kobo, and Smashwords, and I shall update my little section of the righthand sidebar accordingly!

Susan Kaye Quinn and E.M. Tippetts both make the Semifinals of the Kindle Book Review's Best Indie Books of 2012 Contest!

The Cove's got two indie writers who made it to the Semifinals of the Kindle Book Review Best Indie Books of 2012 Contest. I (E.M. Tippetts) am in the romance category with Someone Else's Fairytale and Susan Kaye Quinn is in the YA category with Open Minds.


We even got a nifty badge:

Making my own book trailer

Okay, so last year I decided to take my unpublished chick lits and indie publish them, because I had nothing to lose. They weren't making any money sitting on my hard drive, and agents and editors all told me that they liked my writing, but that no publisher was touching chick lit with a ten foot pole, not for a new writer. Furthermore, they're Mormon chick lit. I'd already published one book with one of the major LDS publishers and at the end of the day decided it wasn't worth the hassle for the very limited exposure I got in such a tiny, regional market. So, why not see how it worked in the national market? Fast forward eight months and I am making more money from my indie novels than I am from my science fiction short stories, and I've been paid pro rates on my short stories for years, but the gap keeps on widening as the novels sell incrementally more each month. I never thought I'd be a self published author OR a chick lit author. It's funny the twists and turns life takes sometimes. Nowadays I love being both traditional (as Emily Mah, the science fiction/fantasy author) and indie (as E.M. Tippetts, the LDS chick lit/YA author) and what I especially love about being indie is all the skills I have to learn. I know so much more about how a book goes together, gets seen by readers &tc. nowadays, which can only help my traditional publishing career, I think.

So I decided to try to make my own book trailer. I should have kept my first ever draft, but I saved over it. When I realized that it was worth showing a before/after, I did save one of the older drafts.

The images are from Shutter Stock, which is also where a lot of cover designers get the raw material for their cover art (including me), and the music is from Premium Beat. Since I don't have the talent or resources to do a live action trailer, I knew I had to invest a little into getting professional images, and especially into music. Premium Beat does movie trailer music, as in what people in Hollywood literally buy for their trailers. The site has a cheaper rate for us small time indie folks. What is absolutely critical in any business you start up is to be thrifty, not cheap. The idea is to get good value for money, not avoid spending it altogether. If you can only afford a slideshow trailer, then you pay good money to make it the very best slideshow trailer you can afford, and if you can do live action, invest in making it look professional. Having a bunch of your friends in a park speaking Old English with people throwing frisbees in the background is a complete waste of your money. Having no trailer is better than having a bad one.

Sooo, I had to see if I could make a "not bad" one. Here is the first "final draft" version I created:

As I said, the above trailer was my first "final draft", where I thought, "Okay, that'll work". Only it doesn't. There are many, many flaws in it, but the ones I spotted were:

1) No reference to my website. Oops. Duh. I should have that in there because this trailer is embedded in other sites all over the net, including Goodreads, Facebook, and Amazon. It's therefore not enough to mention my website only on YouTube, as not everyone will even see the YouTube page.

2) The text flashes by too fast in parts: Now this is a hard one. My problem is that I'm a speed reader, as in a super speed reader, as in I read Twilight in one day and part of another book too. When the last Harry Potter novel came out, my husband and I were both reading it on a plane. I sat on his right because I was soon one page ahead of him, and within an hour, I was half the book ahead of him. Therefore, I do not have a good concept of how long it takes people to read the text. If they can't read it, that's really ineffective. I'm not sure I was able to fix this one entirely, but I think I made it better.

3) The placement and formatting of the text is weird in places: "Her boyfriend is devoted" has a weird indent in part of it. "the senior class psycho" displays right over a large white portion of the picture for a long time, and worst is the end. I have my sand castle image there, and you'll note the title and my name are positioned to crash right into it. All of this was due to my using Microsoft Movie Maker and it's not intuitively obvious how to position text with that program. I finally figured out that if I had blank lines before or after the text, that would move it up or down the screen.

4) Poor timing of images: I couldn't fix all of this because I don't really know what I'm doing, but where possible I tried to line up more of the image changes to the beats in the music. I think Microsoft Movie Maker offers very limited capability on that score. Some of the images are too slow, like the diary excerpts. You don't actually need to read those, so those can flash by much faster and just give the gist.

5) Too much text in some frames: I really was conscious of how long the whole trailer was because a lot of ones I've seen go on too long. But I figured out in the end that this was a scripting issue more than a trailer editing one. Trailers that go on too long try to cover too much of the plot and get into subplots. Here my experience submitting manuscripts came in very handy. I only talk about the central plot with just a few hand waving hints to subplots in the setup. Given I'd kept the script tight, I could afford to take more time to display less text per frame and keep it on screen long enough for the person to absorb it.

Is the final product perfect? No it is not, but I think it is better, and given it's my first ever book trailer, it's not a complete disaster. See what you think:

Kickstarter campaign underway for the next E.M. Tippetts novel

As many of you know, I've got two writing careers. I've gone the traditional route as a science fiction and fantasy author and sell short stories to magazines, sub novels to agents and editors, and have been working on that for over a decade. Then last year I watched the indie movement get underway and really wanted to jump in an join the fun. So I revived my old chick lit pen name, E.M. Tippetts, and indie published two novels.

The rest, as they say, is history. Fans have been so incredibly supportive and I make a very respectable supplementary income from my novels. Now I'm in the final edits of my next project, and I'm turning again to my fans for some support. I would really like to get a Kirkus Indie review for this next project, so I've launched a Kickstarter campaign to cover the cost.

For those of you who don't know Kickstarter, it is a fantastic resource for independent artists of all stripes. This'll be my first campaign, but not the last, I hope!

 

Memories of Clarion West

Eleven years ago I had the privilege of attending the Clarion West Writers Workshop for Science Fiction and Fantasy in Seattle, Washington. For anyone who hasn't heard of it, the Clarion Workshops are intense, to put it mildly. For six weeks, seventeen students are taught by professional writers - ours were Octavia Butler, Bradley Denton, Nalo Hopkinson, Connie Willis, Ellen Datlow, and Jack Womack. Every morning we'd get up, scrounge some breakfast, and then head to a critique session. Three students would have their heads on the block. We'd have read their stories and go around the circle, analyzing, criticizing, and trying to suggest cures for whatever ailed the piece. The last person to go would be the instructor. After being roasted by seventeen other people, the author was permitted to do two things: 1) ask for clarification and 2) thank everyone.

This has been such a valuable lesson for me because when you write professionally, you can't argue with your readers. You can't complain that they "didn't get it". It was your job to make them get it. Your only remedy is to learn from mistakes, sit back down at the keyboard, and do better next time.

In the science fiction and fantasy genre, a lot of professional writers groups use the Clarion style of critiques, and it was my time at Clarion West that qualified me to join Critical Mass, a writer's group in New Mexico that helped keep me working hard for the next ten years. Meanwhile many of my former workshop mates were finding their own way in critique groups, earning degrees and research grants, and winning awards and accolades such as Hugo and Nebula nominations and novel publishing deals.

It's been a privilege to be associated with my former classmates, and it's been a blessing that social media like email and Facebook have allowed us to keep a connection and be a part of each others lives and careers. This year, we decided to celebrate with a reunion anthology. Since the workshop was in Seattle, home of the Space Needle, we titled it, Under the Needle's Eye. Eleven of us have contributed stories and novel excerpts, and it was my privilege to oversee the copy editing and to convert the book to Kindle format. I have to say, my classmates' work leaves me both humbled and bursting with pride.

And I made us this book trailer:



I hope it conveys some of the sincere admiration I have for my classmates and the incredible fun it was putting this project together. The anthology is FREE today and tomorrow on Amazon, so come find us Under the Needle's Eye!