In Today’s Journal
* My Quote of the Day
* The Bradbury Challenge Report
* A Cover Cheat Sheet
* Of Interest
My Quote of the Day
“When coupled with passion, we can achieve excellence without the sense of having strived for it because work becomes joy.”
The Bradbury Challenge Report
Participating in any challenge is a great way to have fun and grow as a writer.
The requirement is to write at least one short story per week, then let me know the title, word count, and genre per the format below. During the past week, the following writers wrote these new stories:
- Vanessa V. Kilmer “Mandarin Orange” 3019 Paranormal Romance
- Christopher Ridge “Attack of the Fifty Foot Roach” Horror 2005
- William Ridge “The Red tail of Death” 1091 Horror
- Glynn Young “Coffee at the Diner” 2627 General
Congratulations to all of these writers.
A Cover Cheat Sheet
Hey folks, whether you do your own covers or hire someone to do them for you, give branding some serious thought as you go. It will save you a lot of work later.
For branding, you want
- your author name, huge, in the top third of the cover. You can add a small author blurb above of below it, but be sure your name is prominent;
- artwork and colors appropriate to the genre; (to learn about colors, simply key into any search engine “What colors indicate [genre]?”)
- depending on where it fits best with the cover art, the title of the book (also prominent) will either go in the bottom third or the middle third of the cover. (If it goes in the bottom third it’s easier to add a genre or series slug along with it.)
- Don’t overwhelm the potential reader with ‘busy’ art, too many colors or colors that are inappropriate for the genre, or too many fonts. I recommend using no more than two fonts, and I usually get by with one font in different sizes.
If you hire-out cover design, be sure your designer will listen to your artistic input, especially re the list above.
Among my thousands of bits of IP, I currently have an inventory of 168 ‘major’ fiction titles—those are the novels, novellas, and 5- and 10-story short fiction collections—plus around 340 individual short stories.
Only my Blackwell Ops series (55 titles) are branded correctly, and I only did those yesterday morning.
But you can’t see them yet. Now that they’re all rebranded, I still have to
- open each master-cover file (6250 x 9275 pixels), then resize it to 2000 x 3000 for uploading and a 180 x 270 thumbnail for my website,
- upload the new covers to Amazon and D2D and my online discount store,
- then download the new epub and mobi files from D2D and upload them to the online store.
All of that’s wasted time because I should’ve branded them correctly in the first place.
And that’s only those 55 covers.
After that I have to rebrand, resize, and re-upload the covers for the other 113 major titles. And all of that takes away from time I could be writing.
See why I say I hope you’ll be smarter than I was and do them right the first time?
Oh, and that branding stuff I mentioned in the first bulleted list above? All of that goes to discoverability. Without it, you basically don’t stand a chance.
Fortunately, I’m happy for the time being with the 10 Journey Home (SF) saga covers, but eventually I’ll go back and retweak those too.
Not too long ago I also revamped the 22 Wes Crowley novel covers. I think the art’s all right on them now, but I still need to redo them again for branding. However, considering that westerns sell slightly less well than man-eating bears, I’ve decided they’re good enough for now.
For now I plan to press ahead and get all the stuff in the second bulleted list above done for the 55 Blackwell Ops titles. I hope to get all of that done today.
Then I’ll write, and sometime down the line I’ll tackle more covers.
So my advice is this: If you’re just starting out or have only a few major publications, take your time, learn to do branding right, and avoid having to play catchup someday.
Of Interest
Stay Organized! More words to the wise.