book cover | nichepoetryandprose

poetry and prose about place

Posts Tagged ‘book cover’

Book Covers: from sketch to design

In producing my science fiction books, one of the many tasks is to produce a book cover for each book. I could hire this step out, but I made a decision early in my author experience to feature both my art and writing in producing my books.

There are ten (soon to be eleven) books in the Meniscus Science Fiction Series. Once I decided on the design for the first book (Meniscus: Crossing The Churn), I knew I wanted all the books in the series to follow a similar cover pattern. I liked the format of a single block showing the cover art and the general placement of title, volume number and author’s name. I also wanted all the cover art to show the two Meniscus moons (Cardoth-roe, the big moon, and Cardoth-grill’en, the little moon) and the characters in the book in silhouette.

Creating a book cover takes four main steps.

Step One is to consider how I want to present the book and what themes could be displayed.

Step Two is to do a black and white drawing of the cover.

Step Three is to do an acrylic painting of the drawing.

Step Four is to create a cover for the book, to be up-loaded to Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) for both paperback and e-book editions.

The only cover to depart from the pattern (no drawing was produced that led to the cover), was Book Seven, Meniscus: Encounter with the Emenpod. Here are the drawings and final covers for all the books after the first:

There is one other book, Meniscus: One Point Five – Forty Missing Days, that should be shown. Its cover came from a painting done to welcome people to my sales table at various book fairs.

All my best,

Jane ( a.k.a. Alexandra)

Written by jane tims

July 13, 2022 at 7:00 am

Posted in Meniscus, writing a novel

Tagged with art, book cover, drawings, writing process

Book Cover – Land Between the Furrows

with 4 comments

I have been working on the cover painting for the new book in the Kaye Eliot Mysteries: Land Between the Furrows.

First, I do a pencil drawing of the idea I have for the cover. In this book, grind stones from a local grist mill figure in the mystery.

Then I do a painting, based on the pencil drawing. This painting is in acrylics, 16″ by 20″.

Finally, I create the cover. This is, for me, the hardest step. I take the photo of the painting into GIMP, crop to get the correct dimensions (6″ by 9″) and scale the image to 360 dpi (pixels per inch). Then I bring the image into the KDP Cover Creater and add the text and so on.