nichepoetryandprose

poetry and prose about place

Posts Tagged ‘book cover

Book Covers: from sketch to design

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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.

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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.

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Creating a book cover takes four main steps.

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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.

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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:

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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

Book Cover – Land Between the Furrows

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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.

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

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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.

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The book will be ready to go live on March 15, 2021.

All my best,

Jane

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