I had a large cup of coffee later in the afternoon and so I’m still wired at almost 11:00 p.m. PST, so what’s a girl to do?
She makes book covers, that’s what… or at least, one cover.
It’s supposed to be for someone’s book that I decided to do for fun, to see if I could interpret her description of a bacteria that a woman created that came out wrong (thanks to a colleague who tampered with it) and now, instead of eating oil spills, it’s eating everything else on the planet. Or something like that.
She was looking for ways to make her current cover better in an author’s forum so instead of suggesting she tweak this or that (the others already took care of that), I decided to give myself the challenge to create one for her book. I didn’t intend for her to buy it; it’s more to show her a different option as she was hiring the same Fiverr guy who created her first few covers that weren’t a hit among forum members nor with would-be readers. I also needed the distraction from writing Jordan’s story. Somehow I’m still stuck at 27K words and it’s down the wire.
There are three stock images that make up the book cover on the left and I probably spent three hours on it when I planned on spending an hour only. I ended up going back to it and changing the background so the one with the red font on the right only has one background image and is more in line with what a premade cover should be. It’s a bit more generic. The only reason the gun is cut off to the left is that if the author were to do Amazon marketing ads, the cover could get rejected for “promoting violence.”
Twenty years ago, I learned graphic design with Adobe products and there’s a reason why I paid for the whole suite back in the day and had the CDs. But none of those CD’s or their activation codes work on my new laptop and the only option is a monthly subscription. Enter Pixelmator which is for Mac only and ten times cheaper, and it can do almost 90% what Photoshop can. I also no longer do graphic design so Pixelmator does what I need.
The author actually liked the concept of the green one with the bacteria and wanted the PSD files for it so she could tweak it for herself. But I can’t give the image away or even sell it so it can be tweaked because the standard license allows me only to sell the finished product. If I sold her the PSD files to tweak, then I’d need an extended license. This is important for me to know because that means technically I can’t tweak existing pre-made covers that I buy… and neither can authors who buy premade covers thinking they can tweak a thing or two. Yikes!
Anyway, it’s something I need to consider – making covers to sell. The left one actually isn’t bad although it’s tough to sell it as a premade because… come on, bacteria in the background? They look like giant worms haha
Okay, I’m going back to writing.
Liz Durano 