Behind the scenes: How to choose a cover?
So this week I finally got cover art concepts! I won’t include them here because I don’t want to give the surprise away, and they’re not quite done, but I wanted to give you guys an insight into the process I used to decide on my cover.
Warning: I tend to do things that make sense to me. My sister says I would make a terrible scientist (she has a degree in neurobiology) because I tend to wing it and most of the time I couldn’t replicate what I did even if I tried! Drives her crazy when we’re working on embroidery projects together!
So the first thing I did, after my happy dance of course, was print them out. I love being able to have them on my phone to look at when I want, but it’s nothing like seeing them on paper, side by side. They were each very unique and conveyed a different, but similar, message.
The hardest thing for me about this whole cover process has been trying to understand what my target audience would like. That’s hard. I’m so immersed in this world that I’ve created; I have expectations! My characters should look a certain way, the background needs to look the way I imagined it, the font has to be just right…
Unfortunately, that’s not what is going to draw in people.
So my first task when trying to give the designer an idea was to look at best sellers on Amazon. So I did, and of course the cover that I liked would be the one that had all of the custom character art. So not fair. So it was back to the drawing board. Despite being frustrating, I learned a lot about what it takes to put artwork together. And I was pleasantly surprised by what can be done with stock photos!
I really appreciated the advice the designer gave me:
Ask “which would you buy?” vs “which do you like?”
There is no “perfect” cover.
You can’t please everyone!
With all these things in mind, I set out to poll all my advisers, mainly my family and friends. They disappointed me…
They all chose the cover that I liked the least! But that just made me realize how close I am to the story. I don’t know if I’ll ever be 100% satisfied, and that’s hard for me to accept.
Fortunately, everybody was right. After sleeping on it and staring really hard at the picture, I decided that it was the way I needed to go!
The finalized cover will be ready soon! Make sure to keep up with my Wednesday News Posts on www.epaigeburks.com!