See all my covers at: http://www.rebeccaforster.com/ |
by Rebecca Forster
I doubt this will come as a surprise, but ‘pretty’ sells. So does intriguing, shocking, soothing and sexy. That’s why I spent the last three weeks sweating over cover designs for my backlist romances (all of which I hope you’ll check out for your E-reader) and redesigning my thriller covers.
Why, you may wonder, did this exercise create such angst? After all, these are only E-covers. Nobody will run their thumb over the richly embossed type, check to weight of the stock or touch it in a bookstore. This isn’t a ‘real’ cover on a ‘real’ book. And that is my point exactly. These covers are more important than a paper because they will live on in perpetuity.
In this new publishing reality authors who have backlists and don’t own the rights to their covers must now become designers; indie authors who have never had the benefit of seeing their work transformed into a visual face a daunting task of identifying the soul of their books. Bottom line, unlike paper, an E-cover’s impact will be farther reaching than any of us can even imagine.
In the old days an author might reproduce their cover image on bookmarks and mugs. In this brave new world, E-covers pop up as thumbnails on Facebook, Linked-In and other social media posts. They are broadcast to readers of blogs and reviewers who promote your work. An E-cover makes a statement on your own website. An E-book cover is brought up full-size and full color on most readers. An E-book cover sets the tone for your book in a way that a paper cover never could because you – the author – have designed it and that is the truly exquisite bottom line.**
No longer am I at the mercy of a New York art director working off a synopsis of the book we spent months writing. Never again will I have a cover where Lady Justice had a sex change and became a sword-toting Roman guy. I have seen the last of a beautiful ocean on the cover of my book that is set in the high desert of California. Hurrah! I have taken the beaches of cover design, and planted my flag and you can too.
I must confess that initially I was like a young soldier rushing into war without realizing how important the battle was. I lucked out with my Witness Series covers but others looked amateurish, weak and unmemorable. I had that revelation as I readied my romance backlist for E-publication. I was determined to make my covers as easily identifiable as my writing style so when faced with the prospect of creating a minimum of 8 new covers, I knew I needed a plan. I studied E-covers of books I admired and those on the top seller lists. I began to experiment. I realized that, like a first draft of a book, my covers were not perfect the first time out. I began to understand that I had to kick everything up a notch to get noticed.
The new covers now reflect the theme of each book or are evocative of the mood of that work. With the romances and women’s fiction in particular I tried to limit the use of full-on portrait photography in order not to inhibit the romantic reader’s imagination. For me, blocking and color worked for the romances. For other authors, flowers and pastels might be the key to success. For my thrillers, I decided to go darker with ominous and/or graphic images. Though there are no hard and fast rules, here are some guidelines that worked for me:
• Clean is better than fussy
• People (especially parts of people) are intriguing***
• Experiment. Odd colors and disparate type faces can to work together and create drama
• The covers should reflect the tone of the book
• Slugs should be tight and to the point
• Spend a little money on stock photos (I use ‘small’).
• Plug in image search words that aren’t obvious.
• Use PowerPoint portrait setting for your design. The pixel height and width will be perfect.
So, Heck Yeah! Get on top of the the covers. Your E-career will thank you for it.****
*See more of my handiwork at http://www.rebeccaforster.com/ .
**Even if you had a designer, they worked at your direction. Own that cover!
***See The Reckless Ones – my favorite partial body shot.
****The same thoughts hold true for E-packaging!
… is busy!
And it’s not just book deadlines that are driving me nuts these days. I’ve taken on blog guest appearances in addition to my weekly post on Killer Hobbies and my monthly post here at A Slice of Orange.
Plus, I’ve thrown myself into pet rescue after all the research I’ve done and continue to do for my new Pet Rescue Mystery series, which started in March with BEAGLEMANIA. I volunteer weekly as a dog adoption counselor at a local private shelter, plus I’ve become the L.A. Pet Rescue Examiner. I have to admit that I haven’t been posting articles for the Examiner as often as I’d like, but I hope to remedy that–and in the meantime I’m collecting some good stuff to talk about there.

BEAGLEMANIA, March 2011 Berkley Prime Crime |

Linda O! Johnston
Visit Linda at LindaOJohnston.com
or http://killerhobbies.blogspot.com/
Writer’s Block!!
I think it started when I hurt my back last year. And, it seems to persist. Losing my job just seemed to make it worse.
I started a new fantasy romance this year. I wrote eight pages, which I somehow deleted along with the essays I was grading. It took me three weeks, but I finally managed to rewrite those eight pages, only it was more like six. I don’t know if it is better or just shorter. I got a bit further in the story, then I stopped.
It was February that I wrote those pages. The beginning of February and I am still at eight pages with no idea of what my characters are going to do next.
I have spent time building the universe. I know who my villain is and what he wants. I know why he does what he does. I know my hero and heroine and of course they have to stop the villain and fall in love. That is easy enough.
How they get to that point though, I have no idea. I was talking with Debra Young at lunch today about the problem. She often runs into this problem. My problem is that I always know what my characters are going to do next. Or at least they do. Now. Nothing.
It is very disconcerting. Someone better decided what has to happen next because all I am doing is grading papers and playing Mah Jong. There has to be a way to get this book moving forward.
0 0 Read moreby Jennifer Lyon
A friend and I were discussing what makes a “bigger†book. There’s no real definition for bigger, but the one thing I can guarantee you is that it’s not word count. Words are a tool to tell a story, they are NOT the story.
So what is “bigger?†I think it comes down to universal themes that resonate with a larger audience.
For instance, in the Harlequin/Silhouette category books, like Desire, Special Edition, Super Romance, etc, the writing is tightly focused on the emotions of falling in love, and therefore, limits the audience. That does NOT make these books any less enjoyable, it just narrows the audience.
But a bigger book has more ‘commercial’ themes. As an example, let’s talk about the movie Ghost. It works the same in books or movies, and my husband and I just watched it over the weekend so it’s fresh in my mind. The movie has been out for something like 20 years, yet it has a timeless quality to it, and I think that’s because of its themes.
The sudden loss of a loved one. Every person has or will experience this.
What happens when we die? Look at all the books, movies, religions and philosophies dedicated to trying to explain it.
Can a dead loved one reach us? Can we reach them? There’s a whole industry of psychics and others making money off “contacting the dead.†The emotional fragility of grieving will make even the strongest of us reach for any flicker of hope.
Letting go of a loved one. There’s many shades to this one. In the movie, it was time for the hero and heroine to let go of each other so the hero could move on. I had a moment like that with my mom at the very end of her life. She was so sick and I remember the moment clearly where I finally closed my eyes and said to my deceased brother; “You can have her now. Anything to stop her pain.†I was ready to let her go and she passed soon after that.
Betrayal by a friend. In the movie, the hero is betrayed by someone he knows and trusts. Who hasn’t at least seen that happen if not experienced it?
These themes touch all of us, helping us to relate to the movie or book on a personal, intimate level. And that helps create a bigger feel to the book.
In my books, I try to find these universal themes. It’s even more important, I think, because I’m writing paranormal. In NIGHT MAGIC, my heroine, Ailish, is handfasted to a demon and has two weeks to either complete the bond and become a demon witch (who is evil), or she dies.
Now I doubt many of us have ever been in that predicament. But the core theme there is something like: Can a good person be betrayed or tricked into becoming evil? That’s a pretty timeless theme, one that religions have explored and argued since the beginning of time. These themes spin off into more:
Betrayal: Ailish trusted her mother, and she betrayed her.
Redemption: Can Ailish atone for a mistake she made when she was 16?
Handicap: Ailish is blind, something that I believe really humanizes her.
Can she face her own death?
How far will the man who loves her go to save her?
I’m using the idea of “themes†here loosely, but these are the universal concepts that we have some familiarity with and therefore connect us to the characters strongly enough to feel like we’re in their skin. We understand their struggles and conflicts.
P.S. NIGHT MAGIC, the third book in my Wing Slayer Hunter Series went on sale March 22nd, and the forth book SINFUL MAGIC will be out May 31st.
Jennifer Lyon always wanted to be a witch. When her witch-powers didn’t materialize, she turned to creating magic in her books. NIGHT MAGIC is the third book in an enchanting, passionate and supernatural series. Jen’s also has a super secret alter ego known as Jennifer Apodaca, the author of the award winning Samantha Shaw Mystery Series. Visit Jen at http://www.jenniferlyonbooks.com/
6 0 Read moreI have always enjoyed reading advice columnists, a pleasure which has increased with the advent of the net and the ability of others to post comments on both their opinion of the advice as well as responses to the LW (letter writer in advice column parlance!).
My brilliant friend and sf writer, Ellen Kushner, shared this link, which links to this link, which offers the following paradigm that presents and explains the two different, and occasionally contentious cultures of the Asker (Requester) Vs the Guesser (Diviner). It’s a facinating–and I found very helpful–insight into how differently people react to the same stimulus. Here’s an exerpt from one of the links that lays out the paradigm in a response to a query:
“This is a classic case of Ask Culture meets Guess Culture.
“In some families, you grow up with the expectation that it’s OK to ask for anything at all, but you gotta realize you might get no for an answer. This is Ask Culture.
In Guess Culture, you avoid putting a request into words unless you’re pretty sure the answer will be yes. Guess Culture depends on a tight net of shared expectations. A key skill is putting out delicate feelers. If you do this with enough subtlety, you won’t even have to make the request directly; you’ll get an offer. Even then, the offer may be genuine or pro forma; it takes yet more skill and delicacy to discern whether you should accept.
“All kinds of problems spring up around the edges. If you’re a Guess Culture person — and you obviously are — then unwelcome requests from Ask Culture people seem presumptuous and out of line, and you’re likely to feel angry, uncomfortable, and manipulated.
“If you’re an Ask Culture person, Guess Culture behavior can seem incomprehensible, inconsistent, and rife with passive aggression.
“Obviously she’s an Ask and you’re a Guess. (I’m a Guess too. Let me tell you, it’s great for, say, reading nuanced and subtle novels; not so great for, say, dating and getting raises.)
“Thing is, Guess behaviors only work among a subset of other Guess people — ones who share a fairly specific set of expectations and signalling techniques. The farther you get from your own family and friends and subculture, the more you’ll have to embrace Ask behavior. Otherwise you’ll spend your life in a cloud of mild outrage at the Cluelessness of Everyone.
“As you read through the responses to this question, you can easily see who the Guess and the Ask commenters are. It’s an interesting exercise.”
posted by tangerine at 11:38 PM on January 16, 2007 [859 favorites]
You will indeed be able to determine which are Ask and which Guess as you read the comments. Though I hate to call them “guessers” as this type works hard to read the signals so they aren’t guessing. What seems particularly poignant is that even after the two positions are explained, some of the responders are still on their moral high horse of outrage, excoriating the hapless requester as being poorly brought up and horrifyingly rude.
This is what diversity training is all about! We tend to work from our own experience and make assumptions about behavior based, naturally, on ourselves. And I must say it makes me nervous when people are vilified for behaving differently. For, as Hamlet notes to his friend, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” (Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 5)
So if you are a Diviner/Guesser, try to avoid feeling pressured by a request. Channel your inner Asker and realize you can Just Say No. Really. They will likely not hate you forever. They were just asking! And by the same token as a Diviner, work on asking more, hating people forever less, and finding a reasonable common ground.
If you’re an Asker/Requester, try to avoid putting pressure on with a request if you don’t know the person well–or even if you do. Try to offer a face-saving out or reassurances. There are mine fields, and whether you choose to be aware of them or not, you may lose limbs and/or friendships!
I hope you found this as insightful as I did. I confess to being a diviner, but have close family members who are askers. I work on responding in kind and trying to channel their straightforwardness when I need it!
So…are you a requester or diviner?
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More info →A Slice of Orange is an affiliate with some of the booksellers listed on this website, including Barnes & Nobel, Books A Million, iBooks, Kobo, and Smashwords. This means A Slice of Orange may earn a small advertising fee from sales made through the links used on this website. There are reminders of these affiliate links on the pages for individual books.
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