How A Book Cover Does Its Job

I’ve just re-covered Scent of the Böggel-Mann – yes, me – and I’m told it’s not half bad. But why did I take time out from writing to produce my own cover? Cost.

Scent of the Böggel-Mann is a story of 10,000 words – about a tenth the length of each of my Torc of Moonlight novels. It retails at 99p / 99c and I gain in royalty 29p / 33c per sale. Bespoke ebook covers can cost $300 upwards. You don’t need to be a mathematician to work out how many sales are needed to recoup the outlay and, unless you are a bestselling ‘name’, the time it will take to gain those sales. Two or three days spent watching YouTube how-to videos and experimenting with image manipulation software begins to look cost effective – IF thought is given to the design.

The primary goal of a book cover is to entice its target readership to click for more information. The target readership in this case are those people who read Horror, so my first stop was the Amazon bestseller list for that genre to understand the ‘look’ of the genre. At first glance, which is how long a trawling buyer may focus on a cover, there’s a lot of monochrome and most of it is dark in tone using plenty of contrast. Armed with that information I started to seek similar images.

I have an account with Depositphotos, picked up during a sale, but I also keep my eye on Pixabay, a site of free-to-use images, and Creative Commons images. Be certain about the licensing conditions offered; not all will include commercial use.

The story centres on a locked shipping trunk gained at an auction by a young-woman-next-door female. I discounted having an image of a woman on the cover. If she was neither a terrified victim nor somehow possessed of evil her ordinariness alone would run counter to the look of the genre. Give readers no reasons to reject investigating further. I found an image of the sort of trunk described in the story, but I couldn’t find a suitable background. Besides, let’s face facts here, the skills needed to competently mesh the two are beyond me at the moment. Then I read an article about the folly of ‘telling the story’ on a cover. What I needed was to indicate the tone of the story, not the story itself. Back to hunting images.

First I came up with the smokey skull, but felt it was a bit bare. I searched for more smoke effects and found a couple using the same colours.

I particularly liked the red eyes of the smoke-skull. It’s not a frightening image, as in portraying oodles of gore, but a quietly sinister image which fits with the tone of the story – my writing is more Stephen King than Richard Laymon. And there’s a skull in the story, and smoke, so despite not wanting the cover to ‘tell the story’, it does tick a couple of story boxes. As I couldn’t find anything better, I made my choice. Note: the images have a watermark enabling test downloads so mock-ups can be produced before purchasing, which is most useful when you are paying by the image. I decided to stick with the black background – it’s both easier and gives the required contrast – but moved both images about the cover-space in search of a placing to catch the eye.

Typefaces and fonts are a world unto themselves and the choice is ridiculously wide. For instance, a thin curly font is beloved by Chicklit, part of its genre look along with pastel colours and hand-drawn imagery, but what did I need for Horror? Again I went back to studying the Amazon bestseller lists and trawling YouTube.

On YouTube I came across Derek Murphy’s collection of how-to videos. The one I’ve linked to I found particularly useful because he explains what he’s doing and why he’s doing it, and the video and narration show there’s a great amount of trial and error involved – a learning curve that resonates with me. He may be using an updated version of Photoshop, but the concepts can be transferred to whichever software is available.

Checking back with the Amazon Horror list, I began to understand the virtuous circle of Title, Authorname and Logline or Review Quote, as well as serif/sans serif choices, and selecting colours from the image’s palate.

The red of the smoke-skull’s eye which had drawn me originally would be my colour of choice for the Title; the blue of the smoke my choice for my Authorname and a Logline. I wouldn’t have thought of using a Logline at all, despite these being carried by many book covers in the Bestseller list, yet it is an instant way of giving an indication of the story. I also chose a calm sans serif font for Authorname and Logline, and a busier font for the title.

Whether my choice of font for the Title is the best, or even reasonable, remains to be seen. It is readable, even as red-on-black at the thumbnail size used by Amazon. The fact that the Authorname and Logline can’t be read at thumbnail is neither here nor there; at thumbnail it is the look that counts the most. Get a reader to click on the image link and they can be read on its page. After that it’s up to the blurb – the product description – to make the sale. Sometimes, it’s the cover alone that does that.

With the cover complete, I created a complementary visual for use on social media sites using the images already purchased in a slightly different way.

Tips:

• Expensive image manipulation software is not necessary to produce reasonable book covers. For free try Canva, which has an ebook template. Or try out Derek Murphy’s own semi-completed online cover creator on his DIYBookCovers website. If you do wish to purchase software, take a look at Serif’s Affinity retailing at less than £50. There are lots of tutorials on its site, and user videos on YouTube.
• Keep a note of all settings used in creating a cover, from the source and identity code of the images, to the font and HEX number of colours used in the text. It’s surprising how often I need to refer to the information.

If you found this post useful, please take time to say so in the Comments, below. Or do me a favour and RT my currently Pinned Tweet. Or heck, buy the title. It's only 99p. 😄

Scent of the Böggel-Mann - New Cover

Here it is at last: the new cover for my stand-alone short, Scent of the Böggel-Mann.

I’ve also re-worked the ‘product description’ - the blurb:

Some lots are best left in the auction room.

Elaine haunts auctions held in crumbling country mansions, dreaming of a find to make her and Gary rich. A plain wooden shipping trunk has no key to its iron-banded locks but is far heavier than it should be. What might it contain?

Some lots are best left in the auction room.

Mainstream publishers regularly change the covers of their titles: to re-brand the author, or a series, or to edge the title further into its genre ‘look’. Scent of the Böggel-Mann is aligned with the Horror genre, but you’d picked up that already, right? With a cover like this it couldn’t be Chicklit, could it?

And that’s how covers work. They act as fast tags to the type of story to be found within. 'A picture paints a thousand words', and all that. 

 

The title is on wide distribution at an entry level price of 99p/99c, available from Kindle, Kobo, iBooks, Nook, and Smashwords for all formats.

Join me next time, when I’ll be talking about the whys and the hows of creating a cover.

Reading and Writing Historicals - Faction

I’ve recently read two ‘faction’ works, and I enjoyed both.  The first was a novella, All The Freshness Of The Morning by David Black, the second full-length, The Secret Life Of The Elephant Man, by Milford Grove.

All The Freshness Of The Morning is a dramatisation of the time spent in the Pacific during WW2 of a young Lieutenant Jack Kennedy – later known to history as the United States President John F Kennedy. It is written in an accessible, chatty style, conveyed by a fictitious narrator years later remembering his time aboard the same PT boat.

In contrast, The Secret Life Of The Elephant Man takes the progressively deforming Joseph Merrick from his birth in Leicester to his death in the London Hospital in 1890. Although Merrick is the focus, and the story is conveyed from his viewpoint and that of his contemporaries, the book explores Victorian attitudes to the vulnerable, therefore deftly mirroring attitudes prevalent today.

‘Faction’ is the art of fictionalising recorded facts about real people, usually now dead, to give an insight into their life and times, written in such a way as to challenge the reader to discern the fact from the fiction. This is why it’s a genre I’ve shied away from. No matter the amount of research undertaken, no writer is ever going to get the detail correct. As if to underline this, both works mentioned above state that they are a work of fiction based on historical fact. They have, however, made me muse on the way I do write history.

For Hostage of the Heart the big picture, the events of the latter part of 1066, were researched, as was the life of ordinary people – the primary pull of history for me – yet no character existed in history. Does this make it less of a story, less of a truth?

For Beneath The Shining Mountains I also concentrated on the life of the Apsaroke people of the American northern plains. Its pre-European expansion backdrop I knew a great deal about as for many years I’d been a re-enactor giving talks to schools and community groups. Did these people live and breathe? Yes, but not under the names or settings depicted.

Each novel in the supernatural Torc of Moonlight trilogy has a different historical thread which resonates with the main contemporary timeline. Binding the two are the real-life settings which were researched down to the colour of the paint on a door.

In all, anachronisms were scrubbed spotless, yet in each the depth of history portrayed varied. Do I still believe I made a decent fist of writing the history? Yes. So why am I now musing on the different forms of conveying it?

This year I discovered information about my grandmother’s life at the close of WW1, a piece of jigsaw that has unexpectedly connected family hearsay. I want to portray her story in fiction, yet I have little more than a few black and white photographs of her in later years and a couple of bald census pages. I could certainly conjure a historical novel, though it would deviate from her day-to-day trials. Could I write faction? I’m not sure I have enough to make a choice. Maybe when I start researching the period and the places, she’ll tell me.

#Research: Medieval Marmion Tower

The Marmion Tower

Following on from the last post on medieval Markenfield Hall with its Tudor gatehouse, this time I’m a few miles north to focus on an earlier gatehouse, the enigma that is the Marmion Tower in West Tanfield, Ripon.

Built and remodelled between 1350 and 1400, it stands tight between the drop to the River Ure and the wall of the village's church of St Nicholas, which may, or may not, explain why the barrel-vaulted entrance passage is off-set.

Not substantial in footprint, it was substantial in comfort, having three floors, at least two garderobes built into its riverside walls, three fireplaces, and an oriel window. Although there were certainly gates, and it is crenellated – permission had to be sought from the Crown – there is no provision for either a portcullis or arrow slits.

I’m not alone in finding this curious, considering the violence of the time. Like Markenfield Hall, it lies on the north-south road from Scotland, at a point where the Ure was crossed by ferry, now a bridge carrying the A6108.

Fireplace and cupboard, ground floor porter/guard's chamber

Was it built as a free-standing tower ‘house’, perhaps a dowager house with an enclosed courtyard beyond, specifically to be close to the church? Or was it built to be “of worth” – ie, not timbered – for a hall beyond, which was not, or became not, the owner’s main residence?

Or, over the intervening years since the 1066 Norman invasion, were there two residences? Certainly something was built with commanding views on a rocky spur  further along the bending River Ure, but that’s over a mile away. A motte and bailey ‘castle’ erected, as so many were, immediately after the Harrying of the North? Mmm.

Left: rise to the 1st floor oriel window, line of 2nd storey flooring plus window

Right: view from oriel window showing chantry house of priest plus modern bridge

Personally, I go for the two residences theory. When John Leyland, the noted 16th century antiquarian, passed through on business for King Henry VIII, he was not impressed to find “a meane manor place” with a towered gateway and a house of squared stone. However the cossetted Leyland felt about the state of the manor dwellings, a look inside the church at the effigies of its former owners left me in no doubt as to the worth of the families who once resided there.

Sir John Marmion and his wife Lady Elizabeth

While other chest tombs of the families are carved in eroding stone, this tomb, carved in alabaster, carries the effigy of John Marmion who, in 1387, died in Spain fighting for his overlord, John of Gaunt third son of King Edward III. It is, therefore, highly unlikely that his body resides within.

Beside him is his wife, Lady Elizabeth, who died in 1400. In the foreground and behind their heads can be glimpsed parts of the decorated wrought iron "hearse" of unknown date, which carries thick candles at its four corners.

As is usual in churches, there was neither the room nor the natural light to take full photographs, but it is from the spectacularly detailed carving that writers, and historians, gain much information of the period.

While Elizabeth's head rests on a cushion supported by angelic cherubs, John Marmion's rests on his ornately feathered tilting (jousting) helm, carved out inside to look exactly as it had when he wore it in life. Note the interlocking shoulder sections of his plate armour and the tactile nature of his mail coif. Note, too, that both hands have been hacked off, while his wife's remain in prayer. Probably he was holding his - his - sword down the length of his body and it was subsequently robbed. Around his neck is carved the collar of the Lancastrian house, a decoration instituted by King Henry IV.

This sort of attention to fine detail, and there is far more than I can show here, does not come cheap. So what happened to his, their, equally opulent dwelling?

It seems that no documented explanation exists, at least that I've come across. If Leland's assertion in the 16th century was that the property/ies was "a meane manor place", then in all probability it was being allowed, for whatever reason, to fall into wrack and ruin. According to local tradition its usable stone was carried off to build other great houses in the area. It wasn't unknown. Thankfully the gatehouse was left where it stood, or people like me would never have heard of the Marmions, or be intrigued by the enigma of the Marmion Tower.


Note:  Click on the images to bring up a larger view. All photos (c) Linda Acaster.