Making your own book covers.

This is my last National Craft Month post for writers!  I’ve shown you how I created my writing space, made art of our goals, and even character collages.  Today I want to talk about making your own book covers.  Whenever I’m feeling uncreative about a project, usually around the 10K mark, I like to pause on the project and create a book cover for it.  Now, this isn’t something I plan on ever using or making my own book with.  It’s just something I use as a visual trigger for my book.  A few times I’ve printed one out as an 8×10 and stuck it in front of my printed manuscript in a binder for revisions, but people rarely see these from me anymore.

Let me just say right now before I go any further – I am doing these for fun.  Not for profit.  Not to stick on a book and sell it.  These are just another crafty thing to do that involves my writing.

The second super important thing I’ll say: ask permission to use any artwork you want to display anywhere.

Tools.

I’m going to use a few different freeware programs and online resources.  You can google and find other stock image sites, use Photoshop or any number of other things.  Below are the tools I will be using:

• Gimp
• Paint.NET
• Picnik.com
• DeviantArt.com

The first two are freeware graphic/photo editing software that can be downloaded. I prefer using Gimp to alter pictures.  It has some great resizing tools and allows you to move images without auto cropping them.  I’m more familiar with it than I am with Paint.NET which could be half of my problems.  User error often is.

Picnik is an online program similar to the two above, except you just handle one picture.  You can put text or ‘stickers’ over the image, but you cannot upload two images and mix them.  Mostly I use Picnik for it’s amazing filters and the fun fonts.

I usually get my images from DeviantArt’s stock gallery because it supports people who are learning, and you get some great student stuff from the site.  Also, people are really excited when you use their images and give them credit.  If you’re wanting to make a book cover for a book you will be selling, contact the artists and see if they mind you making a for-profit project using their work.  I can’t tell you that their response is 100% one way.

The Pieces.

Below are the images I’ll be using.

I decided I wanted to go with a steampunk idea.  I love steampunk but my attempts at writing it haven’t gone off so well.  So I can indulge with a little pretend book cover making!

Assembling.

I’m going to start in Gimp.  This isn’t a how-to-use-it blog, so I’m going to gloss over a lot of the finer points.

I have a basic blank template that is 900 x 600 pixels that I begin with.  I import all of my pictures as layers and begin  deciding what I’m going to use and what I’m not and the general placement of everything.

Looking back, I should have first altered the colors of the female with the dreadlocks.  The colors in her image were darker than the rest.  Unfortunately she ends up fading into the background, overpowered by everything else.

Once I get everything on my project, I start erasing what I don’t need.  Backgrounds, extra stuff, I want to strip it all away so I can see the images I want to work with.  At this point for me the objects aren’t always scaled properly to one another because it’s just too difficult to get it just right in the beginning.

The thing that honestly takes the longest about these projects, is getting rid of every single bit of the excess ‘stuff’.  I like to start out with the really big eraser and just wipe out the big stuff so that when I come in with the tiny eraser there’s less for me to worry about.  I work with the touchpad on my laptop.  Yes, I know that it’s tedious and your hand will probably hurt.  I spent probably an hour on this one.

Once I have all of the erasing done, I start positioning and scaling objects around each other.  I like to layer backgrounds, using transparencies to make it new and exciting.  When everything’s where I want it, I save the project and export it as a picture and take it into Picnik.  GIMP has a lot of filter options, but I’ve never fallen in love with them.  I find the ones on Picnik easier to use, and they have nifty fonts and the drag and drop banners are easier.

Here’s the first book cover image with no filters:

Honestly, it’s a little sloppy. You can tell that I was really rushing with the erasing, but the blocking of the people isn’t that bad.  Unfortunately I hadn’t yet realized that the chick practically disappeared.  I realized that much later.  Next, I took it to Picnik.

Here you can see my first attempt at the cover.  I dropped the text over the image with a few filters

I like to double up my fonts, this means that I have the title text in black, and then again in another color.  It helps it to stand out from the background without the use of a filler square of transparent stuff behind it.

I’m not crazy about this cover, because this was about the point in my little ‘production’ that I realized what was wrong with it.  The girl faded, and the car popped… Hm. Back to the drawing board!

I decided to reblock the picture.  When I say blocking, think theater or any design really when you deal with placement.  Since I wanted to keep the female in the forefront, I moved her, resized and took it all back to Picnik.

Here’s the original busted project:

It’s not terrible, but you can see what I mean when I said it just didn’t jive.  Now, here’s the same project with bits moved around a little…

I think the results on the second one are by far better!  The female is in the forefront, the focal black and white stresses the three primary pieces of the cover – the girl, the dude, and the ride.  The background is also more apparent in this version.  I’m still not crazy about it, and if I was working with more than going on two hours I would get something else together.

Other Examples

So there you have it!

Do you have any graphic editing tricks or tips to share? Have you made your own book covers before?

Most searched terms…

Since today is Cid-blogs-badly day, I’m going to go ahead and post something fun and silly.  If you’re as OCD about anything as I am, you might understand my fascination of watching the stats on this here blog.  I track them; try to figure out what brings in readers, what keeps them and what I could do differently.  One of my favorite things to do though is to look at the search terms a person plugs into a search engine like Google in relation to how they get to my site.  Yes, this stuff is reported back to me.

My top three search terms?

1. Ancient Babylon
2. Creation story
3. Sex

I understand the first two.  My series in February was packed full of me talking about ancient Babylon.  I did a whole spiel about cultural creation stories even.  I get those two.  I’m more than a little curious about the sex ones though.  I won’t go through the different sex+ some other word searches, but they make me laugh!  I did one post about the difficulty and avoidance in writing intimate encounters and it’s skyrocketed to one of my most viewed blogs; makes me wonder if I shouldn’t do a blog series about writing intimacy.  Interesting fact? 50% of my search results are for some combination including ‘sex’.

Here’s a word cloud of my search terms.  I made this using Wordle on my lunch break. Time to get back to work!  (Dude, this is my first work-blog…wow)

Do you have a site?  What’s the search term that’s surprised you the most? The funniest?

*Just going to give Suzan a shout out, um, I stole her idea.*

Redecorating.

I failed at getting the blog put together for today – because I decided to play with themes and backgrounds.  Yeah, I’m setting a horrible example, please forgive me.  But now I have flying whales on my blog.  Aren’t they cool?  I think I’m going to name them.

Do you have a suggestion for what to name my magical flying whales?

Reading outside your comfort zone.

Last year I set a goal for myself to read outside of my comfort zone.  I discovered that there were things I liked reading that I wouldn’t have had I not looked outside of the norm for myself.  There were also things that I didn’t want to read again because – I just didn’t like it.  And that’s okay.

A lot of my abnormal reading centered around exploring romance genres.  Before I was okay with romance arcs, but I rarely read anything where the romance played center stage.  And now look at me.  I’m a romance junkie, wholeheartedly.

I was reading a romance wherein the heroine wants to explore some of her fantasies.  She makes a point in saying that the books she’s read up until those adventurous phase of her life kicked in allowed her all the control.  She could continue reading or she could put it down and never go back into that world or the situation again.  Now, the character had some specific curiosities and reading the book I found myself thinking that I would never read those kinds of books!

During one of my rereading phases I picked this book back up and read it and when I got to the particular exploration part again, I still had the same thoughts but I also stepped back and asked myself: Is it fair to make this kind of judgment if I haven’t even read anything like that?

Nope, it’s not fair.

So I’m reading some genre erotics and see what I think.  I’m calling myself out.  In the past I’ve read some erotic books, but they were by accident or for review.  (Yes, there is a difference.)  The difference is that I’m selecting them.  I’m also going to read a mystery.  I cringe at the thought, but the mystery plot device plays into so many other genres that I shouldn’t have that kind of a knee jerk reaction.  I’m sure that I’ll add something else to this pile of things I should read, but those are the two that I have had the most bigoted response to reading.

Here are some recommendations from my reading so far:

• Alien Revealed by Lilly Cain (Carina Press title)- This is a longer sci-fi novella.  I was skeptical when I read about it being about aliens and I expected to  DNF.  I was wrong!  The race and universe building were really good and I’m genuinely interested to see if there is more that explores the alien race.  It has plot, it has spies, it has sexiness, aliens with mental powers and natural tattoos, and it has very light bondage.  Not what I was expecting, in a good way.  (Note: there is a second book in coming out June 13th called Naked Truth that features two characters introduced in AR.)
• Anything by Julia Devlin – I met her doing #1k1hr sprints on twitter, and I’ve read all but one of her ebooks.  Her books, they sizzle.  You can tell through the descriptions what the couple’s thing is.  Pride and Surrender, mostly just downright sexy, one kink bit.  A Whole New Light isn’t for the faint of heart.  It explores the sub/dom dynamic.  Riding the Rail is another sexy one, the characters seem to have a thing for public places.
• Wizard Moon by Michele Bardsley – super funny, but this is not for the weak of heart.  The story is quite naughty, but told with Michele’s trademark humor and snark.
• The Bottom Line by Shelley Munro – The heroine explores her interest in spanking, and hilarity ensues, and then tragedy.  Very light kink, lots of funny.  I need to look through her other books.  Her writing was fun, and she’s from New Zeland and her characters play rugby.  Um, heck yes?  Rugby games are way fun!

Is there a genre you don’t read, or topics that you refuse to read about?

Weekly Update!

I’m starting this super, duper late because I’ve been so busy writing I couldn’t be bothered to worry about blogs. Pshaw!

Blogging.

Solidified the blogging plan for the next two months. Impressive, yes?  Now to just implement it.  Deciding things is easier than putting it into practice.

Revising.

I discovered a short story I wrote last year and forgot about.  The thing is that the story is incredibly clean except for a few POV issues.  I’m considering tacking on more to the end of it and seeing if I can’t sell it as a short somewhere.  It’s fantasy, with tortured shifter heroes and selfless heroines.

Plotting.

This last weekend we talked about my roster of bad guys for my future project.  It was good discussion, but it makes me wonder about working on genre stuff with people who don’t understand the genre.  Yes, there are a lot of fundamental things that can be discussed no matter the subtext, but some elements just don’t translate.

Writing.

I’ve had a great writing week.  Like, you wouldn’t even begin to believe how great it’s been! There were a few days, Sunday in particular, that I lost to writing on other things.

Project:Formerly Fat Club: Casual Love
Genre: Contemporary Romance
Type: novel
Progress: I can see the end!  Okay, not quite, but I know it’s there!  Honestly, I’m probably two weeks from finishing it at the rate I’ve been going and factoring in the other writing I’ve been doing.  It’s disappointing because I wanted to finish CL before the conference next weekend, but it’s not earth shattering.  I’ll still probably finish it before my workshops get rocking next month, which will be good because they will distract me from writing time.

What I read…

• Eternal Hunter – Cynthia Eden
• A lot of other stuff.  Really, read tons this last week, a lot of it I’m discussing tomorrow.  Right now I can’t remember all the titles I’ve read this week, and it’s late and you’re just going to have to be okay with that.  <3

It’s the weekend!

This weekend is kind of a repeat of the last few:

• write on Casual Love
• get bangs trimmed
• write on Casual Love – must write significant amount
• IF above – work on one of the shorts
• blogs – do something about next week and next month
• write on Casual Love
• if possible, spend Sunday evening reading

Do you see a theme here?

What are you doing this weekend?  Reading anything good?

Organization: File Versions

Today, in my ever onward quest for better organization, I’m talking about versioning your files. I will wholeheartedly admit that I’m more than a little fanatical about this. I blame my former SFX professor. (sound effects, like for a Foley stage)

What is versioning and why should I care?

Have you ever had a document you’re working on and in the midst of writing something, you realize that you completely hate what you just wrote?  You delete it, completely disgusted with yourself and close down for the day.  The next day you come back and think that scene you wrote, the one you deleted, probably wasn’t that bad.  Now why didn’t you save that bit and sleep on deleting it?  Or maybe you’re editing and you trim away a scene you don’t think you need because the information learned is realized in two different places…. Except later you realize that a big emotional moment also happened in that scene… And it’s gone.

When I was in audio engineering class and taking the SFX course, we learned about versioning.  In fact, we versioned after almost every minor alteration to a file.  What would happen was that we would begin the day with the file from the day before.  The very first thing we would do would be to save the file under a new name that either reflected the date or how many generations from the beginning this file was.  The idea was that if I started the day and made changes to the file with the new name, only to realize that I completely blundered and screwed up a lot of tracks, I could delete that file, and start over from the previous day’s version.

I’m a writer. What do I care?

As writers, saving different versions of your zero draft, that thing where you word vomit your story into, doesn’t always make a whole lot of sense.  I know of some people who do version their zero drafts, and that’s fine.  It’s extra backup!  I personally don’t do that.

Versioning is useful for writers when editing.  Think about all of the trimming and adding you do during revisions.  Versioning the file ensures that you never really lose those bits you trim away.  They’re just left behind in yesterdays file version.  If you’re all about tracking how much you add, it’s a quick way to reference words added as well.

I version by the name of the project, the draft and the day.  So my naming convention goes something like this

WIP Name + Draft Number . Day of Edits

In functionality, if I was revising Casual Love and was on the second draft, and was on the sixth day of working, the file name would look something like this:

Casual Love 2.6

I also version for critiques as well.  If you look at my picture you can tell that the fourth draft of Blood Bound was a critique round during which I handed it over to someone else.

Ultimately, the choice to version is up to the person.  I stand by the practicality of it.

Do you have a system of versioning or something similar that helps you keep track of file versions?

The character collage.

In celebration of National Craft Month, I wanted to do some crafting related blogs for writers.  I already showed you how to create a writing space and display your goals as art.  This week I wanted to do something I’ve never done before, but I’ve heard about!  Character collages.

This is going to be a photo heavy blog, so apologies in advance, but the best way to do this is by showing.

I knew when I decided to do this that I wanted to stay away from a piece of poster board with tons of magazine cutouts slapped on it.  I wanted to do something that was a little more artistic and simple, so I set out to gather my materials with that in mind.

Materials.

1. Pictures. I printed out pictures that I thought identified my characters.  First was the concept pictures of the characters themselves, and then a few that touched on either their dreams, family, or things they held dear.
2. Frames. I specifically chose to frame these, wanting to go with a shadow box feel.
3. Stickers. I ventured into the scrapbook section at the local craft store and got a few things that I thought went with my characters or said something about them.
4. Paper. Like I said, I wanted to go with something a little more artistic than just a piece of white poster board, so I substituted fancy scrapbook paper.

Assembly.

Putting together your collage is all up to you.  There is no right or wrong way to do it.  That’s one of the reasons I wanted to do a character collage.  I’m not a great artist and I tend to fudge the instructions on things.  Here are some suggestions though:

• Measure and cut your paper or poster board before you begin.  Lay it in the frame and test how it looks just to make sure!
• When cutting the pictures, don’t just make straight squares.  Round the edges, make designs in the lines, or give it eight sides instead of four.
• Before you glue everything down, really look at where you want things to be placed.
• Don’t over-glue the pictures!

Display.

I have plans to rearrange the photos on my wall and display these two collages over my desk along with my goals, so I don’t have any pictures of them hanging to show off, but I’ll walk you through each of my collages and tell you why I picked the things I did.

Meet Gretchen Flynn, or Flynn as she prefers to be called.  She is the heroine in my horror story I’ll be starting very soon.  I lucked out and found a picture that almost perfectly fit the description I had in my head for her.  In retrospect, the background is a little too busy, but I really liked the blue, vintage feel.  It’s a little girly for a woman who is pretty bad ass.  In Flynn’s free time she plays hockey for a league in Houston.  Before this, her free time was spent being a paranormal investigator.  She’s originally from Louisiana, where her very paranormally aware family still lives.  One of her aunts reads the cards for Flynn, and Flynn almost always gets the Fool card drawn for her.  I selected the pictures and stickers to reflect a lot of this.  There’s the mask for her family and the tarot card as well as the ghosts.  I picked out the cave picture in the right hand side corner because the story I’m writing has to do with caves.

Meet Jonah Scarborough, the skeptic and frenemy of Flynn.  Jonah was an easy guy to select stuff for.  A lifelong boyscout, there were tons of options to chose from when it came to picking out scout like stuff.  The picture I picked out to represent ‘Jonah’ is close enough.  In my mind he’s more tan and has brown eyes, but the face and hair are spot on.  I specifically placed his picture to hide the way I had to cut the picture.  You’ll notice I used the same cave picture from Flynn’s but I cut it differently because of their personalities, they see it differently.  I covered Jonah’s collage with words that I thought Jonah would want attributed to him.  Up on the right hand corner is a picture that symbolizes him and his brother, Connor, who is very important to him.  Jonah is brought into the story because he is a spelunker and they need him to go crawl around in a cave.

Have you made a character collage?  What did you use to create yours?

Organization: Customizing to fit your needs

It’s time for a little bit more organization in our lives!  But this time, it’s all about the options.

This month I’m discussing the need for organization with our novels behind the scenes.  I’m a big fan of the Novel Notebook template provided by Lynn Viehl, which I talked about in week two.  I might have mentioned it before, a few times or ten.  Last week I talked about organizing your Novel Notebook, and this week I want to talk about customizing to fit your project and your needs!

This week is all about options.  I like customizing things, from my WordPress template to my makeup and my Jeep.  I want it to fit me and my method of doing stuff.  Your method will probably be different from mine, and ours will be different from my friends - and that’s okay!

Depending on the project you’re working on, you will need different things.

If you’re writing a project that requires a lot of research and accuracy, you can set up your notebook so that you have a research tab.  Organizing and maintaining your tabs, pages and sub-pages makes it easier to reference material quickly.  Another reason OneNote is a great tool especially for research intense projects is the capacity for copy/paste.  You can capture an entire Wiki article, pictures, links, everything and plop it into a page or a sub-page to keep on hand for reference instead of going to a website.  In the picture you can see an example of my alternative history project in the making.  What isn’t pictured here are the pages I use to organize how I’ve changed and shaped the history and culture of my world.  Having the research on hand to view next to my fabricated history is invaluable!  It prevents me from flipping around too much.

Say you’re writing a fantasy project.  Creating an entire world can be labor intensive and hard to manage.  I don’t have an example of this on hand, but the functionality is still the same as the above project.  Tabs set up to take care of keeping track of places, items, and characters as the story progresses can make a writers life that much easier!

My current project is a contemporary romance.  When I started I had no idea how difficult it would be to manage my characters real lives.  Let me tell you, fantasy projects are so easy!  You don’t really have to worry about their ‘real’ jobs or their ‘normal’ lives, but a contemporary romance has to juggle all of those factors.  So I literally created all of my characters lives; I know their day to day schedules, the floor plans of their homes, what clothes are in their closets and I’ve probably even made up their grocery lists!  Okay, I’m kidding about the grocery list business, but you can see what I have added on top of the Novel Notebook to make this project as useful as possible for my needs.

Overall, the biggest thing I’ve added to the Novel Notebook that Lynn Viehl provided is the World Building section.  I did a series on world building in February, and while I think I’m getting a grasp on it, I know I’m not there yet.  I’m getting better, but I always need to keep tabs on that information.  I’m still devising a fool proof template of sorts for myself, but in my projects that involve any world building, it has its own tab.

Links!

• Lynn Viehl’sNovel Notebook
• Suzan Isik – What is OneNote and why should I use it?

What are some bits of information particular to your project that you would need to keep track of?  Have you added anything new to your Novel Notebook?

DA BWAHA – and 2nd chances!

Quick update for anyone who is getting as much of a kick out of DA BWAHA as I am, there’s a lull in the voting right now because the 2nd chance part of the tournament is getting set up.  If your brackets are bleeding red as much as mine are, it’s a chance to hopefully staunch some of that mess. 

Is it sad I only just realized there are prizes involved for those who make the right picks?  I was voting just because it was fun and there were books up for voting that I’m kinda in love with.  Really, it’s been soooo much fun listening to the trash talk and the pimping out of books and authors.  But there always has to be a spoil sport, ya know?

Aparently some people took offense at some people pushing for one author or book over another.  No names, because that’s just not classy, but I’m sad that such a fun event draws people like that out and people who were having fun got targeted.  I did my own pimping out for books, but not near as much as other people did, and really, who cares what I say?  If you’re going to play the game, realize it’s a game and just playing it is exciting and don’t take stuff so personally!

I feel another manners blog coming on.

That’s not the point of this blog.  The point is to tell you to go make your 2nd Chance picks on the DA BWAHA site and vote (for the Iron Duke)!

Really, this next round is going to be a painful choice for me because I have to pick between a book I love, Iron Duke, and an author I idolize, Nalini Singh since all my other picks got bumped off in the last round of voting.