You've pulled your hair out, slammed your characters and
plots through the kitchen blender day in night out. They dragged you by your trembling
fingers to the keyboard, up and out of bed at 4AM. You've read, reread, edited,
written, rewritten and corrected them to where you've promised yourself to never
bring it up to your friends and co-workers again. And remade that promise at
least a hundred times after breaking it two hundred times.
This time, finally, The End actually means it.
You're going to upload your doc and click the God button.
All you need is a Book Cover.
Wottsa Matta U?
BEGIN dealing with the Billboard Hawking Your Genius the
instant you can make out the manufacturers name on whichever buzz saw you're
going to put your heroes through, probably the end of your first draft.
"The first draft of anything is shit." Ernest
Hemingway
Except in Book Covers.
Moe slaps Curley again.
You are going to want revisions. Those revisions are going
to cost money. Go ahead. Pull my finger. Look up artists who do book covers and
query them. Do it now so it won't come as a shock later. Sure, you could farm it out through Fiver.
When have you ever gotten Industry Standard quality for 1%
to 2% of Industry Standard price?
I NEED A SHOWER And There's NO
HOT WATER
No graphic designer no matter how many book covers they've
done is going to SEE your characters the way you sweated yourself to sleep for
months or years TRYING to see them IN THE WORLD YOU CREATED for them. Not if
they read your manuscript a dozen times or a hundred times.
Yes, There Really Is
Good News, Virginia
You don't fork over a months wages (or two) for a JPG.
You can at least Borrow
a digital camera no matter how broke you are.
Then you don't spend a cent.
Take your own pics. Do not use public domain images.
Unless I read them wrong, Amazon allows public domain images
only if you were the original copyright owner who released them into the public
domain.
You don't want spam in your inbox.
Amazon doesn't want litigious spam from Dewey, Cheatem, and
Howe LLP clogging theirs.
Free Software
Forget buying Photoshop or any other graphics software. Do not buy any of them.
Get GIMP, It's free.
You download it Free.
Downside? It will crash occasionally. Save often.
Don't leave 8 or 9 windows open and then open a 10th that's already 100
layers deep. I'm not using a dual or quad core CPU or any special graphics card
and considering the sheer amount of data GIMP slaps around on my machine, . . .
it should be fine on yours too.
In over 2 years I've yet to hit the wall. If I can imagine a
photo mod/trick/effect GIMP will do it. I just need to look up how.
Forget the user instruction docs. Go to youtube. Huge user
community. Lots of tutorials. Downside? Stoners, the brain dead, and super ego.
If the narrator can't find his script within the first 30 seconds . . .
Basics first
Learn to open layers, stack, and manage them.
Learn what the stuff in the toolbox does.
Tutorials on Text and Text Effects, including ones you Don't
think you'll use.
But I'd Never Want That Text. It's Fugly.
I'm talking to
writers here. You Should already know.
Art is An
Accumulation of Subtleties
Would you read just 1 Author for inspiration and
instruction?
Recombine different
tools and techniques to taste.
The guy on my covers is acrylics on a 3' by 4' canvas. I painted him. But you're not a painter? Neither am I. It took me forever.
So again, you can at least Borrow a camera and talk someone into modeling for you. GIMP has plenty of filters and lighting effects to blend/match your sister into the overall look.
If you're a writer you already spend an awful lot of time in places and situations that don't exist.
Get busy imagining and experimenting.
If you put it off till you're ready to self pub, you'll wish you hadn't.
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