Self-publishing “1000 Words” – Aenima

When I went to create the book cover for Aenima, one of my “1000 Words” short stories, I had a sketch in mind. I wanted the upper half of a winged lady, with a pair of wings framing her and shaped with cogs.

That didn’t exactly happen.

I did manage to get a picture of cogs that I needed, thanks to my fiance for finding the cog while out on his dad’s farm, and I had the pictures I wanted for the lady. But I ran into issues of developing it into the actual cover. Finally I compromised. The wings are present (though looking like butterfly wings), and I managed to incorporate cogs into the picture without actually having them on the wings. Of course, right after I published the short story on Smashwords and starting writing this post, it hit me that the wings in the story are neither bird nor butterfly wings, but dragonfly wings. *Sigh.* Amazing, how I didn’t catch that, even as both the author and the illustrator.

Of course, once I tried putting the text on the image, I realized that spacing did not want to work well for text placement. And I had a horrible time with the font itself. Thankfully, I was directed to look at dafont.com for potential fonts, and found the lovely “Steamwreck” was commercially usable, and free. Yay! (Since then, I have been directed to a font site that allows people to download 10,000 fonts for $20.00. And they’re commercially usable. Not all are suitable for book cover designing, but still… it’s been helpful.) So I finally took the main image and made it smaller, then reused the background, changed the border color, and added little cogs around the text itself.

Overall, I’m pleased with it. I like the book cover image than the “Lady In Cogs” image by itself.

Aenima on Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/152094

So now, for a quick update:

Since uploading The Dreamkeeper yesterday, it’s had 42 downloads. The other stories still have a few downloads trickling in, though I’m not sure if that’s due to uploading more stories, or to people finding them on thier own. The Carrier has done the best job so far of still being downloaded. Shafted Dreams is having the least success. I will be interested in seeing if they continue to be downloaded once the project is complete, or if downloads will slow down. Since everything’s free, price is not a factor.

I’m considering uploading a couple other short stories I wrote (longer ones) once I complete this project, and actually pricing them to see if it makes a difference, and if those are actually purchased. Plus I’ll have the anthology version, which will cost money, however, all the “1000 Words” short stories will remain free, at least for the time being. That way, if anyone wants to support me, they can, but no one has to.

I’ve just completed another cover for one of the stories I need to write, and I’ve written a sci-fi romance story to add to the project. This means that I have two stories to edit, two stories to write, and four covers to design.

You can find my latest short story, Aenima, at Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/152094