Tag Archives: book cover design

March 14, 2012 · 3:43 am

Photo Illustration – Volcanic Ash Mock Book Cover

After attempting to create the background for another manip, I discovered it just didn’t want to work. So I stripped out the people from the image, and reworked it. Did some tweaking, added the hooded figure from a different manip that needed to be reworked, then added the book cover elements. Flipped the actual background.

Added an illustrated look to it.

Now I’m much happier with it. 🙂

Fantasy Warrior Photoshoot – Christina

This was a photoshoot I did with Christina. The idea was to have a fantasy warrior/mage character, and we went over to Culp Park when the weather turned unexpectedly nice. I was looking to get “video game action poses,” and it turned out to be really fun. I came back with over a thousand pictures to sort through. Got it down to 100 images, then finally twenty favorites. These are the resulting images. 🙂

Flickr Slideshow: http://www.flickr.com/photos/sbibb/sets/72157629206245630/show/

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Filed under Photo Illustration

Tagged as book cover design, digital imaging, fantasy, fantasy warrior, photo illustration, photography, photomanipulation, portrait, SBibb, Stephanie Bibb, Stephanie Flint

March 11, 2012 · 5:31 pm

Additions to the Blog

If you noticed a bunch of new links appear on the side bar of the blog, that’s because I decided to try posting links that I thought might be helpful. This includes my favorite Author/Agent sites, since I’m interested in writing, as well as book cover design sites, since I’m hoping to go into that as a profession. I’ll also include other various links that I find useful or interesting.

Also, I now have a like button on my blog for those of you interested in facebook. ( http://www.facebook.com/sbibbphoto ) 🙂

Enjoy, and let me know if there’s anything you’d like to see or hear more about.

Self-Publishing 1000 Words – Snow Witch is on Smashwords

I have completed the cover for Snow Witch and finished formatting the short story for Smashwords. (Next up will be a Kindle edition). It is now up on Smashwords. The process felt surprisingly easy, and I only had one issue (had to change it from .docx to .doc), but the solution was easily remedied. I’m currently reading through and getting the hang of sales versus downloads, but hopefully it will work out well. I’m not sure if downloads also includes downloads of the sample.

Since Smashwords currently has a sitewide promotion going on this month for downloading an ebook, I choose to give “Snow Witch” the option to be downloaded for free. I’m hoping to entice people to download and review it, but we’ll see if anything comes of it. I missed the first half of the promotion, though, so it will only be free for three days, until March 10^th. I would be curious to know how many people are interested in it because of the cover, and how many people are interested in the story due to the short description.

I also posted a note about it on my photo illustration Facebook page, made an announcement via Absolute Write’s announcements forum, and posted it here to my WordPress blog. I currently have two sales, one with the Smashwords coupon, and one an actual purchase. I’m not sure if the actual purchase was intentional or not. I’ll be curious to see how it tracks for the next few days (and will probably have to tell myself not to keep checking Smashwords’ dashboard for updates).

Next up is to create the Kindle edition, and then I need to edit and write the next short stories to be published. One down, nine to go.

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Filed under Book Covers, Business Ventures, Photo Illustration, Writing

Tagged as 1000 Words, Absolute Write, author, book cover, book cover design, e-publishing, photographic illustration, SBibb, self publish, self-publishing, short stories, Snow Witch, Stephanie Bibb, Stephanie Flint, writing

March 5, 2012 · 11:36 am

Self-Publishing “1000 Words” Project – A Collection of Short Stories

For my capstone honors college project, I elected to merge both my major and minor together. I’m a photography major with a creative writing minor, and for my photography I have a special interest in book cover design and photomanipulation.

Therefore, I decided to create a project consisting of ten short stories, each approximately 1000 words long, which would each be illustrated with a book cover. The title of the project, 1000 Words, comes from the phrase, “a picture’s worth a thousand words.”

While I will be creating a print, photobook version of all ten stories as the completion point, I realized I needed some sort of motivation to write, edit, and illustrate each individual short story.

Enter self-publishing.

I’ve long had an interest in self-publishing, but I also want to try the traditional route, and intend to start off trying traditional for my novels. Now, with the advent of ebooks, I want to try selling the short stories as a side project. Part of this is because I will be using my own first printing rights for the project, and the other part is to help me get a feel for the process and book cover design in order to aid future clients.

So I decided that I will create an e-version of each short story, and self-publish them as I complete them through Smashwords and Kindle. I’ll start off using Smashwords so that I can learn the formatting, then create a Kindle version afterwards.

I am currently planning to price each one at .99 cents, then once all of them are written, compile them into the final anthology called 1000 Words. I have not yet decided on its price, though I’m considering $2.99 and $3.99 at this point in time.

I honestly don’t expect to make any money off of this, especially since I have little in the way of marketing planned. I do intend to announce on my facebook page when I release a story, but seeing as how I have few followers on the business page, I’m not sure how effective that will be.

Also, I am hoping to offer a promotion of a couple day free downloading period (or give coupons to those who ask) for friends or people who might be interested in reviewing the short stories. I have considered leaving one story free once I get multiple stories uploaded.

In the meantime, my first short story slated to be published (hopefully by the end of this week), is “Snow Witch.” A young witch ventures outside of her town for the first time in hopes of transferring her brother’s illness to a willing creature.

I’m in the process of reviewing the short story (which I posted in AW’s Share Your Work forums) and I’m also currently editing the book cover to make it the best I can. 🙂

Let me know if you have any questions or thoughts. I’m hoping that sharing the process will be helpful to multiple people. 🙂