Tag Archives: covers

May 20, 2016 · 2:00 pm

Behind the Scenes – Sword of the Quest

A cover for Melange Books. For this cover, we wanted to match the covers of the previous books, Dragon Sword and Sword of Doom. The font and border placement remained the same, as did the leather textured background. The difference was the scene on the front. We tried a couple cover options before we came to this particular setup. (As a note, if you’re the cover artist working on multiple books in a series, and you have all the art forms for each of those books, make sure you don’t accidentally blend ideas from each form.)

Since there’s a lot going on in this cover, the lighting played an important role in balancing the cover. I made sure to have the main character fully lit, and thus in the spotlight. Next up was the woman, but I put her in slight shadow. The reader’s gaze falls first on the man, then her, then finally on the cloaked shadow in the background. The cloaked figure I shadowed the most. Partially because the figure is supposed to be mysterious, but also so the figure doesn’t attract the initial attention from the main character. Then, once all the pieces were in place, I added the specific lighting from the emerald, that way the whole scene fell together.

For the runes on the altar, I drew them in one color on a separate layer and then tinkered with the “bevel and emboss” special effect until they looked like they were part of the stone.

This is the result:

Behind the Scenes - Sword of the Quest - Book Cover

Stock images from The Dollar Photo Club (Stock site sold to Adobe Stock, individual links no longer work): katana // wolf // woman’s head / man’s arm / man’s legs / man’s torso
Stock images from Dreamstime:
http://www.dreamstime.com/stock-photo-angkor-wat-temple-inside-corridor-walls-cambodia-image26822490 – temple

http://www.dreamstime.com/royalty-free-stock-image-leather-clad-warrior-image265556 – leather tunic

http://www.dreamstime.com/stock-photography-ancient-roman-stone-pedestal-image12983352 – stone pedestal

http://www.dreamstime.com/stock-photo-emerald-isolated-image16275280 – emerald

http://www.dreamstime.com/stock-photo-dangerous-vampire-catacombs-full-skulls-bones-horror-fantasy-image64756682 – cloaked figure

Behind the Scenes – Beyond the Eyes – Cover Remake

This is a cover for Rebekkah Ford. For this cover, we redid a cover I created for her three years ago, back when I was trying to find willing authors to take a chance on me so I could build my portfolio (thank you!).

At the time, we came up with this:

The goal was to create something mysterious, with a bit of a taste of horror for her first YA paranormal. At the time, I took inspiration from the cover of Clockwork Angel, the cover art of which I adore.

However, this was an earlier cover of mine, so the font effects are a tad amateurish (and I hadn’t even justified the original back cover copy… which I later updated once I discovered that trick). Not only that, but the cover felt too much like a horror novel, and wasn’t attracting as many romance readers as it should (since this is definitely a paranormal romance).

So Rebekkah contacted me again a couple months ago to see about updating the covers for this series. She had a few stock images in mind, and after working through a few proofs and font placement, we came up with this remake for the first book:

(See how much better the back cover formatting looks after three more years of experience?)

The woman on the cover clearly resembles the main character, Paige, the shadow in the distance could easily be a sinister dark spirit (or a mysterious immortal), and the eerie forest distinctly fits a prominent setting of the story. I blurred the background to help make the model stand out, then flipped it for the back cover, and darkened the spine to make sure the words were readable. This cover should now attract paranormal romance readers. In addition, the straightforward text should attract a bit of an older audience (this series fits the upper YA/NA categories).

Personally, I like both covers, but having read the book, I suspect the new cover will attract more of the target audience.

You can find Beyond the Eyes on Goodreads.

Stock images from Shutterstock:

http://www.shutterstock.com/pic.mhtml?id=281147264

http://www.shutterstock.com/pic.mhtml?id=107037647

Read more from the author’s point of view:

http://rebekkahford.com/2015/09/25/two-mistakes-i-made-with-my-first-book-cover/

2 Comments

Filed under Book Covers, Client Work, Photo Illustration

Tagged as Beyond the Eyes, Beyond the Eyes trilogies, book covers, cover remakes, covers, doing a remake of a cover, haunting, NA book cover, new book covers, paranormal romance, photographic illustration, Rebekkah Ford, redoing a cover, Stephanie Flint

August 28, 2012 · 2:06 pm

Cover Reveal – At the Bullet’s Tip

I was sure I posted this a week ago. Anyways, don’t worry… haven’t fallen off the face of the Earth. It’s been a busy past few weeks as Isaac gets prepared for grad school. We’ve been stripping furniture (old furniture, from the 1920s…) to stain, and that took up quite a bit of time for about a week. Anyways, I do have a new book cover to show you. 🙂

“At the Bullet’s Tip,” by Erika Lindsen, a romance thriller. 🙂

This was a cross between photomanipulation and digital illustration. Parts of it were drawn in (using Photoshop CS6), while other parts of it were originally photographs that I used the “threshold” tool on to give it that sillohuetted look. 🙂

1000 Words: Name change on Smashwords

So it turns out you can’t have two pen names linked to a single Smashwords account. The result is that I’d either have to create a second account for Stephanie Flint, or change all the covers and copyright info on the previous books. Seeing as how I wanted to keep “SBibb” for the account link, I decided to change the covers.

Overall, it might’ve taken a couple hours. Luckily, most of the covers had layering where I was able to just change my last name with a couple modifications, and Photoshop CS6 (loving the new save function) is helpful with doing some easy adjustments. Afterwards, I adjusted all the front matter and bio info on the stories themselves (again, yay for having everything in nearly one place).

I also added tags to each short story that included “SBibb, Stephanie Bibb, Stephanie Flint” to make it easier to find. Search engine optimization (SEO) is important to having your websites and books and such found, so I also included a note about the name change in the long description. I didn’t put it in the short description since I’d rather reserve that space for info about the story itself.

I also linked the “Where to find this book in print” to the1000 Wordsanthology (print edition) on Amazon. Since I don’t want to change the inner covers of the ebook version on Smashwords, I’m unpublishing it there. Kindle allows me (as far as I understand) to keep the older editions of the book the same, while putting my new name on any new books I publish. Therefore, I decided that will not change.

However, one thing I did try to do was make it easier for people to find my work, whether they look it up under Stephanie Bibb or under Stephanie Flint. I imagine it’ll take a little while for my stuff to show up on search engines under the new name, but this way, it should be linked. Also, when I did the book covers, I was careful to make sure the font didn’t change when I switched out the names. That way the quality of the cover remained the same.

Then I went through and made sure that all the edits were in place, and finally changed my profile name on Smashwords itself. I also uploaded my profile picture, taken by my wonderful husband, Isaac. 🙂

Here’s the response I got from Smashwords about the name change, in case anyone else needs to know it:

You have two options:

1. Open a new account for the new name. I wouldn’t recommend this because the books won’t be linked either with us or with the retailers. It’s also a pain to manage two accounts.

2. Here’s a link to the FAQ’s section on changing the author name:

https://www.smashwords.com/about/supportfaq#Updating

Scroll down a bit until you see the section “I’ve decided to change my Pen Name. How to I change it without de-listing my book at retailers?”

Some additional recommendations: A. You should change your profile to the new name, and then update your front matter for all the books so it reads “Copyright New Name 2012” Originally written and published under the maiden name, Old Name

… this will help our vetting team and our retailers understand why the name on the cover doesn’t match the name in the metadata.

B. Also, update the tags, bio and long description so both names are mentioned. This will help make all the books more discoverable if someone’s searching on the old or new name.

So hopefully this is helpful. Meantime, I’ll see if everything transferred over smoothly. If it did, then maybe the premium distribution will start working again soon. 🙂