Hot-Cha: Covers for your Romance Novels

I may be the last one to hear about this site, or not. If you write romance, though, or sexy hard-boiled, and you self-publish, you can get intriguing covers from this guy Jimmy Thomas, a handsome, well-built model who runs his own romance cover business. He's having a sale this week. Can you imagine? The sale ends today, though. Sadly, I don't get anything out of promoting his stuff other than the satisfaction of staring at pictures of a handsome, well-built model.

I bought one of Mr. Thomas's pictures to use as a cover for my perennial chestnut, THE BODICE RIP'T.  I'm all set now to self-publish the thing. All I have to do is finish writing it.

Here are some other pictures from Mr. Thomas's website. You'll notice that the examples I put up all have watermarks. To buy them for yourself, sans watermark, go to the site: www.romancenovelcovers.com

I wouldn't call this one "Regency" so much. I'm sure that people in the Regency period wore way more underwear than this. Pink dresses are pretty, though.

And here's some plain beefcake. Don't know what's up with the handcuffs. You can make that story up yourself.

And lest we forget we're crime writers, here's a hardboiled detective cover. There are plenty of others, with and without guns.

Check out the site for many more thrills, some of which are a bit too spicy for a family blog. Just remember, if you select one of these pictures for a cover for your book, be sure that the fonts you use for your title and author name are high-contrast and plenty big enough to read. Not all of us can see as well as we used to.

© 2014 Kate Gallison

Fooling Around with Covers

New Cover

The upside of self-publishing is that one has complete creative control over the product. If one doesn't hire an editor or a proofreader, or engage a professional artist to design the cover, the product is all one's own. This has its advantages and disadvantages, as my old history teacher, Mrs. Wilcox, used to say. The downside is that one runs the risk of standing revealed in public as a complete horse's ass.

I flatter myself that my copy is pretty clean. Over the years I worked with one of the best copy editors in the business, now gone to the big publishing house in the sky. She taught me much. As for the plotting, well, I do the best I can, and I won't take advice from anybody anyway so it might as well go out the way it is. Hey, I'm an entertaining writer. But, the covers—!

Take MONKEYSTORM. (Please.) I designed what I thought was a killer cover for that book, replete with a picture of a raging monkey, although there were no actual monkeys in it, but only virtual monkeys appearing in a videogame. Harold liked the cover with its fierce monkey face; he said it would grab people's attention; I had to agree. But at a recent conference another writer took a gander at it and asked, "Is it horror?" Well, no, it's mostly supposed to be funny, though it's full of grisly murders and more or less pitched to a YA audience. Who haven't discovered it yet. Truth be told, I haven't sold very many copies to anybody at all.

Old Cover

Maybe the problem is the cover.

I'm taking another shot at that now. Behold the new cover (above). If that doesn't persuade anybody to buy it, my fall-back cover will have two thinly clad teenagers making out in a graveyard. I understand that this sort of thing is a big sales booster. FIFTY SHADES OF GRAY had only a nice silk cravat on the cover, as I recall, but they say the hot stuff was all on the inside.

What do you think of the new cover? Of book covers generally? Please advise.

Kate Gallison

Book Covers: What Sells Books?

(New cover)

(New cover)

A big chunk of my backlist is up on Amazon Kindle. Being the penny-pinching, nickel-nursing miser that I am, I designed the covers for the first two books in the Nick Magaracz series personally, rather than have it professionally done. On reflection, they're probably sort of lame. The books are just lying there. I don't think I've sold ten copies. And yet, the books are very entertaining! Honest, guys! The critics liked them!

As you probably know, when the rights for a writer's hard-cover or paperback book revert to the writer, the rights to the nice cover the publisher had their artists design for the book do not revert. The writer must make or hire another cover for the e-book. And there's a lot to think about, when you do this. You know how it is with covers. They should be thematically related to what is written in the book, attention-getting, and attractive. Legible is also good.

Do a search online for good book covers and the internet will show you artistic covers from the golden age of publishing. THE GODFATHER. THE GREAT GATSBY. Stuff like that.

I like Hank Phillipi Ryan's cover for THE OTHER WOMAN. Red, white, and gray are perfect colors for a political thriller, and the bridge and the woman in the red coat have to do with what the book is actually about.

Inspired by this, I got busy and made new covers for UNBALANCED ACCOUNTS and THE DEATH TAPE, the first two books about soft-boiled Trenton detective Nick Magaracz. Do you like them? Would they get you to buy the book? I think I like them. They're kind of arty. Maybe a little grim, but we aren't dealing with cozies here. The pictures are real pictures of Trenton. I tell you what, though, if I thought it would sell books I'd put LOL cats on the cover.

Kate Gallison

Still More about Book Covers

Barry Eisler was sorely aggrieved this week by the cover his French publisher put on one of his books. Most of us have thoughts about our covers. Few of us utter them, for fear of annoying our publishers, who believe they know best. For most of us, no cover can be as attractive as the book inside, any more than a baby bunting can be as attractive as the baby.

Still, there are good covers and bad covers. My own feeling is that a good book cover is like a good poster.

First of all it should be clearly legible, if nothing else. Believe it or not, this is not true of all posters or book covers. The cover of Barry Eisler's book is at least clearly legible. His French fans will pick it up even though the color is yucky and the artwork conveys no sense of excitement, because his name is on it in large print.

Some wildly successful posters, like this one for a Cream concert at the Fillmore East, cannot be read and understood unless you are stoned out of your gourd. But, whaddya want, that was the sixties.

Secondly, after legibility, posters and book covers should convey a sense of what is on offer. Barry Eisler's book cover fails in this respect, although some say that the French like their book covers deadly dull. The French are said to be an excitable race, after all; it may be that the sight of a garage door and a couple of security cameras on the cover of a book can drive a Frenchman half-mad with anticipation.

Drama is good, if the book is meant to be dramatic. Lovers kissing, killers murdering, dead bodies lying there like a lox, noble cowboys preparing to face the challenges of the West; just as a poster should entice you to go see the show, a book cover should entice you to pick up the book.

We like to think that a poster or a cover would also be reasonably truthful in its enticements. This lurid cover was probably not what Elizabeth Barrett Browning had in mind when she penned her Sonnets from the Portuguese, but, hey,  somebody at Random House liked it.

Third, a good poster (and by extension a good book cover) should be visually simple. Or so my high school art teacher, Mrs. Bockius, used to say. Rest her soul, she didn't live to experience posters from the Fillmore East. I can't imagine what she would have made of them.



I could do a whole other post on spines. The spine of a book might be all that most people ever see of it. What do you go for, when you reach for a book's spine?

Kate Gallison

Book Covers: Legibility for Low Vision Readers

For those of you keen-eyed young folks who may find yourself designing covers for large print books for weak-eyed old folks, an excellent resource is the site maintained by Lighthouse International, an organization dedicated to fighting vision loss through prevention, treatment and empowerment. Readable book covers are part of the empowerment that the Lighthouse fosters. The Lighthouse's site explains the principles of accessible type design -- not only what looks good, but what a low-vision person, the sort who reads large-print books, might actually be able to see, even to read.

The Lighthouse offers ten rules for making text legible:

1. Text should be printed with the highest possible contrast. (Black and white is recommended, but colors can be effectively contrasted; see the Lighthouse's instructions for effective color contrast.
2. Type color is important for achieving contrast.
3. Point size: Type should be large.
4. Leading, or spacing between lines of text, should be at least 25 to 30 percent of the point size.
5. Avoid complicated, decorative or cursive fonts. Condensed fonts are less effective.
6. A roman typeface, using upper and lower cases, is more readable than italics, oblique or condensed.
7. Text with close letter spacing often presents difficulties for readers who are partially sighted.
8. Extra-wide binding margins are especially helpful in bound material because it makes it easier to hold the volume flat.
9. Paper with a glossy finish can lessen legibility because many people who are older or who have partial sight also have problems with glare.
10. distinctive colors, sizes and formats on the covers can make it easier to find a book or other document that is buried among similar publications.

If you think about it, these rules make perfect sense, the more so if you're over forty and have begun to notice vision changes. The book cover above was the cover that the large-print book publisher put on Irene Fleming's first book, The Edge of Ruin. The lady's face is sort of pretty but the text is nearly illegible.  I can't imagine anyone with low vision pulling this off the shelf. It's mighty hard for them to see.

Kate Gallison (Irene Fleming)

The Covers

Publishers get to choose, not writers. Sometimes we are happy, sometimes not. Except for folks like James Patterson and Mary Higgins Clark, authors have little, if anything to say about book cover design.

I was thrilled when saw the original cover for City of Silver. I had dreamed what it might be many times. During the long years of looking for an agent for the book and then waiting while it worked its way through the publication process, I imagined what the published book would look like. I had the cover of a favorite history used in my research in my mind's eye. The final design for the novel surpassed all my expectations. It was totally beautiful to me, perhaps because it was my first novel. But it really is a lovely physical specimen of a book. (By the way, its interior is also a knockout. The front pages and the chapter beginnings are all designed to look like a seventeenth century book. What a gorgeous touch!)

When Felony and Mayhem Press acquired the paperback rights, they thought the original cover too staid for what they considered a lively story. They decided to replace it with a cover they thought did the story justice. When I first saw the new design, it was so different from its predecessor, I was nonplussed. But everyone I asked liked it a lot. This week I announced that the paperback will launch on April 16. I presented the new cover and asked readers to weigh in on their reactions. Only one person said she preferred the original. Others liked both. Marjorie Weiss, a dear friend who is also an accomplished and successful artist, offered this opinion, "Loved the cover of the hardcover, but the paperback is equally beautiful and alluring."

This issue is not confined to fiction. My nonfiction went through similar choices. Never Work for a Jerk started with a jackass in a business suit, a splendid choice in my estimation. But the paperback publisher thought it, guess what, staid. They came up with something much more lively. The foreign rights publishers had their own ideas. I just LOVE the elegant Japanese version.

Only once did I try to influence what a book looked like. Both my agent and I tried our very best to put the kibosh on the cover for my latest nonfiction book: Monster Boss. Except for the fake tear, it looks to me like the cover of procedures manual on water heater repair.

Do you think a book's cover influences sales? Does cover design make a difference in what you buy?

Annamaria Alfieri