Just to recap, Part 1 focused on everything that I thought was absolutely essential to be on an author’s website – the kind of stuff readers are going to be looking for and the kind of stuff that will give you the best chance of promoting your books to potential readers.
For this second part, I want to talk briefly about some of the other considerations you need to take into account when you’re building (or buying) your author website. Apologies in advance, because some of this stuff is more technical than the stuff in the previous part, but it’s stuff you can check up on, and if it needs fixing, well, it should be fairly easy to find a web designer who can handle it for you.
Responsive Design
Suppose you’re hanging out with friends in real life, rather than online, and someone mentions a book or an author. It/they sounds/sound interesting, and you figure you’ll find out more. You whip out your phone and look them up. Maybe you look on Amazon or Goodreads, and that’s all good, because you’ll get a good experience.
But suppose you look on the author’s website, because you’re after more info than either of those sites can give you. And when you get to that author’s website, you can’t read it. The whole giant website is squeezed into your phone’s screen. You have to zoom in enormously then swipe back and forth for every line.
What a pain. Unless you’re really determined, you might give up. I certainly have. Maybe you’ll remember to check later at home, or maybe, like me again, you’ll forget. You might have bought that book or become a fan of the author’s for life, but you didn’t because their website doesn’t work properly on a phone and you gave up. Game over.
Increasingly, people are using phones and tablets to access the web. Some people don’t have a desktop or laptop at all anymore, and that trend is only going to increase. Depending on your demographic, most of your readers may already prefer to look at websites on their phones or tablets.
If your website isn’t as good or better on a phone screen, you’re doing yourself and your readers a disservice.
There are two strategies you can take to deal with this. (Big companies like Amazon will often run two or more completely different sites for mobile and desktop, but there’s no need for you to do this).
Mobile Theme
First up, if you’re using WordPress (and probably some other systems) you can install a separate mobile ‘theme’ or plugin that will detect if a mobile device is being used and give a simple, smaller version of your website.
This solution is definitely better than nothing, but it tends to lead to functional and bland websites rather than brilliant ones on phones. Still, it’s a solution you can use right away and it will help.
Responsive Design
The better solution if you’re starting a new website is to use what’s known as ‘responsive design’. This website you’re looking at now (patricksamphire.com) uses responsive design. If you’re looking at it on a laptop or desktop, resize your browser window (by grabbing hold of the bottom right corner and dragging it). You’ll notice that, as you make the web browser smaller or larger, a lot of things change. The header changes. The navigation changes. The layout of the page changes. The size of the images changes. All these changes are designed to make the website work as well as possible for screens of all different sizes.
Here are some screenshots of the homepage on a phone, an iPad and a laptop.
First up, here’s what it looks like from a relatively modern phone (click for larger photo):
Screenshot from Nexus 4 phone.
Next up, here’s a second generation iPad held vertically.
Screenshot from iPad held vertically.
Then the same iPad held horizontally – with more horizontal space there’s room for the navigation to show up.
Screenshot from iPad held horizontally.
Then finally on a laptop:
Screenshot from 13 inch MacBook Pro.
As you can see, no matter what device you’re using to look at the website, you’ll get the same content but a layout and design that’s suited to the way you’re looking at it. Lower down on the page, you’ll notice that the number and size of the columns also changes.
Light and Fast
No matter how small or big your website is, it needs to load quickly for people who visit it. If you make them hang around staring at a blank screen, a lot of them will leave. How quickly? Ideally, you’d want to get your website to load in one second, but that’s not always realistic for a smaller site, so you should aim for two seconds. If your website is taking ten seconds, you’ve got problems.
There are a lot of technical factors that go into making your website fast, and sadly many web designers don’t seem to know what these are or can’t be bothered to deal with them, and it may be hard to tell by just looking at their portfolios whether designers really know what they’re doing in terms of fast and efficient websites or not.
The main things that will slow your website down are:
Too many and too large images, including background or header images
Too many javascript files being loaded (which can come from too many plugins, social media sharing buttons, and bad web development)
A slow web host
How far your visitor is from your web server
Dealing with these one at a time:
Images: make sure that you crop or resize images to the correct size before you upload them, and make sure you optimise them. If you don’t know how to optimise images and you’re using WordPress, install the Smush.it plugin, which will help compress the image.
Javascript: don’t use social media sharing plugins (see Part 1 of this series for details), disable and remove any unnecessary plugins, and make sure your theme is well constructed.
Web host: most of you will be using shared web hosting. To be honest, you’re in a bit of a lottery there, because if you share a server with someone who is using it heavily, the server will be slower. You basically have the choice of moving to a faster (and more expensive) hosting provider or dealing with the one you’ve got. And while you can’t do much about other users overloading your server, you can at least ensure that your own website doesn’t make too many demands on the server. Using caching plugins and maybe even a Content Delivery Network (cdn) will speed things up a lot. This website runs on a shared hosting plan, and it generally manages to be pretty quick. But sometimes, on a shared hosting plan, it’s just going to be slow. You have to decide how much money is worth spending. Whatever you do, though, don’t use a free hosting provider (an exception would be using the wordpress.com or blogspot free blogs).
How far away: Make sure you host your website in the country from which you expect to get most of your visitors. A shorter distance between the web host and the visitor will mean a quicker delivery of the content. A Content Delivery Network will also help overcome issues related to distance from the server by storing copies of your website on different servers around the world.
How Do You Know How Fast Your Website Is?
There are various services available online that will measure the speed of your site and give you an analysis of what is slowing it down. My personal favourite is GTmetrix. It will tell you the page load time, the total size of the page, and a whole bunch of other information about what is slowing down the site.
Your aim should be:
Page load time: around 2 seconds or less. Total page size: ideally less than 500KB, but absolutely never more than 1MB. The version of your website that is delivered to a mobile phone should be smaller than the one going to desktops.
For comparison, I just ran this website homepage through GTmetrix, and these are the results I got (for the full-sized version of the website):
Page load time: 2.27s Total page size: 443KB
So, not as fast as I would ideally like, but as I said, when you’re on shared hosting, you can’t always control how fast the server will respond. When I look closer at where the delay is coming from, it’s down to the speed of the server (and, I’ve noticed, over the last few days, my website hasn’t been responding as fast as normal).
Luckily, a lot of the files that are slowing down my website on first visit (like the stylesheet) will be cached by the browser and subsequent pages will be faster.
Another service you can use to test how long your website takes to load is Pingdom.
If your website is running too slow, ask your web designer or developer to look into it. There’s almost certainly something that can be done to speed it up. That way you’ll get more visitors and they’ll stay longer.
Readable
Okay, suppose that someone has found their way onto your website. It loaded quickly and fitted your phone’s screen nicely.
Now all your visitor has to do is read it, right?
And that’s where problems come in far too often.
Here’s what you must have if your website is going to be readable:
Large text – the text on this website is about as small as you should ever have.
A clean simple font – nothing fancy or curly or difficult to read. Just because a font is readable on your screen doesn’t mean it will be on every computer. Different operating systems and different browsers render fonts differently, and sometimes badly. Don’t just grab a font you like from google fonts or a free fonts site. Choose something widespread, professional, and simple (many of these are free).
Dark text on a light background – definitely not light text on a dark background. Dark backgrounds work on things like photography sites where there are lots of pictures and not much text, but on a site that has any significant amount of text (that is, more than a paragraph or two per page), then it’ll be almost unreadable for many, many visitors, and they won’t strain their eyes to try.
Clear Navigation and Structure
You need some form of navigation if people are going to find their way around your website, but navigation is actually quite difficult to get right. Here are a few guidelines to help you:
The main (top level) navigation should contain six or seven items, tops, including ‘Home’. If you offer more, people’s eyes will skip over the items or they will click something more or less at random.
You need to match the navigation items to what your visitors expect. For example, if you write fiction, your visitors are most likely to be looking for a main navigation item with the text ‘books’ or ‘novels’ or something similar. An item like ‘bibliography’ is less helpful, unless you’re writing for an academic audience. Likewise, if you use the title of your book or series, unless you are really famous, no one will know what you’re talking about. Furthermore, if you bury the link to your books as a subsection under some other heading like ‘about’ or ‘biography’, it won’t lead people to your books easily.
‘Dropdown menus’, where you hover a cursor over a menu to get other items to appear are also a bad idea. People often find them difficult or impossible to use, and they can be a problem on touch screens.
Sometimes people include too many navigation items at the top level because they have heard of the ‘three click rule’ – that you must never make anyone click more than three times to get to any part of your website. Let’s be clear about this. There is no such rule. There never was any evidence to suggest that it mattered. Yes, don’t make people click on things unnecessarily without getting anywhere, but as long as you are being interesting, people will follow you as far as they need to.
The structure of the website, that is, how the pages fit together with each other internally doesn’t have to match the structure of the navigation, but you’ll find it easier if it does.
Okay, folks, that’s it.
Like I said, sorry some parts of this are a bit technical and dense in places. But you should be able at least to check whether your website adapts to different sized screens and whether it loads quickly, and if doesn’t, someone should be able to help you fix that.
If you’ve got any questions, please do feel free to ask them below or on Twitter.
If you’re interested in my web design work (or, for that matter, my ebook design work), please drop over to my other website at 50SecondsNorth.com.
For those of you interested in new books, I’ve been interviewing debut authors over on the Fearless Fifteeners’ blog. Here are the interviews, so check them out!
Kate A. Boorman, author of YA fantasy, Winterkill
From the interview:
Emmeline embodies what, for me, is so interesting about being a young adult. It’s a time that is really complex and rife for dramatic tension because when at that age you are brimming with ideas and energy and passion, but you often lack the agency to act on these things.
The winter described in the book is a heightened version of the winter we experience on the Canadian prairies. And it was certainly inspired by what winter might be like a hundred years ago, with no fossil fuel-created luxuries. Each year, where I live, there is a palpable sense of foreboding as autumn graduates to winter.
Lauren Magaziner, author of funny middle grade fantasy, The Only Thing Worse Than Witches
From the interview:
I love writing scenes with Witchling Two because she’s so animated and fun. I love writing the school scenes because Mrs. Frabbleknacker is so evilly delicious; you never know what she’s going to do next.
I’m afraid of spiders. So much so that I can’t even look at a picture of one. I guess it didn’t really help that I grew up in a wooded area with hundreds of big, fat, hairy spiders. (The biggest one I ever saw was legitimately the size of my head. I named it Aragog. Then I shrieked so loud that they probably heard me in Australia.)
Jen Swann Downey, author of middle grade adventure, The Ninja Librarians: The Accidental Keyhand
From the interview:
I play a huge inadvertent fundraising role for my own beloved local library. Over the years there have been books that were unearthed from behind car seats and under beds months and even a year after they were checked out and promptly misplaced. Once we rented a beach house that we had rented five years previously, and discovered one of our missing library books there! I’m ashamed to say that I still own a copy of Henry Huggins that was checked out decades ago from my childhood library…
Hey folks. This time around, I thought I’d highlight three really good looking books that are being published today.
Just a Drop of Water, by Kerry O’Malley Cerra
Ever since he was little, Jake Green has longed to be a soldier and a hero like his grandpa, who died serving his country. Right now, though, he just wants to outsmart—and outrun—the rival cross country team, the Palmetto Bugs. But then the tragedy of September 11 happens. It’s quickly discovered that one of the hijackers lived nearby, making Jake’s Florida town an FBI hot spot. Two days later, the tragedy becomes even more personal when Jake’s best friend, Sam Madina, is pummeled for being an Arab Muslim by their bully classmate, Bobby.
According to Jake’s personal code of conduct, anyone who beats up your best friend is due for a butt kicking, and so Jake goes after Bobby. But soon after, Sam’s father is detained by the FBI and Jake’s mom doubts the innocence of Sam’s family, forcing Jake to choose between his best friend and his parents. When Jake finds out that Sam’s been keeping secrets, too, he doesn’t know who his allies are anymore. But the final blow comes when his grandpa’s real past is revealed to Jake. Suddenly, everything he ever knew to be true feels like one big lie. In the end, he must decide: either walk away from Sam and the revenge that Bobby has planned, or become the hero he’s always aspired to be.
A powerful story of a girl who is afraid to touch another person’s skin, until the boy auditioning for Hamlet opposite her Ophelia gives her a reason to overcome her fears.
Step on a crack, break your mother’s back. Touch another person’s skin, and Dad’s gone for good.
Caddie can’t stop thinking that if she keeps from touching another person’s skin, her parents might get back together… which is why she wears full-length gloves to school and covers every inch of her skin.
It seems harmless at first, but Caddie’s obsession soon threatens her ambitions as an actress. She desperately wants to play Ophelia in her school’s production of Hamlet. But that would mean touching Peter, who’s auditioning for the title role—and kissing him. Part of Caddie would love nothing more than to kiss Peter—but the other part isn’t sure she’s brave enough to let herself fall.
Perfect for fans of Laurie Halse Anderson, this debut novel from Rachel M. Wilson is a moving story of a talented girl who’s fighting an increasingly severe anxiety disorder, and the friends and family who stand by her.
This one is already out in the UK, but today is the US publication day.
Just like any other morning, Skylar Rousseau is late for school, but when she is greeted by a blanket of silent stares upon entering Blackfin High, she discovers that the whole town thought she fell from the pier and drowned on her sixteenth birthday three months earlier. However, Sky remembers the last three months living her life as normal, and since she is a full, living breathing human being, she has no idea whose body is buried underneath her tombstone. Everyone seems reluctant to help except her steadfast friend and crush, Sean … and a secretive man who draws her to a mysterious circus in the woods.
Sky must wade through impossibilities and lies to discover the truth about what happened to her, which proves to be a bit difficult when someone is following her every move with the intent to harm her. And Sky’s only hope of finding the answers she seeks may have already been turned to ashes.
So, I’ve been buried deep in revisions of SECRETS OF THE DRAGON TOMB these last three weeks or so, hiding in the corner of a cafe for four or five hours a day whacking away about it.
While I was busy working a few very cool things showed up.
First up, Goodreads, Amazon, Barnes and Noble and the rest are now all listing the publication day for SECRETS OF THE DRAGON TOMB as August 18, 2015. I haven’t heard anything official, but for now, I’m going to assume this is right.
Second up, SECRETS… is now actually available for pre-order from Book Depository, Books-a-Million, various international Amazons, including Amazon UK (although oddly not Amazon USA, which is peculiar, because right now it’s only scheduled for North American publication), and it’s listed on Indiebound, although whether you pre-order it probably depends on your local indie store.
There’s no cover or book description up on any of those sites yet, but you can preorder anyway! (Here’s some info about the book right here on this lovely website, just for you.)
Well, good morning everyone! (Or, you know, good some other time of day. Whatever.)
Today I’m really excited, because it’s the day that Stephanie Burgis’s Courting Magic is published. This is the fourth book in the Kat, Incorrigible series, which started with Kat, Incorrigible (titled A Most Improper Magick in the U.K.)
Courting Magic takes place five years after the last book, with our heroine, Kat, just about to enter Regency society. But Kat is not just any young lady, she is a magical Guardian and a witch, and she’s been given a mission to uncover an illusionist who is infiltrating parties to steal from the guests.
Courting Magic is a novella, so it’s about half the length of the Kat novels, but it’s still got everything you’d expect from a Kat novel: adventure, romance, magic, and one of the best heroines you’ll read.
This is the blurb:
In Kat Stephenson’s Regency England, magic is even more shocking than a stolen kiss. But now that she’s eighteen, it’s time for wild and magical Kat to be introduced to high society by her older sisters, whether she likes it or not…and to finally have a romance of her own!
Of course, her true love is hopelessly ineligible. But when has Kat ever let Society’s opinion stop her from making up her own mind? Once she realizes she’s found her perfect match, she’s not going to let anything or anyone stand in their way – even if she does have to solve a magical mystery, matchmake for an old friend, and break a few rules along the way!
“Courting Magic” is a sparkling 34,000-word Regency novella set in the world of Kat, Incorrigible.
Courting Magic is available as an ebook pretty much anywhere you can buy ebooks.
Yes, I’ve just received my editorial letter for my first novel, Secrets of the Dragon Tomb. For those of you who don’t know about such things, you get an editorial letter after you’ve sold your book, as part of the publishing process. It’s where the editor goes through in detail what you need to change to make the book publishable. Pretty much every book gets one of these. Maybe there are a few bestsellers who don’t, but everyone else does. The edits can be minor or incredibly major (and if you self-publish, you’ll need to hire an editor to provide the feedback for you, because you always need it).
Anyway, this is basically the feedback I got in my editorial letter:
Or something like that… :)
As my book is a middle grade book, a couple of the things I’m having to fix are making the protagonist younger (he’ll be 12, instead of 14 as he originally was) and making the book shorter (it was 100,000 words in the first draft, 75,000 words in the draft that my editor bought, and will now need to be closer to 60-65,000 words.
I’m also going to have a map at the front of the book. I love maps at the front of books! In fact, it’s not really a book if it doesn’t have a map, right???
Luckily for everyone, a proper artist is going to draw the map, but I had to provide a rough version for them to work with.
So, as a kind of peek, here’s the map I sent to my editor.
Mars in 1816. Image based on Google Mars images.
I don’t intend to explain what any of the things are on the map. You’ll have to wait for the book. I did decide to alter the geography of Mars a bit, because I have the power.
Well, it turns out that the queen visited the set of Game of Thrones yesterday, and, in a move that was the greatest disappointment to the internet since Firefly was cancelled, entirely failed to sit on the Iron Throne.
Or so we were told.
I know better. After the cameras and the journalist had gone, and the lights were turned out, she returned to take her rightful seat and stare down at the remains of the rivals who had defied her. How do I know? I sneaked in and took a photo. So, here is incontrovertible evidence:
Queen Elizabeth II takes the Iron Throne of Westeros.
So, I have been attempting to upgrade my Photoshop skills. In the old days, that simply involved undoing the top of the skull, removing the Photoshop-cortex and replacing it with a newer model, but you know the way that brains are made these days, what with being impossible to upgrade components yourself.
Anyway, I’ve been reduced to actually having to practice to get better. I know, right?
Most of my Photoshop work I do when I’m designing book covers or websites, but that doesn’t always give you the opportunity to practice the things you’re not good at, so I’m starting to do some ‘photomanipulations’ to practice my techniques.
I’m putting them up on deviantART (along with a few of my covers which I’m particularly fond of), which is an awesome place to see other people’s work and to get stock you can use for making images.
In other news, Steph and I have been together 13 years today, which, wow, is a long time, right? Neither of us could have imagined when we met at Clarion West back in 2001 that we’d end up here with our two lovely, amazing little boys and careers as professional writers. It’s been a fantastic 13 years. Thank you, sweetheart.
Yesterday, Stephanie Burgis revealed the cover for her forthcoming novella, Courting Magic, part of her Kat, Incorrigible series of books (the series is called The Unladylike Adventures of Kat Stephenson in the UK).
As I designed the cover, I thought I’d give an overview of how I went about doing it. If you’re not interested in this kind of thing, feel free to skip. I won’t be offended. I promise. (Well, not much. Not completely. Well, I’ll forgive you if you add the novella on Goodreads. Well…)
This isn’t going to be a full tutorial on how to create the cover, but hopefully it will give you an idea of what steps you would need take to design a cover like this.
The original stock photo that we started with is below. (You can click on any of the images in this post to see them at a much larger size.)
The original stock photo
(I’ve put a watermark on the original image because it’s not a free stock image. Hopefully you can still see what we’re working with.)
Whenever you’re embarking on a project like this, where you’re going to do a fair amount to an image, it’s worth spending a little time figuring out exactly what you’re need to do before you start.
So, looking at the original photo:
The background is boring. We need something more interesting.
The dress is nice, but it doesn’t “pop” out particularly, and we want the image to have impact.
The model has blonde hair. Although the books never describe the colour of the heroine’s hair, all of the previous book covers have had her with dark hair, so we’re going to keep that.
This is a nice period photo, but the book is a fantasy adventure (with romance and humour) and we need some of the fantasy element in there too.
Okay, so that’s the main things we’re going to need to deal with.
Extracting the figure
The first job is arguably the hardest: to remove the model from the background. I’m working in Photoshop, and the techniques I’m talking about here are all based on Photoshop. Other tools will have similar options, but IMO Photoshop is better and more powerful than most other tools you’re likely to have access to.
A quick aside: Whenever you’re editing an image in Photoshop, you should make all changes on masks and new layers. You should never edit the original image directly, because changes made to the original image can’t be reversed, whereas work done on layers and masks is easy to change or dump if you make a mistake.
So, selecting the figure: Making a selection of the model’s dress and the couch she’s on is easy. You can use the pen tool (most accurate, but more difficult and slower), the magic wand tool, the quick selection tool or even the magnetic lasso tool (not great in this case, but sometimes works). The hair is tougher. You should make a rough selection using one of the techniques above and then use the ‘refine edge’ tool. If you’re having trouble selecting the hair, this is a great tutorial:
When you’re done, create a clipping mask using the selection.
The Wallpaper
The next stage, after selecting the model, was to add a new background. We played around with a variety of backgrounds, but in the end went with something nice and simple that would allow the figure to be the focus of the picture without creating a distraction: some fairly muted wallpaper.
I found this pattern on deviantart, courtesy of user ‘pixelsandicecream’ and inverted it (so it’s a light pattern on a dark background). I found a stock photo of some old paper to use as a texture, put the pattern over the top (with a little bit of blur), then used adjustment layers to change the colour to what I wanted. Finally, I used a large, soft, white brush to create the light halo around the model’s head on the wallpaper. This draws attention to the model, while stopping the wallpaper being too ‘flat’.
The Hair
The hair needed darkening. To get that rich brown with a slightly reddish glow, which is what I was after for the hair, I simply chose a very dark brown and (on a new layer), I painted roughly over her hair (this doesn’t need to be enormously exact, but you shouldn’t stray too much onto the skin. I changed the blending mode to ‘soft light’ and clipped the layer to the extracted model (so that it didn’t spill over onto the background).
This left the back of her hair, where it’s shadowed, looking way too dark. On another layer, beneath the one I’d just painted, I chose a blonde colour from her original hair and painted roughly over the dark part of her hair. Again I set the blend mode to soft light and clipped to the extracted model.
At this stage, I wasn’t 100% happy with the outline of the hair and the dress. I thought they lacked depth (as I said, extracting hair, particularly against a background like the one on this original photo, where it blends into the background, is tough). So, I made copies of the extracted model, with the hair adjustments I’d made, merged the copies into a single layer. Then I blurred this copied layer using a Gaussian blur, and with a soft brush on a layer mask, painted away some of the edges where I didn’t want the blur to happen (the couch) and part of the hair, so it wasn’t over the top. Although this is a subtle effect, it adds volume to the hair and makes it more three dimensional. It also improves the quality of the edges of the hair and the dress.
This is where we’ve got to now:
This is starting to look pretty good, but we still want it to pop more so that it has more impact when someone is scrolling through Smashwords or Amazon, for example. Notice also that I’ve left a pretty big space at the top with very little detail. You want plenty of space for your book title. It’s kind of hard to make the book title look awesome if you’re doing it over the main part of your image, so planning to leave a big space for it is a great idea.
The Dress
The dress was pretty easy. I used a hue / saturation adjustment layer and simply cycled through the hues until I found a colour I liked for the dress, then adjusted the saturation and lightness until I got exactly what I wanted. (If you’re interested, the settings I used are: hue: -90; saturation: +41; lightness: +7. But you can vary these to get pretty much any colour you want for the dress.) I clipped the adjustment layer to the extracted model (because you don’t want it to affect the colour of the wallpaper) and then created a layer mask and painted on it with a soft brush over the parts that I don’t want to change colour: the couch, the face, chest, shoulders and hair, the arms, and the gloves.
Magical Element
Courting Magic is a fantasy novella, and we need to show that. The heroine, Kat, is a ‘Guardian’ with impressive magical powers. But it’s not the kind of novel where people are being blasted by lightning bolts, and magic is heavily frowned upon in good society.
We decided to go for an effect of magic leaking out from beneath her hands, where she’s pressing them against her dress, and then floating up and off. (The magical ‘blobs’ floating from her are a motif in a couple of the book covers, and I wanted to follow that.)
There were two parts to building this up. Firstly, the magic coming from under the hands. This was built up with multiple layers, using soft brushes and blurring. I used a radial blur to give the subtle effect of light leaking in an outward direction.
The second part is the ‘blobs’ of magic drifting out and up. This was simply done with a soft, round brush, placing each blob individually. By varying the size, opacity, and colour of each blob, I quickly built up the effect.
I could have painted it all in one go, if I’d wanted to, by going into ‘Brush Presets’ and adjusting the Shape Dynamics, Scattering, Color Dynamics and Transfer, but I wanted more manual control than that would offer. Still, if you’re in a rush and the details of the effects aren’t quite so important, this is a good way to do it (e.g., if you were painting stars in a sky).
Minor Touch-ups
We are pretty much there, now, with the image. It stands out really nicely from the page, and I think it will grab attention if someone is browsing. But there are a couple of really minor things I wanted to improve. You might not even notice they’ve been done, but they’re worth it anyway, because they don’t take much time.
Skin Blemishes
I went through with the healing brush tool (on a new layer) and removed a few of the distracting skin blemishes. This is something you have to be a little careful with, because if you do too much, the skin starts to look unreal. So you don’t want to remove everything. For example, I didn’t take out the moles or the skin creases, but I did remove a few other minor blemishes. This actually helps with the quality when the image size is reduced.
Eyes
I wanted the eyes to be a little more of a focus in the face. I just used the sharpen tool (on a new layer, of course) with a soft brush and painted over the eyes until they became clearer and sharper, then I reduced the opacity to about 70%, to ensure the effect wasn’t over-done.
Skin Colour
The skin was looking a bit washed out now. It didn’t in the original, but with the darker hair and the vibrant dress, the skin doesn’t quite look so great anymore. I used a curves adjustment layer to add a very small amount of red and to reduce the green and blue minutely. I ensured this only adjusted the skin by using a layer mask.
The image is now finished, and all that’s left is to add the text to it.
Text
Courting Magic is an ebook, and that means that, primarily, it needs to work at very small size, so that when readers are tootling through Amazon (or whatever) looking at books, the cover is still readable.
There are three pieces of text that need to go on the cover: the title (Courting Magic); the sub-title (A Kat, Incorrigible Novella); and the author’s name (Stephanie Burgis).
The three novels in the series have a common style of text for the title. I wanted to echo that, but the fonts used on the novels are too thin and light to be easily readable at small size, so I chose similar fonts that were heavier and easier to read.
The title is the most important bit of text (this isn’t true for ‘name’ authors like Nora Roberts or JK Rowling or Stephen King, but it is for the rest of us), so I put it in that nice clear space at the top and made it pretty big. The subtitle is the least important, so it’s pretty small by comparison. The author name I put on a fairly blank part of the dress at the bottom. This helps balance the cover while framing the important centre of the picture.
I’ve used drop shadows on all the text. This makes it look smoother and makes it stand out more. The author name has a small bevelling (don’t do this at home, folks; bevelling can make text really, really horrible) and an incredibly faint outer glow which darkens the area around the author’s name, to help it show up more.
And that’s it. The cover for Courting Magic.
If you’re making a cover like this, you’ll find you make plenty of wrong decisions and mistakes, but that’s okay. If you do all your work with layers and masks, you’ll find it pretty easy to fix or change. Sometimes you just need to experiment to figure out what is going to work.
This is actually a fairly simple cover. There’s nothing here that is particularly difficult if you know what you’re doing with Photoshop, with the exception of extracting the model’s hair from the background.
Here’s a larger version of the cover for you to look at to see if you can spot more of the details! Enjoy, and don’t forget, the novella will be out in mid-August. You can add it on goodreads here.
Thoughts? Comments? Questions? Feel free to leave them below, or send me a message through my contact form. If you’re interested in my cover or web design services, you can find out more about them on my 50 Seconds North website.
Well, who’d of thought. It’s turned hot. Really, really hot for Wales. (“Wales: not always raining…”) I suppose the correct response to this would be to dig out some shorts from somewhere, grab a cool yet awesome hat, and head out to enjoy it. Instead, I’ve drawn the curtains. Well, we’re not really built for this kind of weather over here.
Anyway, I’ve been playing about with the openings of two possible books for the last couple of weeks, and today I really nailed one, so I’m going to pursue this idea for a while. Luckily, both of these books are planned as chapter books, at around 10k words, so I should be able to get both done if I can find good openings for both.
In other news, Steph has revealed the cover to her forthcoming novella in the Kat, Incorrigible series, Courting Magic, set about five years after the previous Kat book. You can see the cover reveal over at the YA Book Nerd blog. I designed the cover, and I’m pretty pleased with the way it turned out.
I’ll do a blog entry in the next few days talking about the idea for the cover and what I did to make it, for those who are interested in such things.
That’s all for now. The sunshine is getting too close, and I must hide…
