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WIG&TSSIP: Mystery and Curiosity

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The Ditchwalk Book Club is reading and discussing Rust Hills’ seminal work, Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular. Announcement here. Overview here. Tag here.

Mystery is the first of three types of suspense that Hills analyzes, and I think it’s fair to say he’s dismissive of mystery as a technique. Despite my own life-long enjoyment of mysteries as a genre, I don’t disagree with his reasoning:

Stories where mystery is deliberately the method, and curiosity about the ending is the whole desired effect, are usually trick stories with wow endings.

Even as you may be bristling at Hills’ highbrow perspective, you probably know exactly what he’s talking about. Mystery can become an all-consuming, story-obliterating objective. As Hills himself notes, everyone has read a book in which the only reason for turning the page sprang from a singular desire — curiosity — to find out the answer to a mystery. Works in which mystery is the “whole desired effect” cannot help be feel insubstantial, if not insincere.

Yet: like sex, mystery does attract attention in fiction. It’s often meaningless attention, resolved by some equally meaningless bit of cleverness, but it works.

To see the raw effect of mystery and curiosity, think about any magazine headline with the word ‘secret’ on it. For a certain percentage of the human species that’s all that’s needed to invoke curiosity, prompting the reader to investigate further. It’s simplistic, even idiotic, but it works.  [ Read more ]

The TYOTE POD cover

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Having had the smarts to avail myself of the experience, insight, technical skill and patience of designer Joleene Naylor, I now have a cover for the print-on-demand (POD) version of my short story collection, The Year of the Elm. I’m not only satisfied with the result, I’m thankful I didn’t have to produce it on my own. Whatever time it might have taken to do it myself, and however much I might have learned along the way, I wouldn’t have been able to replicate the give-and-take that helped us arrive at the solution you see here.

TYOTE Wraparound Cover

All of the issues I wanted to deal with or resolve have been dealt with or resolved. The look of the POD cover is an evolution of the original e-book cover, but it also speaks more directly (albeit suggestively) to the contents of the stories. I can’t help but feel that it’s an improvement.

Total cost for all of the advice, artistic input, technical wizardry and plain old common sense that Joleene provided: $50.  [ Read more ]

Cover Design Week Conclusion

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This post concludes the extended two-week run of Cover Design Week. To see the previous posts, click the CDW tag below.

If you’re thinking about hiring a cover designer the critical first step is thoroughly considering your needs, abilities and tolerances. Because of the work I’ve put in I now know why I’m looking for help with the TYOTE redesign, and what it is I want to come away with when I have someone help me. This in turn helps me define the qualities I’m looking for in a designer, apart from any budgetary limitations.

As to who I’ll hire I don’t know yet. I received a number of helpful responses in reply to my request for recommendations, and I encourage you to ask for recs from people you know or writers whose covers you like. You may not get a response from everyone, but if you’re polite and patient I’m confident you’ll end up with designers worth considering.

Having previously noted that cost is not a useful metric for determining quality or effectiveness in a book cover, and that nobody really knows how a particular cover design will impact sales, the objective I’m now aiming for is a cover I like. Because every independent writer is also their own marketing department and sales force, I think it’s important to have confidence in the first impression my book will be making.

The obvious problem is that not only do some writers have no idea how to design their own book cover, they may not (or should not) trust their own eye when looking at the work of others. If you think you’re in that boat, ask a few friends or peers for feedback on designs you’re considering. (Do NOT put someone else between you and the person designing your cover. You will complicate the process, diminish the effectiveness of the collaboration, and learn little or nothing that will help you the next time.)

Finally, I think there’s an obvious point that needs to be made about all of this. No matter how much time and money you have, no matter how talented you (and your designer, if you hire one) are, there are diminishing returns to agonizing about your cover. And that point arrives fairly quickly.

While we’ve all seen covers we found horrendous, the truth is that most covers are acceptable. Your goal, then, should not be designing the perfect cover, but avoiding the unadulterated abomination.

— Mark Barrett

Contemplating the TYOTE Cover (Re)Design

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This post is part of Cover Design Week. To see other posts click the CDW tag below.

Here is a large version of the cover of my short story collection, The Year of the Elm (TYOTE):

You can see a smaller version in the right-hand column on this page, and on the Smashwords page where the collection is currently being sold. [Book removed 01/03/17.]

One of the few practical things I knew when I set about designing the cover was that the small image would be more important than the large image. The reason was that the cover would almost always be shown as a thumbnail to interested readers, rendering subtleties all but indistinguishable.

For that reason, along with aesthetic reasons I’ll get to momentarily, I decided to make the title of the work and my name clearly visible at almost any size, and to make the composition simple enough that it wouldn’t be corrupted by a reduction in size. Whatever you think about the design, I feel confident I achieved this practical goal. I did have to resign myself to the fact that the subtitle would not be visible at reduced size, but I felt that was an acceptable loss. Whether this calls into question the inclusion of a subtitle I’m still not sure.  [ Read more ]

Cover Design Decision Criteria

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This post is part of Cover Design Week. To see other posts click the CDW tag below.

In an earlier post I talked about how the value of hiring a cover designer is directly related to the potential time savings. For me the prospect of hiring a cover designer will save me time in a variety of ways, including some that are unconventional, or at least idiosyncratic.

I have a fair amount of technical knowledge. I’m reasonably comfortable with computers, and if I don’t have specific familiarity with a given application I can usually get it to do what I need in fairly short order. In putting together the e-book cover for my short story collection, The Year of the Elm (TYOTE), I used an open-source application called GIMP, which is a free and fairly powerful image editor.

GIMP is not, however, easy to embrace. Even armed with a helpful book about the program I found myself bashing my head on my desk when trying to do simple things, including changing ColorA to ColorB. Like many graphics programs, GIMP uses a dizzying mix of image-editing terminology and application-specific geek terminology to describe various functions and aspects of the interface. If you don’t know which term means what, doing even simple things can become a nightmare.

On the art/design side of the cover-design equation, I’m not an artist, but I have a fairly good eye, and I understand basic composition. Whatever you may think of the current TYOTE cover design, it’s pretty much what I was aiming for from concept to execution. Not only do I ‘know it when I see it’ (some people don’t), but I am also able to imagine what I want in advance or work toward it in the image-editing process. I may need to try a few things and discard them, but over time I’ll be able to focus my efforts and reach an acceptable result. What I cannot do is draw very well, but as image libraries continue to grow in size that skill is becoming less and less critical.  [ Read more ]

Joe Konrath on Cover Design Costs (and more)

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This post is part of Cover Design Week. To see other posts click the CDW tag below.

Over at his blog, A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing, Joe Konrath puts an axe to industry-determined royalties and costs, including the cost of designing a book cover. It’s a must-read for any independent author trying to make sense of the current pricing/cost landscape.

Joe’s post is also an important reminder that valuing a book’s viability or merit based on the perpetuation of publishing’s own overhead is invalid on its face, if not fraudulent. In fact, I think the idea that authors should take advice and accept criticism from people whose steady paychecks and health care plans are paid for by exploiting author’s works has run its course. If the only defense of the publishing industry you can muster is also a defense of how you yourself directly profit from the status quo, then you have no defense. What you have is self interest, bias and creeping fear disguised as experience.

For my money, the first person in the publishing industry who figures out how to value any author’s work apart from protecting industry overhead will be the person to watch.

On a related tangent, careful readers will note that Cover Design Week is now in its second week here on Ditchwalk. Because no good deed ever goes unpunished, I fell behind last week when I tried to correct a small problem with my computer using my original WinXP Pro disc — which promptly rendered my main computer completely inoperable. (Amazing, but true. The hardware I’m now running was unrecognizable to the original disc, but that didn’t keep Microsoft’s install routine from rewriting critical sections of my MBR, turning what had been a perfectly functioning machine into a brick.) The irony in this case is that while a wealth of computer experience (and support from others) helped me diagnose the problem, it’s a problem I wouldn’t have had if I hadn’t been mucking around with my machine.

— Mark Barrett

Calculating Cover Design Value

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This post is part of Cover Design Week. To see other posts click the CDW tag below.

In the previous post I said that neither the amount of cash you have on hand nor the cost of an expense necessarily tells you whether that expense is a good idea or not. That’s particularly true for something like the design of a book cover, which is so inherently subjective in any instance as to defy meaningful cost-benefit analysis by even the biggest publishers.

If how much money you have, or what something costs, says nothing about value, then money as a useful metric has pretty much been exhausted. However, since time equals money in many business situations (if not in life as well), we can also look at the value of offloading cover-design responsibility onto someone else from that perspective. In doing so, we may find a more useful way to judge both the merit of the decision and the economic value as well.%nbsp;%nbsp;[ Read more ]

Calculating Cover Design Cost

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This post is part of Cover Design Week. To see the other posts click the CDW tag below.

Whether you’ve been doing your own covers or this is your first self-publishing effort, the decision to involve someone else in the cover-design process carries inherent risks and costs. On the risk side, there’s the chance that the person you employ might let you down, produce something awful, or involve you in some horrific ongoing battle over billing or copyright issues. On the cost side, there’s time and money.

For this post I’m going to assume that the are no risks. The only thing we have to figure out is how much it will cost to have someone else to design (or execute) a cover for our book.

As a line item in a publishing budget, we want to know how many hours it will take at how many dollars to produce the image files we need. Because we’re making this all up, let’s assume we’re able to find someone reliable who can produce our image files for $50.

As creatures of a global consumer culture, it’s tempting to immediately leap to either or both of the following short-sighted conclusions. First, that we should take the deal if we have $50 on hand. Second, that our immediate cost necessarily says something about the total cost of our decision.

Unfortunately, what we have to spend says nothing about how we should spend it, and what things cost now says little or nothing about their total cost over time. The only thing we can say for sure is that if we don’t have $50 we’re out of luck. Other than that, even knowing the cost of the service does little to help validate the expense.  [ Read more ]

Cover Design and Authorial Control

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This post is part of Cover Design Week. To see the other posts click the CDW tag below.

As mentioned in several previous posts, I took a hard, considered look at the publishing industry several times over the past two decades. I considered and tested both the intake process and the opportunities open to me, but found the gatekeeping pervasive and the timelines absurd. The idea of sending a manuscript to an agent or publisher who demanded an exclusive look, yet promised a vague response time measured in months, was untenable to me. In each case, after earning a few rejections and calculating the mathematical odds of success, I moved on to mediums that offered me more access, if not also more money for my storytelling efforts.

I want to stress that I have nothing but respect for writers who have endured and persevered against years of rejection, whether or not they achieved the level of success they desired. I don’t consider that a mistake. I consider it something I couldn’t do, in part because I’ve always been as interested in the process of storytelling as I have been in producing works authored solely by me. It hasn’t mattered whether I was writing screenplays, interactive scripts or novels, but I understand that many writers feel differently. What mattered to me was doing it and getting paid to do it so I could do it again. If what had mattered most was producing a book with my name on it, I readily concede that until recently I would have had no recourse but to appease the denizens of traditional publishing.

As also noted in previous posts, there is a direct correlation between my renewed interest in writing fiction and the fact that I no longer have to jump through publishing hoops in order to reach readers. Whether I can make any money writing fiction is the obvious question, but for now that concern stands apart from the authorial reality and opportunity defined by the internet as a distribution pipeline. Whatever new risks the internet presents (piracy, obscurity), the ability to reach readers without first appeasing intermediaries and gatekeepers feels like freedom.  [ Read more ]

Cover Design Week

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In a recent post about choosing a print-on-demand (POD) provider, I said I was going to look into the viability of having someone else handle the cover art for a POD version of my short story collection, The Year of the Elm. For the past week or so I’ve been doing exactly that, and I think the issues I’ve been wrestling with are ones that many (if not most) independent authors will necessarily confront.

Having asked for and received recommendations and responses from a number of independent authors, the most interesting thing I can report is that the exploding self-publishing marketplace currently provides cover-design services to independent authors at almost any imaginable price point. It’s almost absurdly easy to find people doing this kind of work across a wide range of fees.

While questions of artistic merit and marketing effectiveness are central to the importance of a book cover, and the professional standing of many cover-design providers is all over the map, I’m going to deal with those issues (and more) in subsequent posts. I’ll also try to detail the logical process I follow in coming to my own decision about whether or not to employ someone else’s talents — a decision I took as a foregone conclusion last week, but one I’m a bit surprised to be revisiting again.

As I said in another recent post:

Just because someone hangs out a shingle it doesn’t mean you’re going to be fairly charged, or that the work will be done to your standards. In fact, you could get gouged for slip-shod work that you would then have to pay someone else to fix, leaving you out more money and more time than you would have forfeited if you had done the work yourself.

The point here is that what looks like a simple question — paying others to do work for you — can quickly explode into more complex and problematic questions, all of which also involve time as a component.

More soon.

— Mark Barrett