week

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

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