Triskele Tuesday #bookcovers

Our Triskele Books #triskeletuesday fortnightly twitchat last Tuesday, 5th April, explored the subject of #bookcovers: the good, the bad and the ugly.

On hand to answer our questions, and offer tips and information, was our Triskele colleague, editor of Words with JAM and Bookmuse, and award-winning book designer, JD Smith (@JDSmith_Design). She is also the author of The Importance of Book Cover Design.


First off, @TriskeleBooks wanted some tips on getting your book cover right:  

 @JDSmith_Design replied:

Why do we sense a cover is home-made, whilst another has been professionally designed? There’s something just “not quite right” about non-professional covers...

Great book covers are one of the reasons we love reading paperbacks, as well as eBooks...

Do you like faces on bookcovers? Do they work for you, or would you rather imagine the hero/heroine’s face?

And lastly, these are just a few of the favourite bookcovers we discussed...

For an in-depth look at the design process including:

- How to select and work with a designer
- What works and why
- Where to find images
- How to make informed decisions
- Why formatting matters
- What branding means to you
- How to give your book the best chance of success

The Importance of Book Cover Design is available on Amazon.

If you would like to join in on our hour-long Twitchats, simply search for #triskeletuesday at 19.30 GMT every second Tuesday to discuss varied topics on writing, literature and publishing. All opinions most welcome!
Our next Twitchat will be on Tuesday 19th April, on the subject of #womenincrime

Writers' Services: assembling the right team

You know all those house building programmes that have become so popular in recent years? From Grand Designs to The House That £100k Built – they celebrate DIY builders, designing and constructing their own homes.

One thing you will notice, though, is that however hands-on the home owners are, they will recognise the limits of their own skills and bring in professionals to do aspects of the work – like plastering, plumbing and electrics – that just have to be done right. Even when they DO have those skills, they bring in the professionals to check they are doing things right.

Publishing your own book is like building your own house. Some of those observing the self-publishing phenomenon from the outside – and some of those nervously contemplating attempting it themselves for the first time – imagine that it means the author doing everything alone, from the moment they write The End at the bottom of the very first draft until the book starts flying off the (real or virtual) shelves.

In truth an indie author, like the DIY builder, is more like the manager of a micro-business, taking responsibility for each stage of construction, but knowing when and how to bring in the professionals to help. So what are those professional services you are going to need?

 EDITING

 To carry on with the house building metaphor a bit longer – that first draft isn’t even the blueprint for the published novel. It’s more like the rough sketches for that Grand Design you’ve been dreaming of. You’re going to have to do quite a bit more work on it yourself, bash it into shape, make your vision clearer for your readers. So you go through as many rewrites as it needs until it’s as good as you can possibly make it. And then you need to call in the editors!

First off – a word or warning. Close friends and family do NOT make good editors. Even if they are the best-read people you know. Even if they are writers themselves. They love you. They believe in you. They want you to succeed. And with the best will in the world, they are going to read your work through rose-tinted spectacles.

 What you need to do is find someone you can trust to be ruthlessly honest. Who understands the genre you are writing in and the standards you need to meet. Who can pull apart the work you have just spent the last few months bleeding over without making you feel as if you’re a complete waste of space. And who can help you build it up again so that it is still YOUR book, not theirs, but even better than you ever thought possible.

 It may sounds as if we’re asking for the impossible – but they do exist, these people. We know. We’ve found a few of them – and we’re recommending some of them here. (Another excellent source of recommended service providers is the Alliance of Independent Authors Partner Members.)

 Broadly speaking, there are three types of editing. The lines between them are a bit blurry, and I find it’s easier to think of them as three separate processes.

 First is STRUCTURAL EDITING. This is taking a macro view of the book. If you have sub-plots going nowhere, scenes that advance nothing or characters that fail to come alive; if parts of your story are told in the wrong sequence, you’ve begun it too early or dragged on the ending too long: this is where it should be picked up. At this stage, you want someone who can judge the ms as a whole, and who knows the rules and standards of your genre (and I’m including lit fic as a genre here). Good beta-readers can be excellent at this (but bear in mind what I said about not using friends and family).

CATRIONA TROTH is a structural editor with experience of working with both fiction and non-fiction MSS. 

The next stage is COPY EDITING. When all those big, macro issues have been fixed, it’s time to take a finer-grained look at your ms. A good copy editor will still look at issues of pace. But they will focus at the level of individual sentences and paragraphs. Are you using unnecessary verbiage? Or is this scene underwritten? They’ll spot if a character’s eyes change colour part way through the book. They will also check (or at least question) factual detail. (Was the model of car you describe available when your story was set? Is it really possible to shoot someone at that distance with the gun you’ve given your villain?)  

And finally there is PROOFREADING. This is editing as a lay person understands it: checking spelling, grammar, punctuation. In a manuscript being prepared for publication, it also includes checking that you are using things like em-dashes, en-dashes and hyphens in the correct professional way.

Is all this really necessary? Well, the reading public seems to think so. As reviews on Amazon clearly show, readers can be savagely critical of self-published books that are full of slip-shod amateur errors.

PERRY ILES has been the proofreader for almost all of Triskele' books.

Two other terms you may hear are ‘manuscript critique service’ and ‘beta reader.’ 

 A professional manuscript critique service (such as Cornerstones in the UK) is likely to offer a range of services from which you can choose a package suited to you. They may look at your whole MS, or only an extract. In addition to the editing services above, they will often bring to bear their experience of the market to give you an idea of the commercial viability of your book. Critiquing service may also look at an MS at an earlier stage of development than final editing.

LORRAINE MACE and JOHN HUDSPITH both offer a critiquing service that covers elements of both structural and copy editing.

Polly Courtney worked with editor JOY TIBBS on her novels Feral Youth, Golden Handcuffs and Poles Apart.

 A beta reader, on the other hand, is likely to be a trusted volunteer. Like beta testers in the software industry, who evaluate pre-release software, a beta reader will read your MS when it is close to release and let you know if any part of the book is not working for them. They are likely to focus on the same sorts of areas as structural editor – pace, engagement with characters, any major plot holes. But as they are readers, not generally writers or editors, they may point out problems but not necessarily suggest how to fix them.

 DESIGN ELEMENTS

 So now you have a wonderful story, thoroughly edited to a professional standard. What next? 

COVER DESIGN. 

Self-publishing packages like Kindle Direct Publishing make it very easy for authors to select a few elements from a pool of images and fonts, put them together through a semi-automated process and come up with their own cover design. So why do you need to bother paying a professional designer? 

 Well, for one thing, there is a high risk that your cover is going to end up looking suspiciously like at least half a dozen others, as authors pick from the same limited stock of options. Secondly, it’s amazing how tiny things about the way a cover is put together can change how professional it looks. Most of us do it at an entirely unconscious level, but put two covers together and we will instinctively prefer the one that obeys all those hidden ‘rules’ about visual impact. Designers understand that. 

 So find a good designer, one who can realise your unique vision for your book. And shop around. Designers can be expensive – but they don’t have to be. There are some outstanding ones out there who are also very affordable.  

INTERIOR FORMATTING

The last stage before uploading your ms to a publishing service is INTERIOR FORMATTING. Now, this is something a lot of indie authors do for themselves. It’s not intrinsically difficult and there are plenty of programs and packages out there which can help you with the process. But you need to be aware of the rules about laying out the book as a whole (what goes in the ‘front matter’ before the main text, and in what order, and what goes in the back matter), and about laying out individual pages (first pages of chapters vs. the rest, how page numbering works). You need to understand about balancing the fonts used in the text with those used in headings. And finally you need to understand the differences between formatting print books and eBooks, and the subtle differences between different eBook formats.

 If you are prepared to take the time to learn the rules, then by all means tackle this step yourself. But a slip-up at this stage can make your book scream ‘amateur.’ So if you are not completely confident, it is worth employing someone experienced so do your interior formatting for you. 

JD SMITH has created both cover design and the interior formatting for all of Triskele's books. 

 Once the book is formatted, you have an MS ready to upload to your publishing service. And that really has been made very easy. So long as you are reasonably comfortable around computers, there is no reason why you shouldn’t do that for yourself. (See our Leaving Prints chapter in The Triskele Trail for a post-formatting checklist.) 

 And there you have it. You’ve launched your book. You have made all the decisions about how the book should be presented to the world. And you’ve assembled the team around you who can help you realise that vision. Congratulations, you are an independent professional!

Things to consider when creating a box set

by JD Smith

Boxset, box set, boxed set, I've been asked to add all three titles to covers when designing them for clients. But regardless of which terminology you prefer, here's a few things to consider when creating your box set.

As yet, other than releasing a series of books as one physical book, there is no option to print on demand publish a series of books. So here's I'm referring to ebook publication only.

The Insides
Many authors argue that a table of contents isn't necessary for fiction, and unless you have front and back matter of interest, I'm personally fairly indifferent to the idea of having a list of chapters in a table of contents. However, for books created as a box set, it's vital. Books making up an ebook box set are contained in one document, and the only way to navigate from one book to another is to have a table of contents directing readers to the title page of each book.

You can also trim down front and back matter, having a combined copyright page, dedication, acknowledgements and a single page at the back of the set with links to other books and author website and social media.

The Cover
Many box sets, even ebook box sets, have a 3D cover. However, many people design their 3D covers with a white background:

Great in theory, but whilst a 3D boxset can be published successfully through retailers like Amazon, some other retailers, such as Smashwords and Apple, don't accept them. How do you get around the problem, short of designing a 2D cover?

I spoke to support staff at Smashwords and they/Apple will accept covers which have a 2D element, including the title and author name, which means they will accept a file similar to this:

You still get a great 3D box set image in there, just with the addition of the background and author name/titles. The cover doesn't have to be 3D at all, of course, but it does make a nice differential between single books and sets of books.

Writers' Services: JD Smith

JD Smith Design

website: http://www.jdsmith-design.com/

email: info@jdsmith-design.co.uk

Suitable for publishers outsourcing design, small press, indie collaboratives and self-published authors, JD Smith offers a range of professional graphic design and typesetting services to clients worldwide.

Cover Design: the finishing touch to any book, and the first thing many readers will see. From dust jackets for hardback books to ebook covers, each one is thoughtfully designed to your requirements, bearing in mind the market and genre, and provided to your printer's specification.

Typesetting: drop capitals at the beginning of chapters, well chosen fonts designed for ease of reading, correct paragraph indents, gutters, new chapter spacing, alternating headers, and ebook conversion - all elements that are considered and incorporated when typesetting your manuscript.

Marketing Materials: be it postcards, posters and bookmarks for your launch, or advertising in magazines, each item can be designed to the style of your book cover. Don't know a printer or want the hassle of finding a reliable one? Just ask. Working with a variety of printers and with vast knowledge of the industry, I can source competitive prices with a reliable service and have them delivered to your door.

Meet JD Smith:

JD Smith lives and works in the English Lake District. Having worked as a graphic designer for over 12 years, and a booklover to boot, she understands the industry.

Jane spends most of her time attempting to remain professional, efficient, talented and affordable, because so many of her lovely clients have given her testimonials to that effect, whilst trying to keep her three children from switching off the wireless router, unplugging power cables and writing on her Facebook wall.

The pseudonym JD Smith was created as the username on a writers' messageboard many years ago, and was adopted as her preferred Editor's title when launching the writing magazine Words with JAM. Jane is also a writer of historical fiction.

"Jane Dixon-Smith came recommended by a friend. I'm delighted with the cover she created for me. She's fast and easy to work with and really cared about giving me what I wanted."
Sue Moorcroft, author of All That Mullarkey and Love Writing

Writers' Services: Cover Design

Self-publishing packages like Kindle Direct Publishing make it very easy for authors to select a few elements from a pool of images and fonts, put them together through a semi-automated process and come up with their own cover design. So why do you need to bother paying a professional designer?

Well, for one thing, there is a high risk that your cover is going to end up looking suspiciously like at least half a dozen others, as authors pick from the same limited stock of options. Secondly, it’s amazing how tiny things about the way a cover is put together can change how professional it looks. Most of us do it at an entirely unconscious level, but put two covers together and we will instinctively prefer the one that obeys all those hidden ‘rules’ about visual impact. Designers understand that.

 So find a good designer, one who can realise your unique vision for your book. And shop around. Designers can be expensive – but they don’t have to be. There are some outstanding ones out there who are also very affordable.

All Triskele's eye-catching covers have been designed by JD Smith. Read more...

Design and Print Glossary

by JD Smith

Front Cover - the front cover of your book. This can be the front cover of a paperback, or the image used to display on a webpage selling an ebook.

Spine - specific to printed books only, the spine is the part of the book where the ends of the pages are glued together. When referring to the cover, the spine is the imagery which covers the ends of the pages, typically having an author name and title on display when a book is placed on a book shelf. Designers will ask for your page count so they can calculate your spine width. This is usually done using a calculator on a publisher/printer's website i.e. spine width = number of pages x page thickness

Back Cover – the back cover of a printed book, generally containing blurb

So that’s the basics. Now for some techy stuff …

ISBN/Barcode – sometimes confused as the same thing. They are in fact two different things. An ISBN is the number allocated to books, bought from www.isbn.nielsenbook.co.uk. Some publishers buy them in bulk and sell them on or give them away free with their publishing packages. This number goes on the copyright page. On the back goes the image reference of the number i.e. the barcode. This is an image representation of the ISBN number and usually has the number sat just below it. This is so shops can scan the book on their system, rather than having to manually input a 13 digit number. These days the barcodes are usually generated by the printer/publisher using a funky bit of software and placed on the back of the cover at the bottom (sometimes on the right hand side) after the cover has been designed and submitted for publication. Occasionally, or if you specifically want more control over the ISBN, you can ask the publisher for the barcode, or generate your own using an online company, and have the designer place this for you.

[Image] Resolution - references the quality. The higher the resolution, the better quality the image. For printed books, images are generally required to be 300 dpi at the size they are to be used. For web (i.e. images for covers of ebook) images are only required to be around 72 dpi at the size they are to be displayed.

[Image] DPI - Dots Per Inch. Think of painting an image by making lots of little dots with coloured pens. The more dots, the more complex and complete the image will look. Enough dots and you won’t notice there are any dots.

[Image] Raster/Rasterised – images are either raster or vector. Rasterised images are made up of pixels/dot matrix. They’re images such as photographs and any other images which has been saved down as a JPEG, TIFF and such like.

[Image] Vector – vector images are a designer’s best friend when it comes to scale-ability. Rather than pixels/dots, they are made up of vectors (also known as paths or strokes), which means they can be scaled to any size imaginable. Complex graphics are made up of a series of paths and strokes that you wouldn’t realise are there. These file formats can be saved as EPS or AI (Adobe Illustrator) files. Commonly they are cartoons or digital drawing, although some are so complex you wouldn’t realise they are, and have a photographic quality to them.

Images of a better quality/resolution, generally cost more from a stock image library than a lower resolution image

Stock Image Library - generally speaking these are online sites which sell images in much the same way as you can pay for and download music or software. Many of them sell Royalty Free images.

Royalty Free Image - an image for which you pay a one off fee to use as much as you wish, as opposed to licensing an image where you are limited for example to how many books you can have printed with the image on, and for how long (in years).

Formatting/Typesetting - generally speaking the formatting of text for the interior of a book (i.e. the words/story/prose).

Gutter - the gutter on a book is the margin on the inside edge of a page. It is generally larger than the margin on the outer edge of the page. The reason is that when the spine is glued, and you open a book, you would not be able to see easily any text that runs too close to the spine.

Spread(s) - the left and right and pages of a book which face each other is known as a ‘spread’ or ‘facing pages’. If a designer sends you a PDF in spreads, which they potentially will when proofing a book, it means that the PDF will look as it would when you open a book, with the left and right hand pages next to one another as opposed to single pages.

Book Size - i.e the overall height and width of a book: 6 x 9”, 5 x 8”.

MOBI - Kindle specific file.

Software - Graphic Designers, for the purposes of book covers and paperback formatting, at least, use Adobe Indesign/Quark Express, Adobe Photoshop for image manipulation, and Adobe Illustrator for manipulating or drawing vector illustrations. Anyone who actually does any formatting or page layout in Adobe Illustrator needs to serious rethink their working practice. Kindle documents, however, are best laid out in Word and subsequently converted to MOBI files using a generator.

Bleed - my favourite to explain. Bleed is the image or colour which extends beyond the edge of the cover or page (normally 3mm or .0125”). Designers will deliberately set up cover files so that when they export a print-ready file for the publisher, there is excess image (bleed). This means that when the printer has printed your book covers and subsequently trims them (cuts them out of the large sheet on which they were printed) you do not end up with areas of cover which have no print on them. Think of it like this, if you are going to roll out pastry to line a pie dish, you roll it out larger than you need, line the pie dish, then trim off the excess. This is effectively what bleed is.

Crop Marks (also known as registration marks, trim marks, cutting marks) - fine hairlines printed on the outer edge of your cover file. They tell the printer exactly where they need to trim/cut your cover on each edge. Some publishers add these themselves, others require the final cover files to include them (this difference between printers is fairly specific to publishing books – in the rest of the print industry it is standard to simply supply files WITH crop marks).

Artwork - depending on what you’re referring to, this can mean a multitude of things: 1) An illustration placed on the cover (as in a piece of art, painting, drawing etc); 2) A printer might refer to the finished cover design file, the print PDF, as ‘artwork’; 3) Some designers refer to the process of design as ‘artworking’.

Illustration - painting, drawing (in any medium – pencil through to computer graphics) that may go on the cover or, indeed, the interior or the book. Illustration is NOT the same as cover design, and authors should be careful when employing an illustrator for their cover, that they are also a competent graphic designer, or that they are working with a graphic designer. Many graphic designers will employ an illustrator when occasion arises instead of using stock illustrator or photography. Not to do a disservice to illustrators out there, but as I wouldn’t take it upon myself to draw or paint something for a cover, many illustrators I have come across in my career don’t have the knowledge of typography and setting files for print that a graphic designer should have.

Fonts - the style of the characters of the alphabet. Most computer come with what are known as ‘system fonts’. Many of them are good, some are recognisable as being cheap fonts that come free with software. You can download many free fonts to install on your system from the internet. These also tend to look cheap. And lastly you can also buy fonts, in much the same way as you can buy stock imagery, from websites specialising in selling fonts.

Typography - the art of arranging type (words/titles/author name/body copy). And, yes, this does involve much more than simply centring your name and title.

Body copy/text - the bulk of text in your manuscript.

Blurb - the copy on the back of your book which sells it.

Strapline - it’s amazing how many people don’t know what ‘strapline’ means. It’s the line which goes on the front of your book which gives a further snippet as to what you book might be about (e.g. One kingdom, three brothers, three claims to the throne …)

Pantone - Pantone is a range of ink colours used by the design industry. Most publishers will, however, print the interiors of books in black only, and the covers in colours make of up Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black (CMYK).

Drop Capitals - an enlarged letter generally used at the beginning of a chapter.

PDF – most people have got to grips with the file format PDF these days. Most printers will require one for printing your cover and/or inside pages; others, rarely, just a high resolution JPEG. PDF is a more secure file, which has the capability of embedding fonts and minimising anything in your file being disturbed during the printing process. Designers will also use them to proof your work to you. Proofing will usually be done using low-resolution (low quality), and therefore small file size, PDFs. When it comes to printing, the printer/publisher will require a high-resolution, print-ready, print-quality, PDF.

Mock Up - generally a term used for coming up with visuals of say a cover. Mock-up/concept/ideas/visuals.

JD Smith (Jane) lives and works in the English Lake District. Having worked as a graphic designer for over 12 years, her passion for books and everything literary took over and she now works predominantly on book cover design and typesetting. She is the editor of the writing magazine Words with JAM, and the author of historical fiction.

Jane talks design with Joanna Penn

Triskele member, professional designer, and editor of Words with JAM,  Jane Dixon-Smith talks to Joanna Penn, of The Creative Penn, about design, typography, professional v. amateur formatting, author branding, common mistakes, her own writing and Triskele Books.

Here's the video.

And do listen to Joanna's podcast, with helpful tips on Kobo, good news on indie publishing and a mysterious tease ...


Thank you, Joanna!
http://www.thecreativepenn.com/

The Fundamentals of Good Cover Design #1 - Triskele Toolbox 4

By JD Smith

Poor image choice, bad cropping, stretched imagery, tacky Photoshop manipulation, terrible font choice and typography, hideous colours … pretty much everything.

But are the fundamentals of good cover design? What is a ‘bad’ font choice? How does one know? I was once asked to tell someone what was wrong with their cover design which they’d cobbled together themselves on some awful software which should be relegated to the 80s. The crux was, they didn’t understand what was and wasn’t good design.

The fundamentals of good design are good imagery, good font choice, good composition, good colour choice, good typography. The problem lies in choosing those elements well, bearing in mind a number of aspects including the genre and market, and then making them work for you.

It’s really hard to explain why something is good (or bad) without doing a workshop and showing examples - pointing out how this lines up with that; how putting this image here and adding this specific gradient gives X amount of space in proportion to Y, and thereby giving ample space for the title if you a have it like this, how boosting the contrast here and muting it there makes the whole ensemble punch  ... etc.

You can be born with a talent and a passion for design, but you don’t just go on a course and become a good designer, you have to learn through experience. I spent years presenting work to senior designers to be signed off before it was put in front of a client.  And I spent years having it sent back to me telling me it wasn’t good enough, and having to learn why and how to improve it.  Moulding a cover together with so many factors being taken into consideration is something that eventually becomes second nature. Bit like writing really. It's easy to point out spelling errors and 'the rules' of writing to someone, but when a piece of writing is 'okay' it's difficult to pinpoint and explain and demonstrate exactly how and why it hasn't got that X-Factor: change this one element of the plot and it will sell in the millions – it just doesn’t work like that.

Another thing to bear in mind is that design, like everything else, follows trends. This doesn’t affect generally whether a design is good or bad in terms of layout, but it can mean that even a good design, rather than ‘standing out,’ can be perceived as dated. The same applies to genre. A good cover placed on the ‘wrong’ book can really affect sales.  A romance style cover on a sci-fi book, for example, will cause the book to be overlooked by sci-fi readers, regardless of the content.

JD Smith (Jane) lives and works in the English Lake District. Having worked as a graphic designer for over 12 years, her passion for books and everything literary took over and she now works predominantly on book cover design and typesetting. She is the editor of the writing magazine Words with JAM, and the author of historical fiction.