Making of the (New) Cover for WtDMC
30 Apr 2023 05:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackbirdleeI mentioned a while back that I was re-making the cover for my upcoming book, Welcome to Dead Man's Creek. Well, here it is:
I'm really excited about it! It feels a lot better than the original cover I made. There were two main reasons for the cover change; first of all, as I mentioned, the previous cover just didn't 'feel' right. It was a little too weighted towards the mystery genre. While I do hope I'm delivering a good mystery with this book, that's not really why I expect people will be picking it up - the mystery is the subplot. It also felt a little too slick and polished, when the vibes of the series are more raw and gothic.
The other reason was that the original cover used some assets from Midjourney, and their recent legal issues made me second-guess the wisdom of using those assets.
I've had some people asking me about my cover-making process, because I do make all of my own covers. It's partly a cost-saving thing but also I'm just kind of a control freak. If I'm going to put out a generic cover, I guess I'd just rather that be because I failed to make a good cover, rather than because I paid someone who didn't 'get' my genre or my awesome readers.
If you want to learn more about how I approached conceptualizing and making this new cover, then read on:
Step one in making a brand new cover for a new series is often looking at other covers. Not to copy them; what I want is to put myself in the headspace of a reader hunting for a book. When I look at this cover, what do I think the book inside will be like? Am I excited to read it? Are there any expectations created by the cover that I'd be disappointed if the book didn't live up to?
I don't just look at books in my specific niche of gay harem romance; I also look at gay romance, reverse harem romance, and sometimes I look at otome/dating sim games.
In this particular case, I looked at a lot of reverse harem romance. I found some covers that really inspired me - Groupie by C.M. Stunich, Dance Butterfly Dance by Reese River, and The Never King by Nikki St. Crowe. All excellent books, and all sharing some vibes in common with WtDMC: gothic stories, love interests with alternative aesthetics, and kinky sex scenes.
I also wanted to make it more clear on this cover that vampires were involved, and the easiest way to do that is with a bat. Plus, bats are just fun.
So, with these things in mind, I started making thumbnails. The term 'thumbnail' can mean a few different things; in this case, it's a creative mock-up made at a small size, to see how the concept might actually look.
Here are the three different directions I was considering going:
Note: I generally make my thumbnails by literally just grabbing previews of assets from stock photo sites and cropping them out, because I don't know which assets I want to buy until I've landed on a design. Obviously, I can't publicly post a thumbnail that uses assets I haven't purchased, so in some of the above I've replaced the assets I was actually working on with free stock images from Unsplash.
I also try multiple assets on each design, to make sure that I don't toss out a design idea that could look better with a different bat on it. Once I narrowed it down to the center option, I experimented with even more bats - and various background patterns as well - before deciding exactly which ones I wanted to buy.
As for why I went with the center design: the left design was disappointing to me because I had an exact image in my mind of how I wanted it to look and wasn't finding an easy way to get what I wanted, and the one on the right looked a little too 'crime drama'. But ultimately, it boiled down to the fact that I was most excited about the center concept, and I can easily imagine how I can make a lot of covers in this style, which is important because I intend for this series to go on for quite a while.
There are a lot of lovely black and white bat illustrations available as stock images, so picking the actual image to use was hard! I almost went with the top left bat in this set, actually, but ultimately I had to go with the three hanging bats because I felt like it was too perfect for a reverse harem book with three vampire boyfriends.
And that's about it. I mean, from here, I just make the cover - and I'm not going to get into that process because I don't consider myself a professional graphic designer; there are people out there with a lot more experience and knowledge who teach those kinds of skills. You'll probably notice that my thumbnails are even pretty sloppy; notably, they're all missing my name, which is kind of a key part of the cover? I always do this to myself and it always messes me up when I start the actual cover. Although if you have any specific questions about how I did anything on the cover, I'll do my best to answer!
Anyway, I'll finish by just linking a few of my preferred resources. My favorite stock image sites are Shutterstock, which is great for most things, and Dreamstime, which is a little better for specifically photos of people in my experience. All of the stock images I used for this cover are from Shutterstock - specifically these bats, this pattern, this thumbprint set, and this set of tape strips. My fonts are sourced both from Google Fonts (which are free for commercial use!) and from Creative Market (not free, but a step up in quality). I also have a library of free textures that I downloaded from Lost and Taken a very, very long time ago; the website now is very different from it used to be, but it does look like they still offer some high-quality free textures.
Monthly Words to Date (April): 53,561 (I've been editing more than writing!)
Annual Words to Date (2023): 158,442
Dinner tonight is: Frozen dino nuggets, because it's been a busy day!
The other reason was that the original cover used some assets from Midjourney, and their recent legal issues made me second-guess the wisdom of using those assets.
I've had some people asking me about my cover-making process, because I do make all of my own covers. It's partly a cost-saving thing but also I'm just kind of a control freak. If I'm going to put out a generic cover, I guess I'd just rather that be because I failed to make a good cover, rather than because I paid someone who didn't 'get' my genre or my awesome readers.
If you want to learn more about how I approached conceptualizing and making this new cover, then read on:
Step one in making a brand new cover for a new series is often looking at other covers. Not to copy them; what I want is to put myself in the headspace of a reader hunting for a book. When I look at this cover, what do I think the book inside will be like? Am I excited to read it? Are there any expectations created by the cover that I'd be disappointed if the book didn't live up to?
I don't just look at books in my specific niche of gay harem romance; I also look at gay romance, reverse harem romance, and sometimes I look at otome/dating sim games.
In this particular case, I looked at a lot of reverse harem romance. I found some covers that really inspired me - Groupie by C.M. Stunich, Dance Butterfly Dance by Reese River, and The Never King by Nikki St. Crowe. All excellent books, and all sharing some vibes in common with WtDMC: gothic stories, love interests with alternative aesthetics, and kinky sex scenes.
I also wanted to make it more clear on this cover that vampires were involved, and the easiest way to do that is with a bat. Plus, bats are just fun.
So, with these things in mind, I started making thumbnails. The term 'thumbnail' can mean a few different things; in this case, it's a creative mock-up made at a small size, to see how the concept might actually look.
Here are the three different directions I was considering going:
Note: I generally make my thumbnails by literally just grabbing previews of assets from stock photo sites and cropping them out, because I don't know which assets I want to buy until I've landed on a design. Obviously, I can't publicly post a thumbnail that uses assets I haven't purchased, so in some of the above I've replaced the assets I was actually working on with free stock images from Unsplash.
I also try multiple assets on each design, to make sure that I don't toss out a design idea that could look better with a different bat on it. Once I narrowed it down to the center option, I experimented with even more bats - and various background patterns as well - before deciding exactly which ones I wanted to buy.
As for why I went with the center design: the left design was disappointing to me because I had an exact image in my mind of how I wanted it to look and wasn't finding an easy way to get what I wanted, and the one on the right looked a little too 'crime drama'. But ultimately, it boiled down to the fact that I was most excited about the center concept, and I can easily imagine how I can make a lot of covers in this style, which is important because I intend for this series to go on for quite a while.
There are a lot of lovely black and white bat illustrations available as stock images, so picking the actual image to use was hard! I almost went with the top left bat in this set, actually, but ultimately I had to go with the three hanging bats because I felt like it was too perfect for a reverse harem book with three vampire boyfriends.
And that's about it. I mean, from here, I just make the cover - and I'm not going to get into that process because I don't consider myself a professional graphic designer; there are people out there with a lot more experience and knowledge who teach those kinds of skills. You'll probably notice that my thumbnails are even pretty sloppy; notably, they're all missing my name, which is kind of a key part of the cover? I always do this to myself and it always messes me up when I start the actual cover. Although if you have any specific questions about how I did anything on the cover, I'll do my best to answer!
Anyway, I'll finish by just linking a few of my preferred resources. My favorite stock image sites are Shutterstock, which is great for most things, and Dreamstime, which is a little better for specifically photos of people in my experience. All of the stock images I used for this cover are from Shutterstock - specifically these bats, this pattern, this thumbprint set, and this set of tape strips. My fonts are sourced both from Google Fonts (which are free for commercial use!) and from Creative Market (not free, but a step up in quality). I also have a library of free textures that I downloaded from Lost and Taken a very, very long time ago; the website now is very different from it used to be, but it does look like they still offer some high-quality free textures.
Monthly Words to Date (April): 53,561 (I've been editing more than writing!)
Annual Words to Date (2023): 158,442
Dinner tonight is: Frozen dino nuggets, because it's been a busy day!