My Two New Covers

Yesterday I wrote about my struggles in designing new covers for two of my novellas, and the solution I found.

For a book that an author isn't betting all his or her chips on; for example, a reader magnet (e.g., a freebie for signing up for their newsletter) or for in my case, a novella that no one is going to buy, paying for a professional cover design makes no monetary sense. For those authors for whom money is no object, sure, go ahead. I'm not in that category, yet I still wanted a professional-looking presentation.

Having exhausted, and unfortunately used Canva's pre-made cover templates in the past, I just couldn't stomach them anymore. My previous post details their deficiencies.

Belatedly, I remembered Pixabay, which offers a huge selection of royalty-free images. Once my memory was jogged, I found that I could combine good images with Canva's fonts to design covers that wouldn't embarrass me.

My first priority was Find My Way Home. I may not still have all of the original Canva covers I've used, but here are some of them:

See what I mean? Horrible! I hated every single one, but I had to have something.

 

Here is my newly created cover:

 

You may be asking yourself, what? What's with the grey, and what the hell is that an image of? 

 

Admittedly, I loved the image--the cracked...sky? The cracked and seemingly endless road. This signals to me that Sabrina is going to have a tough time making her way back home, and in fact, it takes her fifteen years. Of course, book browsers won't get the significance, but at least it's an eye-catching cover!

 

I took a look at popular women's fiction novels on Amazon and found that almost without exception, the fonts were big and bold and block-lettered (copycats, all of them). So, I scrolled through Canva's cover templates with an eye to just the fonts, found the right one, swapped out the image, and voila! Potential readers might turn their noses up to it, but I love it, and really, that's what matters.

 

Whispers in the Dark was a more difficult matter. I was thoroughly sick of "shadow" images and/or eyes peeking out from behind curtains or blinds. So cliche. Added to that fact, I already have two black covers for other books (I'll think about that later), and black doesn't signal women's fiction. To be fair, the story is kind of women's fiction, kind of psychological thriller, a point that makes it hard to slot into the most appropriate genre. My first Pixabay searches were "shadow" (again), "lost" (no help), "searching" (even worse), before I just flat out went for "dark blue". 

 

Here are some of my previous Canva covers:

 

Bad, progressing to worse, then worst of all. My "dark blue" search turned up a few possible images, so I uploaded them to Canva, searched for a genre-conforming font among the pre-made templates (weirdly, thrillers tend to use the same font as women's fiction most of the time), and in the end I went with my gut and didn't choose big block lettering. I found a text type I liked, then swapped out the image with each of my possibles. 

 

This is the one I liked the best:

 

 

It still has the darkness aura, but it's set off by the blue flower (signifying hope, maybe?). I like the font, I like the font color, a light grey that contrasts with the dark grey/black of the background, and the color is more moody than the other logical choice--white.

Aside from Canva's boring images, what jumps out at me the most is the brightness of my Pixabay selections. 

The downside of this (and there's always a downside) is that now my other books' covers look like crap next to these. The upside is, now I'll get to play around and have some fun. No, I won't redo all my covers. I actually like at least a couple of them. But...yea, I'm going to change some.

I'm quite proud of my new creations. I'm not even going to chastise myself too much for not thinking of this sooner.