And Now For a Lighter Topic

When a person abandons a pursuit, that doesn't mean they no longer love it; it's simply that the will to continue is gone. My husband stopped producing music a few years ago, but he sometimes goes back to those old recordings and remixes them. Although we may not be doing a particular thing anymore, we don't want that thing to die, to disappear. It mattered.

That brings me to my back catalog of work. I'm aware that I didn't present my novels and novellas in the best light. I chose the easy, and more importantly, the most inexpensive way I could to create their covers. That way was Canva. For many purposes, Canva is wonderful. I don't regret paying for a subscription, because I've used it for so many types of creations, I can't even remember them all. If you click on the dedicated Running From Herself page on my author site, practically every element there was made with Canva.

Where Canva falls down is with its book cover templates. The first time I scrolled through them, I was overwhelmed by the selection. While it's true there are a lot of templates, when you narrow the choices down to ones that could potentially fit your book, the numbers are much less impressive. Canva employs an in-house team of designers, and also invites independent artists to participate via its Canva Creators program. It obviously tries to represent all book genres, with at least a handful of choices for most, although nothing for women's fiction (but I'm used to being excluded). 

I've done many, many covers with Canva, mainly because I'm never satisfied with the templates I chose. One can certainly upload her own image or choose something from Canva's image bank, but that doesn't solve the text problem. Many covers I made originated with an image from the image bank, but trying to find a professional font is nigh impossible. I'm fairly certain its font choices are intended for other uses besides book covers. Women's fiction, according to Amazon's best seller list, almost exclusively uses bold block lettering for titles. Scroll through the Canva font styles all you want; you'll never find that.  

It wasn't 'til I finally hit on the solution that the clouds dissipated. I can download free images from Pixabay, upload them to Canva, then choose a book cover template with the lettering I want and swap out the image. (Canva's image bank also draws heavily from Pixabay, but the selection is limited and if you enjoy viewing images that are this small, fine; check them out. I prefer to see the whole picture, if you will.)

Aside from these issues, my biggest criticism of Canva's cover templates is that they're lifeless and drab. They have no sheen. Do potential book buyers prefer a cover that stands out or one that looks like a picture of a picture? This was obviously a conscious choice Canva made, and it's not for me to wonder why. Maybe it has to do with bandwidth or something. Maybe too many pixels puts the bandwidth on the edge of the cliff--I have no idea.

So now, much like my former producer husband, I'm on a mission to upgrade. I'm still toying with the idea of creating paperback versions of my first two novels for my personal collection, and I want covers that don't repulse me.  

While scrolling through Pixabay today, I found a few possibles, but while the subjects were good, the backgrounds wouldn't lend themselves to adding title and author text. Just for fun, I clicked on "edit image", which took me to, of course, Canva. Here I could erase the background completely or change the color of one element, if I chose. There are other edits one can do, but I'm hesitant to try things I don't understand and find myself in a quagmire I can't get out of.

I'm still striking out on finding a proper image for "What We Conceal" (I might end up changing the title, too!), but I did erase the backgrounds from a few images and downloaded them. I'm fairly certain I won't use them in the end, though. 

So, I moved on to "Once in a Blue Moon". Know how many "moon" pictures exist in the universe? Probably one zillion; one zillion cliche pictures of the moon. I'm sick of them. Naturally, I began my search with "blue moon", because...duh, but I just wasn't feeling them. Then it struck me that the novel is (sort of) magical realism, because the main character assumes the personas of both her mother and her grandmother. Thus, I typed "moon magic" into the search bar. I really kind of love this image:

An important note about it: The moon in the image was originally a pinkish-red, which would have made zero sense combined with the title, so with Canva, I changed the hue. 

The composition of the illustration is pretty awesome. Kudos to the creator. I always say, when I find the right image, I'll know it. I may not know exactly what I'm searching for, but every once in a while, there it is! 

Before I found this, I edited another image by again changing the color of the moon. Trouble is, call me nitpicky, but this looks like a man's hand. Besides, it really pales in comparison to the picture above:

These should give you an idea of how to choose and if necessary, manipulate photos for a stunning book cover. 

I must say, I'm quite pumped about my new project. I haven't been pumped about anything in a very long time.