I was very happy with the cover for Toulouse 4 Death; it had a touch of the story and the ongoing 4 Death motif (the target). It was a result of an evolution over the last six months. A comment here and there helped to modify and revise the look. Then . . . Joel Friedlander offered an off-the-cuff comment about the quality of the Iron Cross image. “It’s not that good of an image, you can do better,” he said. He was right, it can be better.
I had scammed an image of the Iron Cross off the Internet, and yes the quality was bad but it worked, to a point. For an image the size of a postage stamp on the Amazon sell page it would be fine but on a book’s cover, a real book, it was awful. How to fix it? Where can you find an Iron Cross these days and not be a part of a skinhead group, motorcycle gang, or an ex-Nazi officer (didn’t happen to know any in this part of California). Again the internet and voila, a Chinese company, ww2sale.com, makes replicas of uniforms and insignias of German World War II materials. I had the replica in less than two weeks – but it’s all kind of creepy. You can outfit yourself as a Field General in the Waffen SS, and they will tailor it to you; again, very creepy. But then again China will reproduce anything; all you need is a PayPal account.
A quick photograph, a little bit of photoshop work and reinsertion on the layer and the result is a much better image and a higher quality cover.
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| Old Cover |
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| New Cover |
The image on the top is the old cover, the one on the bottom is the new cover. The same but very different. Also note that the shadowing was made more transparent, more realistic.
The cover, even as an ebook, is critical to the marketing of your book. This also includes the typeface selected for the title and the author name, as well as the back of the book. It’s all about catching the eye of the buyer and then making them linger for at least a minute as they discover the story in the blurbs, reviews, and maybe even a few lines from the book. It’s all a tease and a promise. The tease gets them to buy, the promise is the quality of the story. The cover should reflect this.
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| The Back and Spine |
Next week the schedule for the new book that is underway. You will love it!!
More later . . . .
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