In this episode, we take a good hard look what NOT to do when tackling cover design as an indie author, and share some of our biggest mistakes so you can learn from our experiences—both good and bad. We’re going to share a few pro tips that can help you, regardless of whether you’re hiring somebody or not.

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Tools we mentioned in this episode

• ProWriting Aid
• Plottr
• AppSumo
• Canva
• 99Designs
• BookBrush
• DepositPhotos
• Adobe Stock
• Shutterstock
• iStockPhoto
• Photoshop Elements
• Adobe Spark (video)

Visit our websites

• Crystal Hunt (Non-fiction)
• CJ Hunt (Romance)
• Michele Amitrani (Fiction)
• The Creative Academy for Writers (Community/Resources)

Transcript for Strategic Authorpreneur Episode 028: What NOT to Do: Cover Design

Crystal Hunt: Hey there, strategic authorpreneurs. I’m Crystal Hunt.

Michele Amitrani: And I’m Michele Amitrani. We’ll here to help you save time, money, and energy as you have level up your writing career.

Crystal Hunt: Welcome to episode 28 of the strategic authorpreneur podcast. On today’s show we’re talking about what not to do when it comes to book covers and cover design. This episode is brought to you by a book with a great cover Lord of Time by Michele Amitrani, which is a dark fantasy novel about the value of time, life altering opportunities and unexpected endings. So you should check it out. There you go. We’re learning all about promoting our books, right? Since we have this shiny podcast, which we can do whatever we want with, we thought, Hey, why not actually give a shout out to some of the books that we spend all of this time writing.

So show notes, check it out and let us know what you think. I was really fond of this book and it was not what I was expecting. We talk a lot about how Michele writes dark fantasy sci-fi kind of stuff but like, I think in the last episode you said, but without the, blowing up things. So there’s a lot less special effects type stuff in there, but it was an unexpectedly moving story.

And I have to say it made me think about time in different ways. So if you are currently questioning the nature of existence and wondering about how you’re spending your time, this might be just the thing for you so check it out. And what have you been working on this week, sir, that will follow up the Lord of Time.

What has happened since the last episode?

Michele Amitrani: Okay. That was nice. Thank you for that. It’s always nice when other people are saying nice things about your books, but regarding what I’ve been actually reading. There is something I want to share with you and I’m going to do it with my cellphone today. So this is a marketing book, so a book marketing book. It was released a few months ago by Nikolas Erik and it’s called The Ultimate Guide to Book Marketing. The 80-20 System for Selling More Books by Nicholas Erik. Again, this was I think my 5 cents. One of the best book I read. I already spoke of Nicholas’ works extensively in one of the previous episodes and what I really like of Nicholas is that he takes stuff that really happened to him, it basically breaks it down in a way that you can understand what went wrong with his book marketing strategies and what you can do different. And this is an author that has been extremely generous with his content. He has a website that basically has all the resources that he speaks about is this book for free, but I, I really wanted to dig in and shout out for him.

Recently the book also was released as a paperback. This is really a book that is meaningful if you want to make this as your business, really there are so many suggestions that can level up your book marketing skills. So really highly recommended The Ultimate Guide to Book Marketing by Nicholas Erik.

And since we are talking about a book marketing and planning and doing that kind of stuff there was something yeah, that the reading of this book brought to me in this regard, a few weeks ago, I discussed with you of my need of rethinking my strategy for releasing books in the end of 2020 and beginning of 2021, and I’m now doing that, I’m more planning the release schedule for my standalone mythological fantasy books. And I’m almost planning the way I’m going to release my fairytale retelling series. And so I’m trying to be strategic in that regards. I did learn a bunch of things since I started this podcast and I started the 12 by 20 challenge. But I don’t think I’m anywhere near to the point that I want to be. I have a system in place. That’s for sure. I’ve learned a few things about newsletter and releasing content, the fire hose approach we spoke about that. I think it’s meaningful, but really I’m now sitting down and am more than three fourth of the way through my challenge.

I have some products I really can use as assets as we defined them previously. And so I now need to really consider my options and evaluate strategically what to do with them and how to do these things. So this is my planning stage, Crystal. You’ve been there, you’ve done that. You’re actually helping me in the planning of these things.

So I’m very excited about that. I want to see what’s going to happen, what will be happening, because we are public probably going to do this on two separate markets, the Italian and the English one. So many things, and the planning is exciting, and at the same time it’s a bit scary. And on that note, I want to know what you been up to.

And if there are some other things on the planning side that you’ve been doing, if there is something or things that you want to share with us that happened in your writerly life.

Crystal Hunt: I have been less planning more doing this week. So I have been working on editing a few of the stories I have been working on a series of shorter stories that are about 10,000 words each that are Rivers End romances with a touch of magic.

So they are kind of standalones, but that weave together the characters reappear. So that is one of the kind of miniseries within the Rivers End world that I work on the witchy ones as I refer to them often, and I am doing a couple of things to help me get those ready. So one is, I have an editor that I hire. Amanda, she’s fantastic. And she does a great job, but it saves her time and it saves me money if I can polish them up before I send them to her. So once they’re finished, I go back through them a couple of times and I review all the details and bits and pieces and make sure that I haven’t put something into the series that doesn’t belong there.

And that I haven’t accidentally changed a person’s name or given them red hair when they should be blonde or dark haired or whatever. And so I use Plotter to track a lot of my details and then some custom spreadsheets that I’ve made for myself over the years as well. So those are the two tools that I’ve been working with.

And then I run things ProWritingAid once I know the details are correct. Then I do a little language polish before I send them off to Amanda, just to make sure that, you know, if there’s a lot of words that are repeating a whole bunch of times or some basic type of stuff, the cleaner I can make it the more she can focus on leveling things up, not just cleaning things up.

So I do really try to polish them up before she gets her hands on them. So ProWritingAid is the software that I use to do that. And we’ll put a link to the show notes, in the show notes to the tools that we’re talking about, so that if you’re curious to check them out, you can find those easily. And, Yeah, that’s mostly what I’ve been up to on a work production side of things, but on the reading side of things, because I’m gearing up for releasing stories and I’m in full on writing mode still as well.

I have been reading or rereading, I should say Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert, which is just kind of about the nature of creativity and where story ideas come from and how that all works. And one of the reasons I really love this book is it embraces the contradictions that are kind of inherent in what we do.

And I mean, a lot of this comes from the back of the book, but we’re super brave and that we’re putting our work out there in the world, but we’re also terrified of other people reading it. And it can be super lonely to be writing, except that you’re surrounded by people in your imagination and also other writers, but even other writers that are in your world, they can’t ever be inside your head. They can’t actually ever understand everything that you’re thinking and feeling and going through. So it is kind of this weird profession of contradictions, right? We are private often very introverted, but living very public lives because we put our work and ourselves out there.

So I just think it’s an interesting book to kind of work through. And I often use it as like a journaling prompt where I’ll just read a section and then I’ll journal free hand for awhile about what I did I’m thinking or what that brought up for me. And one of the things I do love is this idea that ideas are just floating around all the time and it’s kind of like reincarnation, like the ideas are looking to be born into the world, but they don’t have to be ours. We don’t have to be the ones to make those ideas real. If we don’t do it, they’ll float off and find somebody else to make them come alive. And I find that really freeing because it’s easy to get overwhelmed by ideas once you open yourself to the flow of all of that. And you say, yeah, the universe bring it on, I can write all this stuff. Then you get just this constant influx of stuff in your brain that wants to get written and not enough hours to do it all. So I love the idea that you can say: I’m not, I’m not your person, I’m not your writer, you know, flutter off to somewhere else, find yourself a home.

Then I think there’s a lot of freedom and power in that waiting to focus on the ones that really, really grab you and not feeling like you have to write every idea that comes into your brain. So for me, that’s my takeaway from rereading it this time. Is that permission to say no, thank you, not right now to the ideas that are like little naps, swarming about your head and distracting you from the thing that you’ve chosen to work on.

Okay. So that’s what we’ve been up to, now we are going to dig into talking about book covers and what we’ve learned over the last several years about designing book covers. We’re going to talk about what we’ve learned from doing it ourselves. Also, what we’ve learned from working with cover design, and then share a few pro tips that can help you, regardless of whether you’re hiring somebody or not, but things that are particularly relevant when you’re looking at designing for print on demand in print versions, or looking at digitally publishing your eBooks.

So on that note, if you could travel back in time and do things differently with your book covers, what worked or didn’t work, what would you change if you could time travel?

How to approach a book cover

Michele Amitrani: Okay I just want to add one small thing at the beginning of this episode, when I started as a self publisher, my book covers were supposed to be something that I liked.

So this is something that I want to just get straight out there as fast as possible, and as soon as possible. If there is something that I’ve learned since I’ve become more aware of the business side of things, and you don’t have to agree with me on this, but bear with me. Your book cover it’s a basically piece of piece of packaging.

You’re packaging a product with that book colour. Now I understand that there are so many emotions involved because the book cover is basically the first thing that a person even before the description and all the other things they see of your book. So you want to make sure that it’s striking, that it’s beautiful, but that’s the problem, what’s beautiful and striking for you, it’s not necessarily what’s selling in that regard. So now I’m going to be a bit more businessy and I’m going to answer with your question with this: if I could go back in time, I would not have written to my designer what I thought was the best cover for my book, I would have done some research and I would have found out what the market was selling in that particular product.

Now, why is that? There are a couple of reasons, but first I invite you on seeing over my shoulders. You see those two posters over there? These are actually my book one, and book one extended edition of my science fiction Italian series, the first book. Now I’m not telling you that because I want to promote myself, I’m just standing you, if you see that book, you don’t see a science fiction book, there’s really nothing necessarily that gives you the idea of the genre, but it’s just something that I wanted to convey. I just wanted that main characters face to be there. And probably if I had the possibility to go back in time, I would have explore more a possibility of brainstorm with my designer first I think. Because that’s, I think, the mistake I made. I love that cover, and it’s doing good in the Italian market because let’s face it, the competition is not very strong there, but I don’t think it’s a cover to the market basically. And it hurts telling you that, but I do believe that’s true of what’s behind that experience, and I wish not to make the same choice.

If you can avoid that. Again, you don’t have to do anything that you don’t feel comfortable doing, but I do believe that most of the time, if you want to sell a book and make a living out of that, you should do your research. And if there is something that Nicholas Erik, the author that I was mentioning to you before, he is a one of these authors who says the same thing, your book cover is a piece of packaging.

It’s nothing more than that and that piece of packaging can change and Crystal and I discussed about that more than once saying. The book covers nowadays, you can change that once every two year or every year. It’s not something that is, you know, sculpted in a rock inside there, and it’s never going to change. Cover and cover design for book covers change all the time because taste and artwork can change all the time.

So don’t get too much attached to that cover. Again, I love that cover, but probably what I would have done if I could travel back in time, I would have research to better. And I do know that you have, not necessarily a similar experience. I do believe you are way better in creating your own cover than I am, or at least at the point you were doing your covers for your books, but I want to know if there is something that you want to say related to that Crystal. If there’s something you wouldn’t do? You previously spoke that you are making over the cover, you are releasing new covers, right? So there must be a reason why you’re doing that, right?

Crystal Hunt: Yeah, there’s a couple of reasons. I originally was, well way back when I did my very first romance book, I did my own cover.

And partly it was because I was putting the book out for free. I didn’t have any money. I didn’t want to spend a bunch of money on getting it professionally designed when really I was just going to give it away. I didn’t even know if I was going to write a series at that point. It was just a single story that I was putting out into the world to see what happened.

And so, you know, I didn’t do much with it for a year and a half there was maybe like 2000 downloads in total. I think I made, a hundred dollars in that first year and a half with that book. It was 2014 and that was Silver Bells actually, that I’m talking about. It was the first Rivers End romance before I knew it was going to be a thing.

And so I just put it out and that was fine and I, it was pretty, it didn’t have like a kissing couple on it or anything, which I’ve never felt very pastel myself. And so putting like a pastel couple on a book cover just felt so wrong. Like when you talk about things you don’t like, I mean, I read books like that all the time, but it just didn’t feel right and so I didn’t do that also. I didn’t have good enough Photoshop skills to really rock that properly, to be combining backgrounds and cutting out the existing backgrounds of a couple to put them on there and leering all the pieces and adding the design element. I just wasn’t good enough from a technical perspective and let’s face it the tools have come a long way in the last year seven years in terms of what you can do design wise without being a Photoshop master. So for me, it was really just something functional to throw up there.

And then when I started writing a whole bunch more stories, I was writing short stories and so when I was, I was looking at my budget and not knowing if they were going to sell or not, I really didn’t want to invest a ton of money in the individual covers for something that I knew I was going to put in a box set.

So my plan was I did super simple, clean and consistently branded covers, but super simple graphically. So I just wanted something that I could put out on the individuals and then I was going to box at them and hire somebody to do the box that covered design. So that was my plan. And then they started selling actually reasonably well and I was getting really good reviews and it seemed to be working. I was giving away lots of samples as permafree books in the first in series. And so I was getting a lot of traffic actually, and I was super surprised it was way beyond the expectations that I had had for what was going to happen. So then I thought, Oh, well, okay so I did a new box set cover, which was, it had a couple of kissing on it. It was a little more in line with the markets. It wasn’t pastel because I still refused to go there, but it was at least had certain elements that were similar to the contemporary romance kind of covers. So that was the next step in the evolution of that which taught me a lot and I was getting better at Photoshop and honing my own skills and stuff. And then the latest incarnation is, again, still not pastel so I’m holding true to my inner preferences there, but I did redo all the covers. I’ve hired people over the years to do covers, but we’ll talk about that in a second of why that didn’t quite work the way I hoped it would, but, It really was just about turning the dial to align with the market. And part of that was, I didn’t know for sure which categories I wanted to write in. And so if you don’t know exactly which categories you’re going to be in on the Amazon Kindle store, where other bookstores that you’re on virtually, you don’t know what the rules are, because if you don’t know where you’re going to be positioned in the market, you don’t know exactly what the right fit is going to be.

So I think what worked in the early attempts was that I didn’t go into debt to do it. I was able to put out a product, test it, make sure people liked it well enough and then I earned a bit of money then I use that to buy new stock images. And I actually debated was I going to pay somebody to design the covers, but because I knew I was going to do a ton of stories over the next few years, it made more sense for me to purchase courses on how to improve my Photoshop skills than it was to just hire a designer, to take care of all of that for me. And because I really enjoy the design side, that made sense as a decision for me. Now, I still have this argument with myself constantly of, you know, should I just hire somebody to do it, but we’re going to see how this next test goes and see if the ones that I designed in this last round hold up.

Because what I discovered was that the ones that weren’t totally on market they did great when people were making personal recommendations, but if I wanted to run AMS ads, I wanted to level up to the next sort of income bracket. I needed to start running ads not just promos and word of mouth and, and personal recommendations and reviews, that wasn’t enough anymore. So what I needed was to really make it clear to those potential readers from the cover exactly what products was going to be packaged inside. So I have definitely in this last round aligned more clearly to what the market is, and we will see how that does in terms of scaling up the ads.

I will report back as the season progresses and we’ll let you know whether that has worked for sales or not sales. What are some things that we have learned from our own attempts at cover design? So one is definitely invest a little bit of money in whether it’s lynda.com tutorials. Your local library might actually have a license to lynda.com, which is a site that just has tutorials on how to do all the things and so if you’re learning to use Photoshop or another graphic design kind of program to do your covers, Linda’s a great place to get information on those. Also there’s Udemy, it has a ton of courses on cover design stuff. Derek Murphy is a great resource. It’s creativeindiecovers.com and his blog has tons of articles that will be really helpful for you in terms of learning about cover design in general, and understanding what kind of fonts work in different places. And I also found there’s a course through the Mark Dawson self publishing platform and Stuart Bash is the cover designer who teaches that course. And I have found that to be extremely helpful as well. And he does a really in depth, like here’s how you blend layers using Photoshop and everything else. So those are some resources if you are thinking that you’re going to DIY, do you have, what kind of resources do you use for making your covers?

Cause I know you do a lot of your current ones as well.

DIY or hire someone else to make your covers?

Michele Amitrani: So before I was using more like a copyrights free pictures. And now after understanding how cover are important, especially the image of the covers, I had the need to ship a number of covers on a monthly basis because of my challenge.

So I kind of decided to level up that. So I purchased actually a few coupons with, AppSumo, actually one coupon with AppSumo, and I purchased high definition stocks with, one of the site is called Depositphotos. One of those, there are others, but I purchased basically a package.

I think it was like 50 bucks for 100 of those pictures and I’m using those. I found it way more professional and it’s easier for me to spend less time, than if I have to find them really completely free pictures. Also because these pictures on Shutterstock stock, for example, on this website, it’s more difficult than other people are using those images.

It’s not impossible, but of course, with my design, I’m going to give that image my personal spin. So it’s more, a different kind of cover from other people that I can create it. So that’s one of the resources that I use, paid, royalty free pictures that we, as we call them. The way I assemble my cover it’s not as fancy as Crystal.

I do not use Photoshop. It’s not something that I can afford right now, although I started hearing something like a version of Photoshop sparks that I think it exists, that like you pay less and you can do a few things with Photoshop, not sure 100%, maybe Crystal can speak a bit more about that, but the software, which is actually an online platform, that I use is Canva. And it’s a free, basic resource because I just need the font to work on the pictures, I need to make it a bit more dark, I need to put some, you know, information on the book, like my name, the title.

So I’m not super fancy with those books, but I do take time in trying to find the best picture for the book. In this moment, I guess the resource that I have a bit more is time compared to money. So I’m using that, but definitely I would invest more money on my cover, If I could get more money from my author business, probably most of it would go to the cover because it’s that important that you put, the best presentation you can possibly have, the best piece of package you can possibly give to your book. So Canva. The way I assembled the cover and then royalty-free, website like, Depositphotos, Shutterstocks, Adobe, I believe has a similar subscription kind of a platform where you can get those kinds of pictures.

So yeah, that’s basically what I do to assemble my covers. And that’s what I do to, the tools that I use, and there is something that I think you can say about that Adobe kind of spark, if you want to.

Crystal Hunt: It’s called Photoshop Elements is the one I think you’re thinking about. And so that is like a paired back version of Photoshop and it will run on an iPad and things like that as well.

I mean the good news is that the price is on the Adobe Creative Suite stuff have come down very substantially. So you can licensed just one app that’s monthly, I think $10 actually to do just one app. It’s quite reasonable if you’re going to do Photoshop, but it is, you know, if you get to be in the power users zone, then it makes sense to invest in that because if you do the Creative Cloud version, if you are trying to do really graphic, heavy layouts for your books or anything, you can use InDesign and you can use Adobe illustrator if you’re doing logos and stuff, but all of those are pretty heavy on the learning curve. So if you don’t need to go there, you don’t have to go there. There’s also BookBrush has cover creator tools now as well and built right into KDP publishing is also some cover creation options. So depending on how fancy you want to get and how high tech you want to get with your special effects and stuff. There are lots of options.

A couple of pro tips, things I have learned after many years of obsessively searching stock photos is that you can actually create a portfolio basically inside any of the stock photos. So Adobe stock has gorgeous images, Shutterstock, great Istockphoto depositphotos, a lot of them have crossover, so you can actually do the same photo in multiple places.

So what works really well is to make yourself, troll around in the stock side, make yourself a portfolio or a folder or a favorites list on each of those sites, and then watch for a coupon to come up. If you get on the mailing list of those companies, they will often email you a coupon, or they will have a month free trial where you can download 10 images in the first month for free.

And so if you have a portfolio folder on each of those sites and you know exactly which images you want, then you can take advantage of some of those promos as they become available. And also watch for the Black Friday deals. If you are on our mailing list, for just one thing which you can subscribe to at strategicauthorpreneur.com, we’ll send out each week, if we find a coupon for something, or if there’s a great deal on one of the tools that we talk about, we’ll send that to you through the mailing list. So get on our mailing list. There should be a subscribe button right below this episode, wherever you’re watching it. So that’s also an option, but really just knowing what images you’re going to want is key and then watching for a good chance to download those at an affordable price if you are trying to DIY things, that is the way to go for sure. And there are a couple hybrid options which are in between doing it yourself and hiring a full on cover designer. And you can actually put together the pieces and then there’s a couple different people I found online who will actually do like a font up level for you because often it’s the words that give you a way as a rookie. So handling fonts and the texts on your book cover is the quickest way to flag that you don’t necessarily have the training or the experience to hide that you’re doing it yourself. So you can put together the best version you can, and then hand it over to somebody to kind of polish it for you, that is an, an intermediary way. And another intermediary way is to buy premade covers or, basically stuck covers. So you can actually go online and search through there’s many, many databases of premade covers. You can often get a cover for between about 50 and $300, depending on what site you’re on and the genre of your cover.

But that’s a good way to do it as well. It’s not as expensive generally as having someone custom-make one for you. But if you can find something that will work, then they will put your name and your story, title, and tweak a few things for you before they hand it over so that’s a really good way to also not be super expensive, but to still have something that looks very polished.

Now, what did you learn from your process of hiring a designer? Cause you’ve worked with designers as well as doing some of your own. So tell us what’s came up in that process that you learned?

Working with a designer

Michele Amitrani: I was lucky enough that I found early in my authorpreneur career, there is actually a platform that I use for most of my professionally made cover, one of the, the cover that I commissioned for my science fiction series, for Lord of Time, they all come from a platform called 99Designs. Now this is a bit more on the expensive side, but I just, I wanted someone that I trusted to take care of that side of the book publishing. So early on, I found a really great designer from the Philippines and he basically took care of the book cover of the both the Omnilogos Series and Lord of Time.

And there is an option with 99Designs that you can work only with one person with 1-to-1 project. They call it one to one project. The platform works also as, there are different, a couple of… Now last time I use it, there were three different plan. The silver, the gold, and the platinum, I believe.

And they cost of course more and more. Basically how it works, 99Designs. Is you give basically a sample of what you would like to cover it to me. So maybe a small description of what you would like the cover to be. And then there are literally dozens of artists that compete for winning that cover design.

So I always liked that, competition kind of phase. But the point that I’m trying to make here is that I found one of the designers in that contest that actually didn’t win the color, but that I really liked. So I purchased both his design, uh, and you can see over there and then I will chase the design of another artist.

I didn’t end up using one of these designer anymore, but the other person is the artist that I’m still collaborating with. So I asked him if he was interested in in doing a one to one project with me and he said, yes. So, what I’ve learned from this one to one relationship with the cover designer is that first you have to tell this person what you need your cover to be but up to a point. You never want to just tell him what you would like your cover to be and that’s period, without having some data to back your request. So in my case, I can give these artists from the Philippines, He’s called Benjamin, let’s call him Benjamin.

I can give him a ‘what’s the story about”, like a summary, but at the end of the day, what I know now is that he also needs to see if I’m about to publish a dark fantasy, I need to provide him examples of dark fantasies that are selling well in Kindle, on Amazon, for example. Usually the top 20 to 25. And so he has an idea on what to do and Lord of Time is actually based on this process. I asked him to do a dark fantasy cover, but then I provided him with six to seven different examples, all the works in that genre they were selling. And so he basically came up with the idea that I really liked of Lord of Time. So there is nothing there that was previously made. There is no stock image. He created the artwork from scratch and that’s something that I really like. There is nothing in the world like that cover, it’s really unique. But again, It can be unique, but it needs to be on specs. It needs to be on market. It needs to speak with the right audience. So that’s one of the things that I’ve learned from working with with Benjamin is that first communication is king, super, really important.

If there’s something that doesn’t ring to it, let him know or let her know if you’re using a designer, let this person know what you need, without being scared or afraid of, for example, at the beginning, I was scared that maybe this person would take any of my feedback, harsh or something I am not entitled to, but they actually want to know more.

That’s what I’ve learned. They want to know as much as they can on how to create this cover, because they don’t necessarily know how the the business works. But you know, that they need to create as much as possible a cover that is similar to other covers that are selling in your genre. So communication is king.

Don’t be afraid to say if there is something wrong because they are doing this for a living. If they’re a professional they will understand that with no problem. Another thing that I make sure is that he provides me with stuff that I don’t need, like copyright to use. So I don’t need to have a license.

So something that I ask Benjamin was, if you can please use a font (you can use some font for free, others are copyrighted) that I can actually use by myself. So you choose a great font, but it will simple and I can now use it for promotion and that kind of stuff.

So don’t give for granted that everything that that person is using, your designer, you also can use. So that’s again on the communication side of things. And forth, but also as important as the first things, three things that I’ve learned by collaborating with Benjamin is that I’ve now be working with him five times because I’ve been using him for the four books of the series, for the box set, and then for Lord of Time, so I guess it’s six times, every single time, the amount of time that I need to convey my idea becomes increasingly shorter. So we’re getting to know each other better. That doesn’t mean you have to use always the same designer. In fact, I will encourage you not to use him or her every single time, because you want your cover to look different if you’re writing different things.

But in my case, it made sense because, one of the works was a science fiction series and was, released in the Italian market. And the other was a dark fantasy on the English market. So there was really Science fiction and fantasy are his genre, so he knows what he’s doing so I can ask him to do the same, but I would never have asked him to do a romance cover because really it’s right up his alley.

If you see his portfolio, there are like, I would say 100 different covers, none of them really have the romance element. He’s just specialized in that thing. So the last thing that I will say on this is make sure that your artists, you are community indicating with him or her and making sure that he or she can create cover that sell, or that are appearing in the genre you are going to release on.

And I know you have worked with other cover designers, Crystal, either for yourself, but also for your business, when you had your publishing business. And I want to know if you have any story that are interesting for our listeners now that they can know, or they can learn something from.

Crystal Hunt: Yeah, I think I’ve been on the back end or the negotiating side of actually hundreds of covers over the last 15 years for clients and one-on-one projects and I’ve seen them come together in all different ways. I actually taught a masterclass on covers in the creative Academy. So that is free if you go and join the creative Academy for writers, you can access that masterclass.

And there’s also a series of design tutorials if you are going to take it on, on your own inside the Creative Academy as well. So you can work your way through those tutorials and really get some tips on how to pull it together. But I think when we’re talking about working with somebody, the biggest thing that you hit on, which is super important is: don’t work with somebody who isn’t good in your genre, because there are so many conventions that they will not be familiar with if you are working with somebody who doesn’t have experience in the type of books you are publishing. So the other don’t is don’t approach a designer until you know, what genre of book are you writing categories? Would you be on in the Amazon store? What do you like or not like about some of the top-selling covers and you really need to put the time into doing your homework and collect, I think that information before you approached them. I would also say a good tip of getting the most professional looking product back from your designer is don’t dictate to them exactly what it needs to look like and I think Michele touched on this earlier, but give them a hint of what you like or don’t like, and by all means make suggestions or if you have a particular photo that you really love share that with them but I think most of the problems have come when people had too specific of a vision of what they wanted already.

This basically turns the designer into like a mechanical person that they don’t get to use all their experience because you’ve just told them that they can’t do what they think would look good because it doesn’t suit what you have in your then so yes, definitely communicate your thoughts there but I think it’s really important to give them the freedom, to be the expert that they are. You know, if you are hiring someone with experience you need to respect that and then you need to give them a chance to shine, to add something more than what you could do or see into the mix.

There’s a handful of really specific guidelines too that I’m going to share that I think are really important when it comes to pro tips for designing and whether you’re going to do it, or the cover designer is going to do it. These hold, no matter how the cover is getting created. So if you were designing a full wrap cover, which is going to actually go on a print book and it’s for print on demand it’s really important to make sure that the spine does not have a hard line of color break down the edge of the spine, because there can be a variance of up to an eighth of an inch in the printing and binding process on the cover.

And if you have a straight line of colour right down the edge of where your front say meets up with the spine, you’ll notice very badly if that is off. So if at all possible you want your image to wrap a little bit around the spine and to the back so that you can have that consistency. One thing I learned about having white backgrounds on book covers is they look great and they really pop against a black background, but they don’t work so great when they’re embedded on a lighter background, unless you drop a single pixel or two line around the edge.

So if you have a cover that has white as a base and you are getting ready to post that on Amazon, make sure you add that line around the edges because Amazon won’t. So it needs a little tiny bit of a border just to make sure that it doesn’t disappear oddly into the background. I think one of the things you want to avoid is just getting an ebook cover done at once if you know, you’re going to want an audio book later and you know, you’re going to want to full wrap, even if you don’t order them from the designer right away if you tell them that you’re going to want those other formats, they might choose a different kind or shape of stock photo to use as the base for that cover because ebook covers are square and the full wrap ones, if you’re trying to wrap around a spine are going to be a different shape. And so it’s really important to be upfront about what you might do with it in the future. Even if you’re not doing it right now, they can make better choices for you.

I think also you need to know your distribution platform before you have the designer make your cover because the sizing and the specification, they’re slightly different if you’re using IngramSpark versus KDP print versus whatever on the print cover. If it’s an ebook cover, it’s pretty standard, the sizes are similar in all of the places, unless you’re talking about a boxset that cover and then if you have a box that cover that is 3D there are some of the ebook stores you cannot use that on. And in fact, BookBub, if you’re trying for a BookBub feature, as part of your marketing plan, does not accept, 3D book covers or at least they didn’t last time I looked it up there, so double check, but they needed what they call it flat cover, which is like a single ebook cover with multiple titles listed or however you design it is fine, but they didn’t want a 3D cover. So that is important to know as well.

IF you are going to be targeting one of those places, then just make sure you have an option that will work. Don’t tell your designer to finalize your print cover until you have the interior layout, you need to know how many pages you have in your book before you can get the right spine width.

And so it’s going to cost you extra money If you get them to make your cover And then you have to go back later and ask them to change those files that is going to cost you some dollars. So you don’t want that. A couple more of, I think, the most common mistakes that I’ve seen is people trying to do too much with their cover.

They want to show the location and the characters and the objects that feature, and there’s too much on it. And it’s just too busy and when you are looking at a cover, usually you have a nice big image up on your screen, and that’s great, but that’s not how most people are going to see it because most people are going to see a thumbnail in the online bookstore or they’re going to see a teeny little thumbnail in an ad on Amazon or wherever it’s going to be. So you have to shrink your cover way down so that it’s postage stamp size before you can make a decision about whether or not that’s going to do what you want it to do. Can you clearly read the title? Can you read the author? And do you get a sense of what genre that cover is for?

And I think last but not least don’t make the decision all on your own because as we’ve talked about yours is not the only opinion that matters because it’s the people buying the book, that’s going to be really important. So don’t be afraid to show it to readers in your genre, share it with your writers group, give them a couple of options and get feedback because it’s much better to get feedback in the development stage than it is to get feedback because people just aren’t buying your book, right? It’s a little more expensive and a little more heartbreaking when you go out to the audience and nothing happens. So you might as well find out before you release your book, which one people prefer and there’s lots of great communities that will help you do that, and give you some feedback.

Okay. So on that note, any last tips, tricks things you want to share with the gang?

Last few pieces of advice

Michele Amitrani: Yeah, one thing. Don’t sweat too much most of this stuff. We already explained to you that it’s important the cover, but you can remake it. It’s fine. As long as you understand that that’s just a piece of packaging and they change over time.

So even if you did it wrong you can just remake it. So as long as the book is solid, you don’t have to sell it right of the bat. There are cases of books that actually have been seen spikes after maybe months, or even year. The author understood there was a problem on the cover and then everything changed.

So don’t be too worry of making some mistakes. We made them, we shared those with you, but both of us are still alive and kicking it. So just remember that: you don’t have to get it right necessarily the first time you just have to have the will to get it right, period, in the long run.

Crystal Hunt: Absolutely. Covers change. Try not to change your title because that will create all manner of problems. So let’s say: don’t commit to a cover until you have firmly settled on a title. You don’t want to lose all your reviews and have to change your ISBN and make all kinds of other adjustments. So think real hard on the title and then commit to your cover.

Okay. So the other thing we want you to think on is, you know, how important reviews are in the book world and the podcast world is just the same. So if you can take a moment and leave a review on whatever platform you’re listening to this, that would be a huge help to us. So thank you for that. And before you go, we have a curious jar here.

That has a question for us. So our jar, see? Lots of coloured squares in there. And I, as usual, I’m going to stick my arm in here and shuffle around until my friends and stop.

Have you ever quit writing or wanted to?

Michele Amitrani: Stop now.

Crystal Hunt: I read one today. Okay. Ooh. Okay. Interesting. Today’s question is: have you ever quit writing or wanted to?

Michele Amitrani: I have the answer. The answer is no, but… I let me frame that. I never thought of just stopping, writing. But there were extended periods in which I was not writing and for all the wrong reasons, either because I was dissatisfied with the results of my writing or because I was seeing other authors, having more success.

But, there never was a moment in time in which I said, okay, I’m going to stop writing. This is something that I do because I want to do it. Of course, I want to make a living out of this, I really am sure that this is something that I want to do and something that I want to be able to provide with my family.

But I think there was one author, I can’t remember the name now, but he said, if you can find something that you like, you are lucky, but if you can find something that you like and people are paying you for that, and then basically that’s a jackpot. And it was the author of, I think ‘Along Came a Spider’.

I think it was James Patterson. I believe if I’m not butchering his names that he said that in one of his, the masterclass. But I do believe that. I would be double lucky if I can make this something that I can really rely on, but I will never stop writing, period.

That’s who I am, that’s what defines me. And I will do that even if I couldn’t right now, we have technology. I can even dictate the machine the same stuff, even if the machine would probably understand 30% of the stuff I’m saying, but that’s not an excuse to stop writing. I ride to because that’s what defines me.

Crystal Hunt: Yeah. I think that, that I’ve never, I’ve never quit being a writer, but I’ve definitely had periods where I was not writing. As you said, one of the most kind of dramatic examples of that is after I had built up our children’s book publishing company, we had been all in on that for about seven years and I was doing some work for hire.

So I was writing for an educational publisher in Korea, I had 20 something children’s books out by that point and I was paying the bills by being a writer and, you know, and then at that point we just, our publishing company wasn’t making enough money. So we had to make the decision to close it down, but we still owed a lot of money on that.

And so I working full time and then some to pay off debts of the past publishing adventure and my husband as well and so both of us, I think, were a little disillusioned with the writing life and so I, it was about three years where I really wasn’t writing at all, you know, maybe the occasional blog article, but yeah, and it wasn’t fun. And so I stopped doing it and it’s, even though I wasn’t creative writing, I was still writing for work and so I think I can’t, I can’t say that there’s ever been a period where I really wasn’t writing, I was just writing blog articles for hire or whatever, instead of my own creative writing stuff.

So definitely there have been times when I have been tempted to quit and do something a little more stable or regulated or whatever, but I keep coming back to the whole: Yeah, but I can’t! So I there’s a quote that I heard and it was that: “If you can imagine yourself doing anything else except writing, you should go do” that because this is not a for sure kind of industry, but at the same time, I think even in the phases when I’m not actively creative writing, I’m still collecting ideas for characters, and I’m still writing in my notebook and I’m still doing world-building and I am still developing ideas and being sort of a student of humanities. So I think, Yeah, I’ve never actually quit being a writer as like I’m done with this. It’s more just that the format it takes has morphed and changed shape over the years, which we talked a little bit about in the last episode about why do we write what we write?

And so I think that’s really relevant to this question is it’s not about stopping, it’s more about transforming into a different format what I’m doing in a way that makes sense for my life in its current incarnation. All right, and we would love to hear if you have ever quit writing or been tempted to.

And, how did that go? How did you turn that around? And you’re here again. So we assumed that you’ve turned it around and you can tell us how that all worked. So you can share that with us in the comments section below wherever you’re listening to or watching this episode.

Michele Amitrani: And I remind you that for show notes, links to resources that we mentioned today, and for coupons and discounts, and also for tools that we love and that we use and we’re suggesting to you, you can visit us at strategicauthorpreneur.com.

Crystal Hunt: Be sure to hit that subscribe button so you don’t miss out on our next episode because we are going to be digging into what not to do when it comes to interior layout of your books. Now that you’ve mastered those covers time to move on to the inside.

So until then happy writing.

Michele Amitrani: Ciao, ciao.